Ok, so i updated the theme to please me more. It’s Sodelicious Black with using this photo from pdphoto.org. Leave any comments about the theme or suggestions to do with that ad box on the bottom here.
Well, I have to say, my interests in running the latest and greatest software comes at a price.
I’ve taken to running svn releases of Wordpress. I don’t exactly have a good reason, but it does seem to make themes not work right. (I tried to use two different themes because i’ve been doing a lot with dark backgrounds and light text recently. it went poorly). On the bright side, the new interfaces seem slick and the updates are easier using straight svn access.
For development, I’ve come to find that I’m either in vim or Visual Studio 2008. That’s pretty much the two ends of the spectrum of light and generic program to highly customized and heavy for development. I’ve been doing some development with C#.net and really have to say it’s fun. I love programming in it probably more than any other language. I’m enjoying the environment too. I admit, I kind of miss my vim key bindings and jumping into normal mode to move around, but it’s not all bad. The code completion and intellisense is great in VS2008. The debugger for applications in extremely nice to step through whatever has gone wrong. I really must say that I miss those capabilities when I’m writing something else.
Also, since I mentioned running light text on a dark background, I would suggest altering your theme (if your window manager supports that) to light-on-dark. It’s very nice on my eyes and you can find great places where only backgrounds or foregrounds were specified, making them unreadable! Well, at least it encourages you to think about what happens when someone does try to use high contrast light-on-dark settings with your program/web site. Accessibility forever.
Well, after abandoning my post for updating this for a while, I figure I might want to try Steve Yegge’s suggestion of being more opinionated in my blog. If nothing more, it might generate a bit of hate mail.
I’m going to be honest. I enjoy writing web apps. I really enjoy the back end code and the product at the end. I have done pretty much everything of significance in PHP also. This shouldn’t offend anyone yet, but some people might see PHP and think less of me. And the real question becomes why?
Now I’ve asked a lot of my friends this question. The general answer usually comes down to PHP yielding bad code or being unmaintainable. Um… I don’t think that’s PHP’s fault that the last person who worked on this project kinda hacked it together into somewhat working but terrible shape. Most if not all programming languages allow you to write bad or unmaintainable code (purely functional languages might be the exception, but my experience with them is far too limited to be able to comment). To be quite honest, I don’t have a problem maintaining my php code. Larger projects always have a framework (one I made usually) to power them and small scripts can easily be navigated by using find in the file or scrolling.
Well Rails and Django are amazing frameworks. This may or may not be true. Rails does have a lot of cool features. It is even cooler when you start giving it extra gems. I’ll give it that, but even that isn’t good enough for me. If you actually want to start using more complicated conditions, you end up writing the SQL you were looking to avoid. Something like Symfony provides most if not all of the commonly requested features for php. There are many other frameworks available too. So if one isn’t good enough, you can always try another.
PHP is slow. To be honest, PHP is usually not where scripts end up being slow. I frequently see one of the following: 1) Are you having PHP do calculations that your database could easily do? Why would you do that? 2) Are you having PHP parse pages that are static or virtually static? Why not use server side includes and not even use the php parse? 3) Did you make a huge data structure that you are recreating on every call? Look into functional programming or restful programming (both are stateless) and consider revising your code.
And in the end, PHP has a lot of well known ways to speed it up. Why not try out a caching solution? memcache is nice and well supported. You could even implement your own.
Are there any reasons to use PHP, not just defend it? YES! Plenty. Integrating kerberos authentication is extremely easy. There is a wealth of information about any common task. the PEAR/PECL code is common and usually easy to use. The wealth of code already available makes it a simple choice.
I noticed that there was some interest on the Dreamhost forums for AJAX to register for lists. I thought this was a good idea, and upon finding no solution, I set out to make one.
I admit that both this is not terribly easy to set up nor is it terribly hard. You have to modify 1 php file and include the required components on your web page. There is a full readme enclosed to help you get it set up.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment!
I haven’t been able to get online at my house reliably for the past couple days. This is really causing problems with me finishing some stuff (such as uploading one completed project). I apologize for the delays and I’ll try to get one project uploaded and possibly write a review of Cardamar’s last album while I’m at it.
On a lighter note, I just got a new PMP: a Cowon D2. I also will give some feedback on that and give a link to the excellent review I read before purchasing (I need to get it out of my history at home). Hopefully all that tonight.
Somehow I am having a very bad time with electronics. A lot of them around me aren’t cooperating resulting in something breaking. As I try to stay on top of this, other things have been pushed back. I apologize again. I’m not going to give a target date so I don’t have to worry about writing delayed messages. Review of Cardamar’s cd should come in the near future though.
Also, Freefalling into Freedom (on chilloutmixes.com) is a great mix. The use of kettle was somewhat surprising but very well done. Check it out.
Ok, so my ajax-foo is no where near where I wanted it to be (though a small error, it was still annoying…). This resulted in the update to chilloutmixes.com taking until earlier today. It is now done and you can subscribe to the list from the main page (the list I will be sending announcements whenever a new mix is available or site related news). I will not be emailing the updates by hand anymore, so anyone who is currently getting updates will no longer receive them unless you subscribe to that list.
The tutorials are coming later still. I hope to finish them … um.. maybe by tuesday. So just hang in there! I made the reward better in compensation for the delay and will make it easier to get even without doing the optional third demo. Sorry for the delay.
Also, there is a new mix from Cardamar available. Honestly, i haven’t even listened to the full thing yet, so head over to chilloutmixes.com and check it out.
The code to set up an announcement list for chilloutmixes.com is basically done. All I have to do it test it and copy and paste some default messages into it. That should be done and active tonight. If I have the time, I should be able to finish the 3rd cURL demo and write up the first tutorial. Hopefully I’ll post tonight with all the good news. Of course the source for everything will be made available.
Ok, so I’ve had a lot of other things to play with (Including a Sidekick 3 and a PS3) which has this tendency to take away my time. I’m also working on getting chilloutmixes.com set up better for announcing new mixes. All of this is taking up my time. The curl demos are done being created, but I haven’t had the time to set up the tutorial to solve them. Um… I’m getting to it. Sorry.
Also, I just got Cardamar’s latest CD. I need to write a review on that as well. There was a new mix released by Marco Torrance in the past couple weeks also, so be sure to check out chillout mixes if you haven’t recently.
That’s all i can say for now.
Ok, I haven’t forgotten about the cURL tutorial or updating the site. I just happen to be quite busy right now. This weekend I hope to have some time to finish up the cURL stuff (I am working on it, it’s just not done) and hopefully get back to my project. This is somewhat of a reminder to myself as well, so hopefully it works! I also promise to make all of the source code available of both the problems and solutions.
Random cool thing I found: tntnet. I had heard about C++ server pages before, but tntnet is the project that really makes them shine. They claim that it can serve c++ dynamic pages fast than traditional web servers (probably apache) can serve static pages because the c++ pages get compiled. Awesome for speed. The syntax looks pretty nice to for making the views (and you get the c++ goodness for all of the processing).