A Day in Paradise

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At ZendCon I talked about “Planning a PHP 4 to PHP 5 codebase rewrite, a practical approach”. The talk was based on my own experience, as well as famous discussion of the topic such as Joel Spolsky’s “Things you should never do” and the examination of “famous” platform rewrites.

During my monday morning surf, I bumped into this dailywtf called “No Need to Change It!“. This is an interesting story about a software development company who created car dealership systems. The original system was built in Cobol and the story goes on to explain the various loops that they jumped through to avoid having to rewrite their entire system. These steps included creating a COBOL->C converter (so that they could run under x86), and then the generation of windows forms to run on top of the system so that they could use “new windows technology.”

While it’s obvious that this story was intended to be derogatory, from a business standpoint sounds like a success and probably even something that Joel would be proud of.

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Russian former spy dies

I love the hypocricy which surrounds the glorification/demonization of spies.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’ve stopped using Backpackit completely. It was cool at first but then when we get past a certain number of articles, the system breaks down.

Plus google has spell checking, tagging, and a ton of other goodness. The only thing that I have to get used to is the “organisation-by-tagging” system that google uses. I have a TON of stuff going by me, so it might make it slightly more difficult to use than just a simple “folder” metaphor.

What more can I say, why pay for something when you can get something better for google for free.

This disturbs me on many levels.

Police brutality is nothing new, but what was most shocking about this video was how little the 100 or more students standing around did to stop it.

The question that needs to be answered is “if not you, then who?” what is the point in having a free country with the constitutional right to bear arms (to form malitias which keep government tryanny in check) if you’re just going to stand around and ask for the cops badge number after he’s needlessly tasered some kid five times? Or are we so scared of our government that we’re powerless to do anything in the face of tyranny.

I’m not going to get involved with what the kid did and what the police did, and whether or not he was an asshole. It really doesn’t matter. Regardless of what the kid did, the police handled it brutally, and the students (and anyone who watches the video) realize that.

Civil uprisings which have overthrown governments have been triggered by less than this. I guess the bright side is that it was captured and now that has seen it maybe next time someone will do something to stop it.

</rant>

Just a quick note to let my planetary friends that I’ve created a page that is tracking all information about my Zend Framework Hidden Gems series of articles.

More information on my Zend Framework Hidden Gems page.

I’m not going to waste blog space reiterating what is covered in the link above, but just wanted to mention that this work is being released (and will stay) under the Creative Commons license, so any comments on the articles, style or code is greatly appreciated and will be integrated back into the work (with attribution) to make this series a point of reference for those using Zend Framework.

My ZendCon and PHP Conference slides are up.

Moving to PHP5 with Style
Planning a PHP4 -> PHP5 platform Rewrite
Advanced PHP Tools (tutorial)

I enjoyed these two conferences a lot, and wrote up a not-so-technical review of ZendConference2006 on my “corporate” Hedge Fund Website Creation blog. A writeup of the PHP Conference is coming up.

“We’re sorry the telephone that you are calling from is not in service at this time”

What does that mean? I’m using it aren’t I?

Frightening article on BBC about creating human/cow hybrids:

The hybrid human-bovine embryos would be used for stem cell research and would not be allowed to develop for more than a few days.

But critics say it is unethical and potentially dangerous.

Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris – a member of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee – said: “If human benefit can be derived by perfecting therapeutic cloning techniques or from research into subsequently-derived stem cells, then it would actually be immoral to prevent it just because of a ‘yuck’ factor.”

Creating chimeras isn’t something that’s exactly new. However using them to harvest human organs is pretty wild.

I’ve blogged about the second “tech boom” and traditionally biotech follows closely on the tech wave. From experience I know that Venture capitalists are just dying to get their hands on some of the money that is bound to be made in the biotech industry, so while the money is flowing I expect to see a lot of “brave new techniques” come out into the open. A company that is pretty hungry in this market is the secretive candadian biotech company Genada, not much word as to what they are actually doing (sounds like the late 90′s) but a lot of investors wanting to cash in on the next “leap for mankind.”

So here’s to holding our breath and see what these companies come up with before the money stops flowing!