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:
If so, leveraging the Free--paying people to get other people to write for
non-monetary rewards--may not be the enemy of professional journalists.
Instead, it may be their salvation.
File under projects/
Mon Jun 29 20:03:49 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.
my $thing = Thing->new( id => 123 )->load;
$thing->foo('bar');
$thing->save;
#
# the above is mock code
# representing something like:
#
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
UPDATE table things
SET foo = 'bar'
WHERE ID = 123;
END TRANSACTION;
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
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