The Internet has been buzzing lately about Google’s new application, Wave. Though it is still under a limited preview, everyone seems to be talking about it. I have heard everything from the evangelicals touting this as a sign of the coming singularity, to people just not getting it or thinking it too complicated to understand.

For most people, Google Wave indeed will not make much sense. At least not yet. However, for the developers and engineers out there though and the people who work remotely or just on teams, there is something more to be seen in its future. When I look at Google Wave, I see the ability to email out a requirement document for a project to a whole team. The ability to change and modify it as the project grows and shrinks (as it always does). The ability to keep track of the changes, much in the way one would do with a wiki. The ability to add someone to an existing conversation and for them to be able to easily use that history and the comments along with it to understand why changes are being made.

In short, I see a complete change in how a project team works.

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One of my biggest gripes about PHP in comparison to other modern object-oriented languages is the relatively poor state of error handling. The mix and match style of triggered errors and exceptions is unbefitting of a modern language, especially one that is ready for the enterprise. Most modern languages deal with errors strictly through the throwing of exceptions, because it allows for a more robust method of triggering a response from the system. This is because a thrown exception, can be caught. In PHP though, a triggered error cannot.

At least not technically.

Lucky for us there is a way to make PHP behave a little more civilly than it does by default. Through some clever uses of the error and exception handlers, we can make PHP just a little more robust.
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When I first started thinking about building a server to house my growing collection of digital videos, my needs seemed simple enough. I needed a low-power computer to house a few tera-byte drives in. The computer needed to be able to run as a DLNA server, so as to stream video to my Playstation 3. On top of that, I wanted something relatively low maintenance. I love to play with new toys as much as the next bloke, however in this case, I need something that I can leave on and forget about.

My first thoughts led me to building a simple Linux server. However, as I started looking into cases and motherboards my needs jumped from, simple media server to ESX server. Why? Because that would be a really fun toy. However, it is not practical and does not meet my number one need. That it be low maintenance. Even if it could house a media server as well as a webserver and act as a router and all sorts of other fun things.

So I shelved the idea for a while. Brewed over it. I thought I about getting a Drobo, for little while, but the more I read on those, the less simple they seemed. Maybe simple if you’re talking about a backup system plugged in via USB to your computer. But plug it in via the network and run server processes on it. All I could see was a big sign saying, “this way be dragons.” Once again, simple.

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