Tech

First off, yes I am an old fart and an elitist jerk. Sue me. I've just about had it with what the MySpace mentality is doing to the Web. Sure, I'm on board the whole "Web 2.0" bandwagon, but somehow MySpace gets put into the same boat with folks like Meebo, Digg and Google. The whole idea of the social networking website is a valid one. But there are such better implementations of the idea out there.

But, with popularity comes the unwashed masses. Just when I thought the Web as a medium had finally moved beyond ridiculous animated GIFs that burn a hole in the users' collective retinas, the latest fad has become "pimping one's myspace". Where we get to see things like this:



...and this...



Stuff that would probably kill your average epileptic. Gone are the days when people created HTML to be lean, mean and 56k modem-ready. Here are the days of pages with 15 embedded 35 MB videos, embedded flash music players and broken, bloated markup that inevitably crash the visitor's computer like a flight over Lockerbee.

I miss the old days. Jakob Nielsen is dead. Long live Jakob Nielsen.

Today NASA released footage taken by a camera mounted on one of the SRBs during the shuttle's recent mission liftoff. This footage shows takeoff, SRB seperation and all the way back down into the Atlantic. Extremely cool video.

SRB-cam liftoff video

I ran across a really good blog entry by Clay Loveless (of Feedster fame) yesterday that really cut to the heart of what it means to call yourself a software developer. In his words: discipline. I highly recommend everyone who considers themselves a developer to give this a read and check his bullet points against their own development methodologies. Here's some of my favorite points from his blog entry:

• You must be disciplined enough to write well-documented code.
  Yes, functionality counts, but if you're hit by a bus (or trampled by
  your fan club at an ego-rally) tomorrow, someone else has to take over
  your stuff and make sense out of it. For a pro, documentation isn't
  grunt work left to the community, or the peons. The pro just does it
  because it's what pros do.
• You must be disciplined enough to write code with error reporting (by whatever name your language of choice calls it) cranked to the max. use strict error_reporting(E_STRICT) on PHP5 or error_reporting(E_ALL) on PHP4, whatever: these modes of development
  weren't created to annoy you, they were created to save your ass and
  hopefully help you evolve into a better developer. Writing new code
  under something as sloppy as 'error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE)' should
  be an absolute last resort.

Enjoy.

Somehow I missed this news back when it was announced, but Zend (the PHP Company) has announced the PHP Collaboration Project. The aim of this project is to leverage the power of some really big hitters in the IT world (IBM, Oracle, Intel and others) to drive PHP into the enterprise market and the future. If there is one trend when it comes to PHP (as well as other open source web app languages like Ruby), it is that it has been seeing steady uptake in the enterprise, by leaps and bounds over the last few years. Look out .Net and J2EE.

The most interesting development from this project I think is the announcement of a forthcoming Zend PHP Framework. What's a framework do you ask? Simply put, a framework is a re-usable set of code, or library, that is engineered to perform the common tasks that almost all web apps do like database connectivity, ldap directory searches, security, user management, etc. For instance, I've created several apps using PHP at work. All of them do these common things, and I had to re-write or re-tool the same code over and over again. With a framework, I've got this stuff already built to begin with. I don't have to worry about the plumbing, framing and infrastructure of an application, I just have to build the house around it.

Sure there are lots of PHP frameworks out there like PRADO, Symfony and others. I myself was seriously looking into using the absolutely fantastic, enterprise-grade Cerebral Cortex framework. (The maintainer, Davey Shafik has since stopped development of Cortex and has moved to the Zend PHP Framework team. Congrats, Mr. Shafik!)

The future is bright for the PHP community. Hang on to yer hats.

So in less than a year I've gone through three iPods. My latest lasted
less than two months before the hard drive crapped out. Just send me a
new one Apple, this is crazy.

So I finally dropped my ridiculous business grade internet access plan with Charter. I was paying $160/mo for a connection that was 1.5mbps down and 384kbps up. (yeah you read that right). It was worth it for a while for the static IP. I'll miss you 66.189.35.193! Anyhow, I've 'downgraded' to 3mbps residential service, and it just blows. REALLY spotty speeds. REALLY slow upload bandwidth.. I think about 128kbps. Running this site on this line just ain't gonna cut it. I may have to end up doing a co-lo somewhere instead. Well at least they don't block ports 80, 22 and 23 anymore.

As I was looking into other options today, I ran across Verizon's FIOS service. That's right baby... fiber to the curb. The speeds START at 5mbps down and 768kbps up. All that at a much cheaper price than Charter, those price gouge-ing fucktards. So in a sudden rush of hopeful glee, I checked availability in Worcester...

...and got the expected result: not available. Why must we citizens of our fair city in the heart of the commonwealth be treated like red-headed stepchildren all the time? GIMME MY SP33DZ0RZ!

Anybody know when it's coming to Worcester? I've heard rumblings ranging from 'mid-2006' to 'when hell freezes over'.