PHP Confessions
Last night on twitter I started this series based on the hashtag #PHPConfessions
I’ve never gotten the order of arguments right for str_replace without checking http://php.net first #PHPConfessions
I’m always afraid I’ll be seated with the Perl people at programmer gatherings #PHPConfessions
I like PHP because I like always having the option to blame my tools #PHPConfessions
Sometimes I go to github just to browse python repos #PHPConfessions
Tax The Old
Productivity has skyrocketed in the past three decades, but all of the surplus has been captured by the top 1%. Wages have been flat. The workforce has lost a lot of leverage due to the cost savings of machines, labor competition with the third world and the migration of women into the workforce.
All of these extra workers are fighting for fewer and fewer jobs. The only solution is to create many more jobs or reduce the number of available workers. [...]
Rummaging Around An Old Hard Drive
I couldn’t find any usb drives tonight so i brought out an old external hard drive. That picture is one of the first “mastheads” of muddylemon.com circa the late 90s.
I also found this poem from the same time period:
Different Person
i used to be a different person, I used to have different thoughts I’m not sure if i changed characters, or merely shifted plots;
I used to be a different person, I was someone I once knew I don’t remember changing, I doubt [...]
How To Do It
Perl
There’s more than one way to do it
PythonThere is one way to do it
PHPI found a way to do it but it didn’t work. I’m just going to do it in WordPress
ColdFusionYou can do that?
.NETThere is one way to do it, but you can do it in any language you want
JavaScriptI know how to do it in jQuery. Does it have jQuery?
ClojureFirst let’s do math!
RubyThis is the right way to do it. All the other ways to do it suck.
Objective-CJust [...]
Dreamhost is incompetent
This site was offline for three days due to the unbelievable incompetence of Dreamhost. There is no excuse for a company in the business of hosting websites to fail so miserably and so often. The reason for the outage is unclear, their infrequent updates would refer to different pieces of failing hardware. The backup server, which is oddly singular in their parlance, failed while restoring to a new server that failed for similar hardware reasons.
I’m off to the cloud!
Update: It [...]
Online Audio Is A Poor Format For Learning Code
Saw a link to a “radio show” about Advanced OO Patterns. I thought that was an odd format for a topic like that. Online audio presentations are great for ideas that live mostly inside your head, but code you usually need to write down. I clicked the link and found a flash-based audio player. No slides or video or text, just the audio. I thought I’d try it out and record my notes….
9:50 pm
Some guy says [...]
Two Player Game
When I was a kid my dad bought us a video game system for Christmas. This was in the early eighties — the height of the Atari era.
We got a Coleco-vision.
It came with Donkey Kong. We were lucky that it came with a game because there weren’t any other games available. Literally. The Coleco-vision was discontinued and we’d already missed the closeout sales on Coleco games. I think any that were left were likely being used as a mulch over the buried [...]
Shoulders
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo but he’s not marked. Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing. He hears the hum of a boy’s dream deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able to live in this world if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing with [...]
Lying At The Barbershop
The guy that usually cuts my hair wasn’t in today. I always wait for him when I go in. Not because he’s a particularly skillful barber, but because of an awkward moment that happened the first time I went to that barbershop.
I had gone in for a haircut after a two year hiatus. For one year I shaved my own head for reasons that I could never really articulate. At the end that experiment I just stopped cutting my hair. [...]
The Once A Year Card
Are you the sort of person that never remembers to buy cards? Birthdays, Christmas, Get Well…. it just doesn’t occur to you.
It’s not that you don’t love the people in your life, you’re just not the sort to express it by buying stationery.
Here’s your solution: The Once A Year Card
It’s a card that very directly and clearly states that I am sending it to the recipient because I want them to know that I occasionally think of them, that I [...]