A Day in Paradise

Cross posting this nice article from Mike Kruckenberg into my PHP section, since it has some great things to keep in mind.

I recently went through this on a platform I was maintaining. The thing that bit me in the ass was some very silly ways previous programmers were parsing timestamp fields. Lesson: do it the right way the first time. The MySQL date/time functions are able to do whatever you need done, there is no need to do date parsing in PHP.

The other issues are mostly minor, and if you do need to change them are relatively easy todo with a global search and replace, or configuration option. Those hours of digging through code looking for timestamp parsing code taught me to RESPECT THE TIMESTAMP!

It’s the beginning of (Un)Conference season, PHP Appalachia is in full swing, and PHPWeekender.

PHP Weekender is an event organized by the PHP Dortmund crew. The event will take place on the 7th and 8th of October in the University of Dortmund. All the information is here.

Unfortunately, due to a very demanding month (relatives visiting, followed by trip to the US, Zend Con and then IPC2k6) I won’t be able to make it. When looking at the schedule I saw that Tobias Struckmeier was giving a talk on Shell Scripting with PHP I thought it would be a good idea to see if I could get an article I wrote on the same topic republished online. And PHP Magazine was happy to oblige me. Even though the article itself was written in the months after the initial release of PHP5, the CLI SAPI hasn’t changed that much and (as far as I can remember) the article is still relevant I’ll post a link when it gets released.

From the Perl Foundation Blog

This week the Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006.

Nick joined the Perl community in the early days of Perl 5. He consistently contributed to the perl5-porters mailing list and later became pumpkin for 5.003_02 where he added the initial implementation of the PerlIO layer.

Some of my first programming projects dealt heavily with Perl/TK. I never met nick but followed the mailing lists and partook of his tireless efforts for the advancement of Perl/TK and Perl in general. He will be missed.

Thanks, Nick

Paper CD Case

Don’t know how long they are going to last… but you can view them all online here and here. Also got Family Guy, South Park and American Dad.

Just got back from watching Crank. What can you say? It’s craaaazzzzy! A couple quick comments.

• The first time I’ve seen google product placement. Between the scenes there were shots from google maps where it panned across the city and then zoomed in on a street/car/house. In the corner was a “Maps provided by google” logo
• Nokia, having phones ring with the “nokia sound” is just as annoying as hearing the windows sound when laptops boot up.
• You really should watch this with proper surround sound set to the appropriate volume
• We have been desensitized to violence
• We have not been desensitized to Sex and Drugs

Now I want to rant about violence in movies. This movie has a lot of Sex, Drugs and Violence. The “funny” thing about it, is that I was really only “shocked” by the Sex and Drugs. This sort of goes along with the rant about how cartoons are being edited to remove scenes where cartoon characters are chugging on a cigar. This is a cartoon where the characters repeatedly blow each other up with various forms of dynamite/fireworks but we’re offended when someone smokes on a childrens show.

So apart from the crazy ride this movie was, I think that this movie has was some form of social commentary. Why is it “alright” to create action and laugh about people blowing each other up, when it’s not “alright” to laugh at people shooting themselves up with huge drug cocktails and the running around town with a huge erection? Obviously when I say “alright” I mean socially acceptable.

Of course combine them all and you have some great scenes, like where he is involved in a car chace / shootout while getting a blowjob. Gives a whole new meaning to shouting “Keep your head down!”

Another highlight was when he needed the poor indian guy’s taxi so he threw him out of the taxi and yelled “Al Quida”, and have the crowd jump on the poor guy and beat the crap out of him. I know, I shouldn’t have laughed… but again, I think this was yet another peice of social commentary by the director.

We took the kids out to the park to have a bbq. While we were waiting for everyone to show up, Annie comes up and says

Annie: “I want to play goofball”
Stella: “goofball?”
Annie: “yes, where you have a stick and hit the little ball”
Stella: “You mean mini-golf?”
Annie: “Yes, mini-golf”

I’ve blogged about Shadow Falls a before, it’s an audio-drama which centers around an epic power struggle between good and evil which takes place in the mysterious town of Shadow Falls. Shadow Falls was created by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff and a large crew of actors and producers. The show has ramped up, and we’re now gearing up for the 6th and last episode of the first season.

Alongside the drama, Mark is doing a “companion” podcast where he talks about various issues (think directors commentary on a DVD). In the first episode he solicited interview requests, so I decided to put together a couple questions and Mark responded immediately.

Thanks Mark for taking the time, and for being the first interview in my 5-question-interview section So without further ado, on with the interview.

(more…)

This one is at least a little more coherent. I agree with what they say, the problem, is that what they say doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you think my website is ugly and because of all the ugly sites the internet sucks. What matters is that despite (and in some cases, because) of all the crap on the internet people still use it and enjoy it.

Another case of the elitest “there-goes-the-neighbourhood” syndrom.

Having said that, the original list is quite interesting. Notice how YouTube and Del.icio.us are on both lists. Where is Craigs list? Is that just another one of those ugly sites that millions of “uncool people” use?

A nice tutorial on GIT explains the development of the program, and Linux’s history.

Torvalds began working on Git as an interim solution to replace BitKeeper, which had previously been the primary source code tool in use by Linux kernel developers worldwide. Some members of the open source community felt that the BitKeeper license was not the best fit for the open source world, and thus Torvalds decided to investigate revision control systems with more permissive licenses.

Has to make you wonder what this guy was smoking, as I remember it went down quite a bit differently.

Over the next three months, BitMover intends to phase out the free BitKeeper product. Some money has been set aside to provide commercial licenses for certain kernel developers, however Linus Torvalds is not one of them. Larry suggested, “if Linus and Andrew and the others moved elsewhere, we’d glady comp them licenses”, referring to their current employment with OSDL.

But it’s good to hear that GIT is gaining momentum.

and can’t log into the system!

Thankfully there is usually someone who has done this before you. I also took a quick look at the 3 tables on another development machine and compared the data. The tables in question are: ezuser , ezuser_role and ezrole – although I didn’t modify the ezrole table.

The EZP forums are great for this type of thing.

After a week of intense work on EZP templates, it quickly becomes apparent where you have made mistakes with the designing of your templates. Most of this stuff is just common sense, if anyone has any other pointers please comment, or post URLs for where this has been discussed.

CSS Rocks
EZP works best with CSS based templates. You’ll notice this most when you need to create a template for a container which will contain a list of various other items. When using CSS, you can use generic code (such as <li> for the list items) and then apply specific classes to the container to modify the look in that page. Since I was delivered a table based html layout for this project, I learned this the hard way.

Override, override, override
The power of EZP comes into play when it comes to overriding the default templates. The power is there to override anything from default datatypes (I had to change the textarea datatype to have fewer than the default 70 rows) to individual objects, classes or sections. There are a couple pitfalls you’ll have to watch for:

• Use Sections: When you want to change the look of a section of your site (ie: I want all the articles in my knowledgebase to have a blue headline) create a section for knowledgebase and then create an override for the class within the section.
• Create a strategy for your override precedence: I had some trouble with overrides taking precedence over other overrides until I came with a basic strategy. Node overrides take precedence (places 1-10), Class overrides come next (11-20, then Section overrides (places 20+), and finally any global overrides. You may not have this many overrides, my main issue was with the “node/view/full.tpl” template.
• Create a strategy for your override naming: If you have a lot of templates you’re managing and if you, like me, prefer to edit your templates outside EZP, you’re going to want to have a naming strategy for your templates. I’m using (type_of_override)_(class)_(section)_(node).tpl. So an override for articles in knowlegdebase would be full_article_knowledgebase.tpl. If I am doing a node override it would be full_42.tpl.
• Create generic templates. I started out creating some very specific templates, before I realized that generic templates which span over a wider range of nodes/classes will be easier to manage. If you need more specific templates after that you can always override your overrides
• Don’t re-invent the wheel: I found myself creating templates which were just containers for other list items. Don’t re-invent the wheel, use (or override) the container template and then modify the list templates for the sub items.

And finally CTCS
This is one that I learned in IRC as well as from a couple of head banging sessions which turned out were caused by me not clearing the cache. Clear the Cache Stupid, ask questions later.

On the heels of last night’s rant, here’s a list of the 50 Coolest Websites of 2006. Some of my favorites are among them including:

Podcast Pickle
The 9
YouTube (just uploaded a test video I made last week today, I’m starting a series of street musicians in frankfurt)
Kevin Sites
Human Clock
and of course MySpace

Sad news today, Robert Levin founder of Freenode (previously Open Projects Network) passed away after being hit by a car while riding his bike. Despite the controversies the surrounding the his operation of the two networks, the incredible effort that he made has helped millions of computer users and open-source projects around the world.

While he will be missed, I have no doubt that the infrastructure that he put so much work into will continue on and contine to support the community.

PCWorld Author Dan Tynan, starts off his “25 Worst Website” list, with what I imagine he thinks is an insightful comment: “When it comes to the Web, hindsight is more like X-ray vision”. I’m not sure if Dan is ignorant, elitist or just suffering from radiation poisoning from over-exposure to X-ray vision, but this article suffers from a severe disconnect from how the real world views and uses the internet.

The technical world is quickly heading into another bubble, call it web2.0 if you like. Articles like these show that we haven’t learned our lessons. The question that I have to ask, is after the boom bursts, who will be left standing, MySpace or YouTube?

The rest is a rant.
(more…)