Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

The Jetpack Debate

I’ve generally found Jetpack to be pretty cool. It’s easier to develop and I’m fairly familiar with both “traditional” extension development and jQuery so it seems natural to me. However I generally agree with Daniel Glazman’s blog post on Jetpack. I’ll even agree that closures can make code more difficult to read, [...]

The Programmer, Like The Poet

So poetic in itself…

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
- Fredrick P. [...]

Z2k9 Bug Strikes The Zune

From the company that brought you Windows ME, and Windows Vista, Microsoft Corporation today introduced the world to the Z2K9 bug. Apparently all 30GB Zune’s reboot and freeze due to a bug in the date/time drivers. Classic. Microsoft’s solution is to simply wait until 2009 (a few more hours). Even more [...]

Object-Oriented Masturbation

Doing some research for an upcoming installment of an infamous series of blog posts (to be released at an undetermined date) I’ve come to notice this annoyance. In general I like object-oriented programming. I think it allows you to take a complicated problem and produce simple, more reusable and easier to maintain code. [...]

PHP Namespacing

The PHP folks have finally announced that PHP will get namespacing in the form of ‘\‘. The universal escape character. They really should have went with the standard ‘::‘ or ‘:::‘. Using ‘\‘ is going to work well.
I was thinking something like this would be more appropriate (background on compatibility here):

………………………………..__…………………………………………
………………………..,-~*`¯lllllll`*~,……………………………………
…………………..,-~*`lllllllllllllllllllllllllll¯`*-,………………………………
………………,-~*llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll*-,…………………………….
……………,-*llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll.\…………………….. …….
………….;*`lllllllllllllllllllllllllll,-~*~-,llllllllllllllllllll\…………………………..
…………..\lllllllllllllllllllllllllll/………\;;;;llllllllllll,-`~-,……………………. [...]

Benchmarking And Testing Browsers

When people talk about open source they often talk about the products, not the process. That’s not really a bad thing (it is after all about the product), but it overlooks some really interesting things sometimes. For example open source tools used in open development.
A few months ago Jesse Ruderman introduced [...]

Wikipedia Infrastructure

Here’s a great read on Wikipedia’s Infrastructure. Two excellent sets of slides. A lot can be done with a LAMP stack. The common theme: caching and careful optimization. There are some really impressive stats in there.

Coda Coolness

So I downloaded and tested out Coda a little bit today. My initial impression is that I’m very impressed. It could be the new standard. A few like Alex King point out that it uses Safari as the default engine. I don’t think that’s so bad. Nothing stops you from [...]

Time Sucks

One of the hardest things to program is the Date and Time. This is especially true when your doing it on the web. Why is that? Using a unix timestamp is immensely helpful and resolves many of the complexities, but it does have some issues (besides the Y2K38 bug). Well lets [...]

Getting A Random Row In MySQL

This is a great page on RAND() in MySQL. Very nice breakdown of how to gain performance with one of the biggest “it should be simple but it isn’t” problems in DBMS’s.