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Yahoo is considering investing in hackers with good ideas and technologies, a company executive said on Saturday.

Choosing an e-reader isn't easy. Here is how to get the best out of the wealth of options available.

Apple showed a death grip on the Motorola Droid X using one hand. We tried the very same experiment last week, and we disagree with Apple's methodology and conclusions in two important ways.

On the Zend Developer Zone today Ralph Schindler has posted the results of the latest Zend Framework Bug Hunt Days (for July 2010).

Zend Framework has recently wrapped up it's July 2010 Bug Hunt with some fantastic results. Collectively, we closed 50 issues in 3 days. That's nearly twice what we have seen in recent months- a trend we hope continues into the coming months!

Top bug hunters this month were Dolf Schimmel and Ramon Henrique Ornelas tying with 14 bugs each with Michelangelo van Dam coming in third.

The fixes in this bug hunt that have been merged into the 1.10 release branch will see the light of day in our next scheduled mini release 1.10.7 during the week of July 26th.

In a new post to his blog John Hamelink lists top CodeIgniter libraries he couldn't live without in his framework development.

CodeIgniter is a great framework. I use it exclusively because of it's flexibility and relative 'lightness' but what use is a framework without libraries to extend its usefulness? (well, not much use, naturally.) Here is my personal list of CodeIgniter libraries I would struggle to live without.

His list includes:

• QuickAuth
• R&OS PDF Class
• Curl library
• Paypal Lib

On the I Am Learning PHP blog today there's a new post asking if web scripting languages really need object-oriented functionality or not:

The object-oriented revolution has not been without controversy. [...] Still, there's no doubt that the revolution has largely succeeded. Most of the popular programming languages in use today are either fully object-oriented or have object-oriented extensions. [...] We feel that the benefits of OOP for 'major' (that is, compiled) programming languages like Java and C++ are clear. On the other hand, we feel that the benefits of OOP for scripting languages (like Perl and PHP) are less obvious and are most debatable in the case of Web-scripting (PHP).

They go one to explain some of their reasoning including the differences between scripting languages and others and how OOP has been implemented on the scripting side. They point out some good things about OOP in PHP but still think it's "tradeoffy" for some of the problems with it.

Unfortunately, Apple didn’t appear to realize that it was necessary to screen what it allows to access this data. Security researchers revealed that a simple web form can grab much of this data - first name, last name, work place, city, state, and email address — no questions asked.

Current rumour states that Android 3.0 will see Android get a complete visual overhaul but that's about all we know about the possible future direction of the mobile OS. In no particular order, here are 10 things we would also like to see in the Android 3.0

On the PHPClasses.org blog today they've released the latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast - .

On this episode of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert comment on the launch of the PHP for Android project and the consequences for the PHP market. They also talk about the cancellation of PHP 6 and the inclusion of features planned for PHP 6 in PHP 5.4, like the integration of the APC cache extension in the main PHP distribution bundle.

You can either listen via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get the latest.

Owners of the iPhone will be able to break electronic locks on their devices in order to download applications that have not been approved by Apple. The government is making that legal under new rules announced Monday.

In a new post to his blog Sebastian Bergmann talks about some updates to PHPUnit that are coming in the 3.5 release.

When you look at the list of changes for PHPUnit 3.5, you will see that many of them deal with refactoring to components. Here is an overview of these new components.

Components that were refactored to work even better include:

• PHP_CodeCoverage
• DbUnit
• PHPUnit_Selenium
• PUPUnit_MockObject

If you're going to be in the New York area tomorrow (July 27th) and want to get in on the latest in PHP 5.3, the New York PHP User Group is having their monthly meeting for July featuring Hans Zaunere and Nate Abele talking about all that PHP 5.3 has to offer.

What do you get when you mix namespaces, late static binding and closures? PHP 5.3 and NYPHP's July meeting, of course. Lithium co-founder Nate Abele and NYPHP Managing Member Hans Zaunere will start by giving an overview of these key concepts, followed by a review of how they're being utilized in the real-world, and finishing with an open Q&A discussion of these new hotter-than-July language features.

The meeting will start at 6:30pm tomorrow (July 27th) at the IBM offices on Madison Ave. You'll need to RSVP if you're going to attend. The meeting will be followed by a post-meeting event at TGI Fridays at Lexington and 5th. For full details on the meeting, check out http://www.nyphp.org/PHP-Presentations/175_PHP-53-Feature-Review-Discussion">this page on the NYPHP site.

The carrier's charges for feature phones and smartphones make no sense.

HTC started off the week by confirming its switch away from AMOLED for many of its phones. Devices with a 3.7-inch screen, such as the Desire and Nexus One, are switching to a Sony Super LCD instead.

Rob Allen has a new post to his blog today about the update he's made to his Zend_Auth tutorial, introducing the authentication component of the Zend Framework.

After too many months of neglect, I have completely rewritten my Zend_Auth tutorial so that it is compatible with Zend Framework 1.10! As an experiment, I have written it directly in HTML, rather than PDF as before and cover the login form along with the login controller code required to authenticate a user using a database table. For good measure, I've included logging out and a view helper to show how to access the logged in user's details.

The tutorial walks you through the creation of a users table, an auth controller/form and the code needed to validate the user against in information in the table (as well as how to log them out). You can also download the code as a zip file.

In a quick new post to his blog today Kevin Schroeder shows you how to debug an RPC call in your Zend Framework application.

Just a quickie. Do you ever want to debug an RPC call to XML-RPC or Soap or something like that using Zend Studio/PDT and the Zend Debugger? What I mean is debug the RPC call, not the request making the RPC call. Doing that is actually quite simple. I have some code here to share that I recently (as in 5 minutes ago, used).

His code snippet shows an "if" conditional that sets values on a set of cookies that the Zend Debugger will pick up on and start the debugging process (with settings like start_debug, debug_coverage and debug_start_session. He also explains the four you really need to know about in a bit more detail.

Apple recently granted ABC Nightline unprecedented access to its secretive "black labs" where it puts upcoming products through exhaustive testing.

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Latest PEAR Releases:

• HTTP_OAuth 0.1.18
• Net_Whois 1.0.4

We'd heard Panasonic was planning a more affordable stereoscopic 3D camcorder, but it looks like we won't have to wait until a mysterious July 28th Tokyo unveiling to find out for sure. It's called the HDC-SDT750, and Panny's advertising it as the "World's first 3D Shooting Camcorder."