NEW YAHOO EMOTICON (FRESH)

Show your friends how you really feel.

These little characters are a great way to spice up your IM conversations and show friends how you feel. Select them from the emoticon menu or type the keyboard shortcuts directly into your message.

Emoticon	Key Combination	Description
	:o3	puppy dog eyes
	:-??	I don't know
	%-(	not listening
	:@)	pig
	3:-O	cow
	:(|)	monkey
	~:>	chicken
	@};-	rose
	%%-	good luck
	**==	flag
	(~~)	pumpkin
	~O)	coffee
	*-:)	idea

Emoticon	Key Combination	Description
	8-X	skull
	=:)	bug
	>-)	alien
	:-L	frustrated
	[-O<	praying
	$-)	money eyes
	:-"	whistling
	b-(	feeling beat up
	:)>-	peace sign
	[-X	shame on you
	\:D/	dancing

Emoticon	Key Combination	Descripion
	>:/	bring it on
	;))	hee hee
	:-@	chatterbox
	^:)^	not worthy
	:-j	oh go on
	(*)	star
	o->	hiro
	o=>	billy
	o-+	april
	(%)	yin yang
	:bz	bee
	[..]	transformer*

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YAHOO DEFENDS ITS EMPLOYEE SEVERANCE PLAN

In its latest bid to thwart an attempt by billionaire investor and shareholder Carl Icahn to take over its board of directors, Yahoo Inc. yesterday sent a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission detailing the employee severance plan that would kick in if the company were acquired by another entity.

Yahoo recently has come under fire from Icahn over the severance plan, which was disclosed in a shareholder lawsuit.

Yahoo said it posted the information it shared with the SEC, which was in the form of an FAQ, on the company's intranet the same day.

On its face, the disclosure might seem a bit unusual, but according to one analyst, it was an attempt by Yahoo to publicly disseminate information it thought it had already made public.

"Yahoo [previously] made a statement that the severance plan was a matter of public record and that it had been widely communicated. But nobody I knew who covered this was aware of what [Yahoo] was talking about," said Rob Enderle, an analyst at San Jose-based Enderle Group.

Enderle said the fact that Yahoo released the information to its employees and filed it with the SEC yesterday indicates that the company had not widely disclosed it. However, Enderle said he didn't think Yahoo deliberately withheld the information. Rather, Yahoo probably thought it had disclosed the information then realized it hadn't, and then scrambled to make the information public, he said.

"It looks incredibly inept, and going into a battle with Carl Icahn looking inept is not a good strategy, Enderle said.

Yahoo could not be reached for comment.

On Monday, shareholders suing Yahoo over its handling of Microsoft Corp.'s acquisition attempt asked the judge (download PDF) to invalidate the controversial employee severance plan before the company's annual shareholders meeting on Aug. 1.

The plaintiffs claimed that Yahoo directors and top managers didn't want to sell the company to Microsoft in order to protect their own interests, and, in violation of their fiduciary duty to shareholders, they adopted a "poison pill" severance plan to sabotage the merger negotiations.

The severance plan was approved Feb. 12, shortly after Microsoft made its original offer to acquire Yahoo on Feb. 1 and would be triggered by a change in control of the company, the plaintiffs said. It would also require shareholders to re-elect the current board members in order to prevent the plan from being activated, the plaintiffs said. They also claimed that the plan would trigger a mass employee exodus.

Icahn is waging a proxy fight to persuade shareholders to boot out Yahoo's directors and replace them with his slate of candidates in the hope that a new board can entice Microsoft back to the negotiating table.

According to Icahn, the employee severance plan would cost an acquirer $2.4 billion, a figure Yahoo disputed in its SEC filing, saying a cost estimate would be based on a number of unknown variables. Yahoo said Icahn's figure assumes that all Yahoo employees leave the company. Using the same analysis that was cited by Icahn and in the shareholder lawsuit, the severance plan would cost $845 million if 30% of employees leave the company "without cause," or $514 million if 15% leave, Yahoo said.

Yahoo also said that, contrary to Icahn's interpretation of the plan, it did not implement it to "thwart a deal with Microsoft." Instead, Yahoo said the plan was intended to help retain employees and preserve the value of the company during a "period of uncertainty," without acting as a barrier to a takeover bid.

In addition, Yahoo said the board can't terminate or cancel the severance plan, despite Icahn's call for the company do so. Yahoo said if a new board of directors is elected, that board could not modify or repeal the plan for two years. If the current board is re-elected, the plan would stay in effect until the board modified or terminated it. However, if Icahn were to abandon his proxy fight, the current board could terminate the plan one month after he abandoned his fight.

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COMBINING CAKEPHP AND THE ZEND FRAMEWORK

The Zend Framework definitely takes a different approach than many of the other PHP frameworks (CakePHP, Zend, CodeIgniter, etc.). It really ends up being more of a collection of libraries than the others do.

In some ways, that makes positioning the Zend Framework as being substantively different from the libraries in PEAR. If you look at what the framework does, there’s not a lot of difference between it and many of the classes in PEAR. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if these libraries were bundled into a “framework” because frameworks are the hot PHP topic right now or because they really wanted a cohesive approach to web development.

All of that aside, there’s some really useful stuff in the Zend Framework, like the Google Calendar stuff I mentioned a couple of days ago. The fact that ZF does come packaged as what amounts to a PEAR package means you can actually fairly easily use those interesting bits from inside *other* PHP frameworks.

One of the reasons I was messing with the Google Calendar stuff in the first place is that I’m *also* messing with CakePHP to build a homegrown solution for time tracking, invoicing and revenue projection for my consulting business. It’s helpful to be able to mark days like holidays and planned vacations as non-billable so you don’t include them in projections.

At any rate, I went looking for information on including bits from the Zend Framework in my Zend project. It ends up being really simple. This older article covers it pretty well and gives you an idea of how to provide “vendor” wrappers around other 3rd party PHP libraries as well.

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MOZILLA MAKES FIREFOX 3.0 BUG-FIX DECISION

Mozilla Corp. decided today to roll out a second release candidate for Firefox 3.0 that will include fixes for about 40 bugs. The alternative was to declare the open-source browser good "as is," then patch the problems with a later update.

Firefox 3.0's final release will be delayed about five days, according to notes from a Tuesday meeting that Mozilla posted to its site.

"As discussed at today's Firefox 3.0 meeting, we've decided that there is sufficient need to produce a new Release Candidate before shipping," said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's lead developer, in an e-mail. "Due to the time required to complete some other external dependencies, we don't expect that this will significantly impact our shipping date, and still estimate a mid-June release date."

Release Candidate 2 (RC2) will be closed as "code complete" tomorrow, a tight timetable possible only because most of the issues uncovered by testers in the first release candidate have already been patched, reviewed and approved. "Because of the early start we got last week identifying the bugs that would be part of an RC2, which, at that time, was speculative, we're in really good shape," added Beltzner.

Only three of approximately 40 identified bugs have not yet "landed," or completed Mozilla's
review and approval process. About a fourth of the bugs Mozilla's planning to patch in RC2 are changes in localized versions of the browser.

Last week, Mozilla highlighted 10 notable bugs that it said it would consider as it made a choice between RC2 and a later update, dubbed "3.0.1", that would be released several weeks after Firefox 3.0 shipped.

One of those bugs, a performance issue limited to Linux, got attention this morning before the RC2 go/no go meeting. "This was discussed at the [last] Tuesday meeting and is a decent perf[ormance] win if we can get this in," read the early notes. "It tends to make the UI unusable when the user hits this state, so it should be considered for an RC2."

The Linux bug got attention in part because of a blog post by Jason Clinton, who works for Advanced Clustering Technologies Inc., a Kansas City, Kan., company that specializes in cluster-based systems and Linux servers. A week ago, Clinton took Mozilla to task over its then-reaction to the bug, which he said showed the company's "second-class" support for the open-source operating system.

Friday, however, after developers had gone back and forth on Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug-tracking database and management system, and come up with two possible solutions, Clinton changed his tune. "Mozilla really stepped up and has demonstrated that they do consider Linux a first-class platform," he wrote in a follow-up post.

If Mozilla adheres to its posted schedule, it will release Firefox 3.0 RC2 sometime after June 5. Previously, Mozilla has said it requires at least a week between debuting a release candidate and -- assuming no major problems crop up -- calling that build final.

Firefox 3.0 will be the first major upgrade to the browser since October 2006, but perhaps not the only one this year. Mozilla's head of engineering last week said that Mozilla may ship another upgrade, tentatively labeled Firefox 3.1, before the end of the year in order to add features that didn't make it into Firefox 3.0. Among the pieces which weren't ready in time for 3.0 but would be for 3.1, Mozilla has cited support for Cross-site XMLHttpRequest, a specification that lets a Web page draw information from servers behind firewalls, and additional performance tuning.

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SYMANTEC PINS BLAME FOR XP SP3 REGISTRY CORRUPTION ON MICROSOFT

Thursday said it was Microsoft's code that crippled some PCs after upgrades to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) emptied Device Manager, deleted network connections, and packed the registry with thousands of bogus entries.

"We finally got to the bottom of this last night," said Dave Cole, Symantec's senior director for product management of its consumer software. "All of these problems are related to the same thing: a Microsoft file that created all the garbage entries [in the registry]."

He also said that some of the same symptoms had been acknowledged by Microsoft when users updated to Windows XP SP2 several years ago; Cole referenced a pair of Microsoft support documents to back up his claim.

Two weeks ago, after Microsoft launched Windows XP SP3 on Windows Update, users started reporting that their network cards and previously crafted connections had mysteriously vanished from Windows after updating with the service pack. The Device Manager had been emptied, they said, and Windows' registry, a directory that stores settings and other critical information, had been packed with large numbers of bogus entries.

Most users who posted messages on Microsoft's XP SP3 support forum said that the errant registry keys — which started with characters such as "$%&" and appeared corrupted at first glance — were located in sections devoted to settings for Symantec products. Not surprisingly, they quickly pinned blame on the security company.

Earlier this week, Symantec denied that its software was at fault and instead pointed a finger at Microsoft.

On Thursday, Cole said Symantec engineers had connected the current problem to a Microsoft file named fixccs.exe. According to information on the Web, fixccs.exe stands for "Fix CCS MaxSubkeyName mismatch," and appears to be part of both XP SP3's and SP2's update packages.

Cole wasn't sure exactly what function fixccs.exe serves. "But it caused similar problems with the Device Manager after SP2. It looks like it's reared its head again," he said.

Two Microsoft support documents — KB893249 and KB914450 — both describe a problem remarkably similar to what users have reported recently. "After you install Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) on a Windows XP-based computer, the Device Manager window is blank or some devices no longer appear," reads KB893249.

The fixccs.exe file attempts to make changes to the registry, said Cole, but in some cases, it also adds large numbers of unnecessary keys. When asked why so many users had reported seeing the errant entries in sections reserved for Symantec products, Cole called it "the luck of the draw. We have a fair number of keys in the registry, and we're on a lot of systems. This is not exclusive to Symantec."

Others have noted that too. A user identified as MRFREEZE61, who posted the first message on the Microsoft support forum thread two weeks ago and later came up with a workaround, said as much today.

"The reported problems are not just limited to those using Symantec products," wrote MRFREEZE61 in a comment added to the original Computerworld story. "Folks on the forum report this specific registry corruption with no Symantec products installed at all. Some find this corruption in device control set enumerators associated with UPNP (Universal Plug and Play) and other 'legacy devices,' others from users of Avast [Antivirus]."

Fixccs.exe has also been linked to problems some users had installing early builds of XP SP3 late last year. In a support forum thread that started Dec. 22, 2007, Shashank Bansal, a Microsoft engineer helping users troubleshoot XP SP3 installation bugs, said, "This is a serious problem for us and we would like to investigate it to further depths. We would need help from all users on this forum for the same." Bansal then asked users who had had trouble updating from XP SP2 to SP3 to identify the process that had hung or had hogged CPU cycles. "Look out for cscipt.exe or fixccs.exe," he said.

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