history

Happy 25th birthday, PHP!

PHP, the language that has truly changed the web, is celebrating its 25th birthday. Over time, it gained an army of fans and army of haters, and it’s still difficult to tell which one is larger.

As someone who is using the language since its early days (yes, PHP 3), I’m glad to see that it is still around, it is still going strong, and it is still vital for the larger portions of the web.

Huge thanks go to the core development team, community, and millions of contributors and users. It wouldn’t have been the same without you. Happy birthday, PHP!

And here’s an awesome timeline to help you remember all the years!

IMDb : The new design

IMDb is widely known for two things: the overwhelming size of its movie database, and the fact that it never changes the way it looks.

Well, guess what, IMDb update its look and feel, and it’s not a minor change. It’s fast, it’s functional, and it no longer looks like it was built 20 years ago.

The funny thing is that while I was looking for a blog post announcing the changes, I came across this one from 2009. I haven’t realized that it was from 2009 until I saw the screenshots.

Some time ago the incredible happened: our beloved movie database site IMDb finally realized that it was not 1996 anymore and dared to hire some designers in order to – you won’t believe it – change the design of the page! When I visited the site the other day, I couldn’t believe my eyes

And just so that we keep the history, here are a couple of screenshots of how it used to look:

Great job IMDb! Even if it’ll take all of us a bit to get used to the new design. At least we know it’ll last another decade.

Lunch Atop A Skyscraper: The Story Behind The 1932 Photo

“Lunch atop a skyscraper: the story behind the 1932 photo” reminds of the picture that once seen, cannot be forgotten. It comes from the time when men were real, and the phrase “health & safety” hasn’t been coined it.

Interpretation of NTFS Timestamps

“Interpretation of NTFS Timestamps” is a fascinating technical dive into the NTFS filesystem and the way it stores file and directory timestamps. Let me just leave you with this quote:

NTFS file timestamps, according to the documentation of the ‘FILETIME’ data structure in the Windows Software Development Toolkit, is a “64-bit value representing the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601 (UTC)”.

WTF?

Earthquakes of the 20th Century

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has this excellent visualization of the earthquakes recorded between January 1, 1901 and Decemeber 31, 2000. Each earthquake is shown as a circle, where the size indicates the strength and the color indicates the depth. Interesting, how most of these make up lines, showing the tectonic plate borders.