B. Mann Consulting

OK, OK, that's a ridiculously long title. But it's great to hear that David Ascher will be heading MailCo and taking Thunderbird in to a brave new adventure.

Stay in Vancouver? Yes, please! We're on a roll, here, and I'm rooting for more open source businesses to grow up here.

Not a big thesis on this topic, just an observation that this evening, as I was thinking about organizing something with friends for tomorrow morning, my instinct was to open a tab and go to Facebook to contact them...rather than email.

And of course, this is exactly what ActiveState's Up4 Facebook app is trying to help with as well.

Update: And of course, today I see that Facebook has added straight-to-email messaging -- "No more switching back and forth between email and Facebook. When you are writing a message, simply enter any email addresses into the “To:” field.". There is a longer post on the Facebook blog about this.

The answer is "probably yes". I just wrote up a description of our Vancouver Drupal Users Group event over on Bryght, but saved the provocative title for here.

I think that maybe I'll lift my stance on only adding Facebook apps that have a "public Internet" face as well. Much as I hate locking data into Facebook, I do want to support local developers: ActiveState's Up4, DabbleDB's DabbleDo, and the soon-to-be-released Opus Player by the Donat Group / Project Opus.

But don't think I won't be continuing to push folks to figure out ways to nicely push and pull data in and out of Facebook in a way that benefits the open Internet as well as respects the privacy and security of user's content within Facebook.

Finally I wanted to share with you that yes, we did indeed continue to chat over beer. The strangest phrase that came up was camel cheese. Nice.

I'm trying to find some time to setup a development environment locally again, and I want to invest in learning an IDE. Most of the folks I know use something like emacs or TextMate to code, but I'd love a little more of an environment. Also, I'm still trying to find more bits and pieces that together form a set of best practices for developing, deploying, and maintaining Drupal.

Initially I was thinking about learning Eclipse, except I've heard that it's PHP support isn't the greatest. Looks like the PHP IDE isn't going to be 1.0 until June 2007. But then again, IBM's Drupal tutorial also explained using Eclipse.

Xcode is Apple's own tool, and there are some guides on using it for PHP.

Then there's Komodo, made by Vancouver's very own ActiveState. 

I want to learn an IDE that has support for multiple languages, so editors purely focused on PHP are out. 

Integration directly with CVS / SVN is a nice to have. svnX works for me as a GUI.