Here's a little project I've been working on. It's a debugging/profiling console for Solar applications. I call it Starburst_Debug_Console. It displays a console on top of your website which shows you your SQL queries, logs and $_SERVER vars.

You can download it by clicking here. There's install instructions over at the project page. Yep, that's git, go ahead and fork it!

I just heard that one of my all time favourite bands (which I also just saw live) is featured in "The Spirit" movie trailer. The song is the christmas song Carol Of The Bells played in ABR style.

This is big news because they are a relatively small band playing very intense music with no clean vocals. Though this song is instrumental. I'm stoked about this, now I just have to see this movie!

Go watch it!

There's been a lot of negative commenting around the choice of the new namespace separator for PHP. The choice was backslash '\'. The usual answer to these comments is: "Pick a better one, and let's see how that works out" or "please stop commenting, '\' is the only one that works".

And I understand this. '\' is the only viable choice.

But the thing is, backslash sucks as a namespace separator. You can't create namespace names with string interpolation because '\n' would then get transformed to a newline. But above all, it's ugly.

I'd much rather live without namespaces than have a bad (ugly) implementation. I mean, do you really want namespaces this badly?

Also, the old excuse of "you don't have to use namespaces" completely misses the point that I have to maintain some poor guy's code someday that has namespaces in it.

I have just published my first entry on the new Solar project blog. Go read about Using registry_set to auto-register objects. It's one of the cool new features of Solar version 1.0.0alpha2.

A new version of Solar has been released. You can see the full list of changes on our new blog. Yep, that's right, the Solar project now has a blog. Keep your eye on it for some cool Solar knowlegde. I will be blogging there about Solar and maybe cross-posting some of the stuff here too.

Last thursday I went to the OpenCoffee meetup for the first time. For you who don't know what it is: it's a meetup for people interested in startups and other webby stuff, at least that's the impression I got.

The meeting was at Nolla, my favourite lunch place. I had a blast and met so many nice people. Conversations ranged from programming to movies and politics. I think I even had a conversation about Erlang, very cool. It's a very international group and half of the conversations are in english which I think is really nice. I met programmers, consultants, designers and managers. I never thought I could run out of business cards, but I did :-). I think I also doubled my jaiku contacts.

It happened that tripsay.com had their launch on the same day and they had a launch party at the same time. We continued to Kaarle XII where we were supposed to meet with the Tripsay guys. I had to leave around midnight and never met them. I don't know if they ever came there.

I strongly recommend others to join the meetup. I will definitely attend in the future. A big thank goes to Ville Vesterinen from ArcticStartup fame for organizing this awesome meetup. And thanks a lot everyone who I met -- I look forward to meeting you again.

So finally, the waiting is over. It's here, I have an iPhone :-).

It really is an amazing device. I now feel connected wherever I go.

Email works perfectly. Setting up Gmail took me about a minute, I didn't need to do any additional setup. It's so nice to get email just like SMS, although it's not pushed to me. I'm fetching every 15 minutes. I don't call that often so I don't think I will have big problems with battery running out.

The biggest thing for me was to replace my iPod and cellphone with one device. I'm always carrying the two with me so this was a huge deal.

I like how SMS works just like IM on my desktop. Organizing SMS to conversations is definitely the best way to do it.

The biggest problem so far is that because I don't use the bundled headphones-with-microphone thingy, I need to unplug my headphones in order for the caller to hear my voice. Why couldn't they make it so that the built-in microphone would activate if no external microphone is attached? Now I'm considering on buying new headphones with a microphone. Maybe that is their plan.

I saw Bullet For My Valentine live on Sunday at Tavastia Helsinki. It was one of the best shows I've been in. We even had a pretty decent pit in there. It's funny how the floor always cleares out during a pit. In the pit you always have much more room than just standing somewhere on the side.

They actually had to cancel their gig on February because some of the guys in the band had diarrhea. We had to wait until July 7th to see them. But man was it worth it! Thank you so much Bullet for the amazing consert!

Too bad my favourite finnish band Kiuas didn't get to open the gig like they were supposed to (for the second time :-( ).

I just got an invitation to last.fm beta, they're apparently relaunching the site with some new goodies.

First impressions:

• The site now looks a lot like Facebook, not sure yet if it's good or not.

• They've added a "Library" feature where you can browse all your artists and songs.

• We now have playlists! Now, if they only could make me share playlists with my friends so that I could play them in my iTunes. I have a very similar music taste with some of my friends so I think it could be possible to make a diff of the songs in a playlist and in my library so I could just start playing the songs on my system.

• I think the artist pages are better and overall it is easier to navigate.