The Future is Free

That's free as in beer. Malcolm Gladwell has a review in this week's New Yorker of Chris Anderson's new book.

Given my new job, this quote from Anderson seems apt:

File under projects/ Mon Jun 29 20:03:49 CT 2009

Terminal Color

For the last ten years I have used the color #E3BF70 (hex) as my terminal background color. It's a darkish amber color that is very easy on the eyes. I'm recording it here because every year or so I have to set up a new system and always have to eyeball the settings till I get something close to what I am used to.

File under projects/ Mon Jun 29 15:32:23 CT 2009

Ziggurat

Not a book but a short story in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

I usually like the fiction pieces in the NY but this particular story, in its surrealism, seemed to tell me a truth I already knew but had forgotten. I immediately sat down to google Stephen O'Connor (the author) to find out more. He sounds like a compelling person.

The religious nature of the story continues a recent trend in NY fiction. Last week's story was also very compelling, a kind of Flannery O'Connor-esque morality tale. O'Connor. There's another trend. I expect next week's fiction piece to have an O'Connor connection as well.

Speaking of New Yorker threads, has anyone else noticed the subtle vocabulary threads in each issue, where a single uncommon word might appear in multiple pieces in the issue? The editors must enjoy finding those connections in their submissions.

File under books/ Fri Jun 26 19:24:10 CT 2009

Unicode

PHP lacks proper and complete Unicode support.

Come on people!

File under projects/php Thu Jun 18 21:25:30 CT 2009

Closures

PHP lacks closures. That is, they are new in 5.3.

As with namespaces, PHP is Way Late to the Game.

File under projects/php Thu Jun 18 21:23:47 CT 2009

Get your degree now!

I get literally hundreds of spam messages urging me to buy a higher education degree. I realized today why these kinds of messages must appeal, because I've had more than one dream in which I realized I had never graduated from high school or college and was completely unprepared to meet fill in challenge here.

These spam must be aimed at a kind of Jungian-level subconscious anxiety that manifests itself as the Unfinished Degree. Of course, there are plenty of folks who really do have unfinished degrees and are struggling in a competitive marketplace. But even a college-degreed person like myself still localizes my dream-time anxiety about life in not having finished school, and I suspect that is also at play.

The Unfinished Degree... <cue Jaws theme...>

File under spam hall of shame/ Thu Jun 18 20:48:57 CT 2009

PHP ORMs

Object-relational mappers are a nice way of simplifying data store interactions, by abstracting the data model into a OO class structure. Or put another way, don't write SQL, write code that is storage agnostic.

I've used a couple of different Perl ORMs over the last four years with great joy: DBIx::Class and (mostly) Rose::DB::Object. Now I'm looking for a suitable PHP project for my toolbelt.

Wikipedia has a good starting list.

Some contenders include:

Xyster

Looks nice but depends on Zend Framework so a bit heavy. Handles cascading actions on related objects.

Doctrine

The most popular (or at least most-mentioned). It has its own special query language (DQL), which is a philosophical turn-off. Isn't SQL+PHP good enough? But I see the DQL is optional.

Rocks PHP Library

Ambitious. The docs make it seem a little like the Rose framework in its goals: an ORM, a Form manager, a web framework. There's a DB abstraction layer that claims to support many different db flavors. It seems pretty young though.

Propel

Mature. But it uses this external XML definition file which just seems crazy. Again, isn't SQL+PHP enough?

DABL

Based on Propel but simpler. No external XML file (+1). Uses same PDO db abstraction layer as Propel.

LightORM

I was initially hopeful about this one but it appears abandoned.

DataMapper

My co-worker turned me on to this one (thanks Sean!). I really like the looks of it so far and will be spending some quality time testing it out.

File under projects/php Thu Jun 18 20:18:09 CT 2009

Recovering /op status on freenode

I hang out as karpet on freenode.net in the #swish-e channel, where there is occasionally meaningful conversation related to the project. I have registered the channel under my nick, but I often logout and back in and forget how to regain operator status. Here's the cheatsheet for my own memory:

/msg nickserv identify karpet mypassword
/msg chanserv op #swish-e karpet

Not too complicated but I always have to hunt around to find the right bots to /msg to.

File under general/ Fri Jun 5 20:48:26 CT 2009

Sensual Orthodoxy

I just looked over the history of the books section of this blog and find it fairly representative that most of the entries date from 2005, around the time I was in library school and my first child was a baby. Since that time I've become busy as a parent and breadwinner and have found my time for book-reading greatly diminished. Or perhaps my appetite for reading and writing here is diminished.

Instead, I've become an avid New Yorker reader, thanks to the gift from my wife of a multi-year subscription. As my friend Russell said to me yesterday, it's amazing that they can publish an issue every week, with such depth and breadth of quality writing. I laugh, cry, ponder and hmmmm my way through each issue and am grateful for its regularity.

But I am returning to books, and I'll be ruminating and reviewing here a bit as I stretch out into a summer of reading.

My friend Debbie is a writer and pastor. She published her first book of sermons about five years ago, and though I've had my signed copy on the shelf in my office since then, I've been slow to pick it up. That's no reflection on the quality of the writing or thinking in the book; it's more a reflection of the fact that I had already heard many of the sermons delivered from the pulpit and around the time the book came out, I was ready to take a break from church and theology and religion. (Why I was ready to take a break would fill many pages, but I'm not inclined to write it down.)

But the last six months or so I have felt more hopeful, despite the woe in the world, and revisiting Debbie's excellent sermons seemed timely. I am glad I did. I'm about four pieces in so far, and already have heard things I don't remember hearing the first time. Good writing is like that.

Of course, I approached the book with obvious biases. I knew I was going to like the sermons, since I like Debbie. I can hear her voice very clearly in my head as I read. The cadence, the tempo, the flurry of images. Very Debbie. Sort of a jazz aesthetic in her prose, the furious little runs of notes that culminate in an opening unto something new. Like poetry, sermons are written to be spoken aloud. I'm glad I have Debbie's voice in my head so I can hear them as they were meant to be heard.

One of the things I've been enjoying is looking at the dates of each sermon and trying to remember who and where I was at the time. Take the one I just read, "A Potentially Gruesome Metaphor," from February, 2001. I was out of town that winter, so I hadn't heard this one before. I know the story well (Luke 5:1-11) where Jesus gets on Simon's boat to preach, then tells him to throw over his nets into the deep and the size of the catch nearly capsizes the boat. The passage ends with Jesus saying that he will make the fishermen fishers of men. Like I said, I know the story well, but I found I didn't know the text well. A good sermon opens up the cracks in the text. Debbie riffs for awhile on the fishing theme, on the monotone evangelical hijacking of the fishers of men image, and then she goes somewhere I didn't expect. Which I like. "Put out into the deep and put down your nets for a catch," says Jesus. And then when the fish come in in overwhelming abundance, Simon's reaction seems, even for Simon, way overboard. "Go away from me, for I am a sinful man." Like Dostoyevsky's opening in Notes from Underground: "I am a sick man...I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man." I am a sinful man.

Debbie then connects the deep with the unconscious in a nod to postmodern psychoanalysis and sheds some light on Simon's reaction, then offers her listener the chance to empathize:



Debbie prayed at my wedding. The other officiant at my wedding was Doug Frank. Doug said to me once, there are only two things in life: fear and trust. Everything comes back to which of those two things you are living out of.

I think about what Doug told me just about every day. Now I have Debbie's wonderful image of fish-laden Jesus as well. Trust. Do not be afraid. Sure, the present circumstances stink, but do not be afraid.

File under books/ Sun May 24 22:22:45 CT 2009

One Million for Netflix

Lest any of my less-geeky friends assume that I know everything hip on the internet, the Netflix Prize was unknown to me until about 20 minutes ago. Then I read a mention of it on kottke.org and read the IEEE Spectrum article written by the current leading team. Now I wish I had heard about it 3 years ago when it started, because it could have been a very cool learning experience.

File under general/ Wed May 20 21:19:35 CT 2009