Archive for June, 2006

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Stupid PHP move

June 13th, 2006

Yes, this happened awhile back, and is another shining example of why people have a hard time trusting/adopting PHP as a real ‘enterprise’ language.

From http://php.net/strip_tags:

Since PHP 4.3.0, HTML comments are also stripped. This is hardcoded and can not be changed with allowable_tags.

So, in other words, behaviour that existed for years is unceremoniously removed without warning and without any other useful option available.

I looked through the CVS comments for the strip_tags function here and didn’t find *any* mention of HTML comments.  Interestingly, there was some work done to strip_tags to make it aware of XML tags.  Why didn’t they put this in the parser and make PHP work with short tags AND XML like I’ve posted about before?

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Posted in PHP

Google Earth beta for Linux

June 12th, 2006

I was pleasantly surprised to just learn that there’s a beta of Google Earth v4 for Linux.  I’ve heard some good stuff about Google Earth, and saw it running on a Windows machine once, but had never installed it (even when using a Windows machine).  So, I thought I’d give it a try out today.  It’s very nice!

I won’t go in to all the ins and outs of the software itself – ogleearth.com would probably do a better job than I could.  What impressed me was the linux installer.  Yes, it still required me to run something from the command line – well, two things, really.  One, make the .bin file executable; two, run it.

I was treated to a basic KDE-ish dialog asking which directory I wanted to install in to, and that was it.  It installed all dependancies in to the local directory – much like OS X apps tend to do.  Yes, if there’s a bug in libqt that needs patching, I’ll need to upgrade it.  Yes it was larger than it probably needed to be.  But it worked, and worked flawlessly.  This has been the sort of approach I’ve been arguing for for years, and I know a few others have, but to little avail.  Perhaps a large enough company like Google can bring a bit of practicality to desktop Linux, rather than focusing solely on the theoretically pure way of doing things.

I hope there’s more Linux apps coming from Google and indeed, others who choose to make their software as easily accessible to a larger desktop Linux audience  :)

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Posted in Google, Ideas, linux

Mixed Apple experience

June 11th, 2006

My wife is a rather committed Apple fan.  We’ve owned an emac for almost 3 years, and have an iPod each.  We’re not rabid ‘top of the line, gotta have it now’ people, but she does appreciate the Apple experience.  We went to the local Apple store here and did explain that we have an emac and were going to upgrade to a new computer.  She’d made her mind up on a new iMac – either a 17″ or 20″ – weren’t sure which.

Screen size was an issue with the wife.  The current emac was a 17″ so we figured a 17″ would work OK.  It doesn’t  The height is about an inch shorter (the width is wider than the emac).  Bit of a disappointment on that one.

The other issue which does REALLY bug me is account migration.  I’d read about how easy it was.  We discussed it in front of the sales guy and he agreed it’s an easy process.  Get it home, out of the box, and are confounded by the fact that I don’t have a firewire cable.  The only way you can upgrade is via firewire – USB cables and ethernet are not supported (WHY ON EARTH IS THIS THE CASE?).  This is the fourth Apple product we’ve purchased in 3 years, and we’ve never once received a firewire cable with any item.  Why are we required to use an Apple-only technology when there are perfectly reasonable data transfer technologies already on board?

All I can say is that this was a less than stellar experience.  Not *bad*, just not all the greatness to which people say Apple always lives up to…

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Posted in Apple, Personal

Transaction patterns – a new vocabulary

June 9th, 2006

Just as ‘design patterns’ have given architects and developers a common way to describe certain types of software problems, Tony Marston is now challenging the community to begin thinking in transaction patterns. The title of his paper is somewhat overstated (as he later admits in his conclusion) but the premise is certainly on target. I wonder if this thinking/meme has a different name and is already being used in the design community. Perhaps there’s something over at boxesandarrows.com, which sort of feels like that natural place for this sort of thing (maybe i’m just way offbase in that thinking though!)

Silly me – what I was thinking about was the Yahoo! Design Pattern area.  This developer area from Yahoo! seems to offer some/much of the same concepts that Tony was getting at.  Tony may be straddling more of a middle ground between the front end and the back end code, so these are probably all different spots along the spectrum of ‘design’, but I thought it was worth it to point out the Yahoo! stuff (again).  They’ve revamped their site and have a lot more info there than they did 3 months ago – it just keeps getting better  :)

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Posted in Design, Development, PHP, Web

Another reason I don’t like Smarty – part 2

June 8th, 2006

There’s no way to run smarty files through a tool to beautify them.  There are beautifiers for PHP and cleaning/reformatting tools for pure HTML, but as far as I can tell, nothing for Smarty.  Having to live with someone else’s Smarty files that are inconsistent makes it difficult to read through them.  If someone *has* a Smarty beautifier, please contact me, post here, or point me to a URL.  Thanks…  :)

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Posted in PHP

mysql full text searching presentation

June 7th, 2006

I’m doing a small presentation for our local Mysql User Group tonight, and the topic is full text searching.  While doing a bit of research, I came across a few useful sites:

The first one is an in-depth analysis of how the full-text algorithm works – definitely worth reading up on.  The other two give demonstrations of the ‘IN BOOLEAN MODE’ which is something I might start using in some projects I offer search on.  What might be even nicer is to only use it if a + or – appears in the search string.

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Posted in MySQL, Uncategorized

Polyphasic sleep

June 6th, 2006

I’ve been so interested in polyphasic sleep after reading Steve Pavlina’s article on his experiences.  My wife doesn’t want me to do it because, as she says, ‘You’re weird enough already!’.  I would love to have an extra few hours per day of awake time – as it is right now I feel like I waste too much of my time every day.  Would my time be better spent trying to organize my time better or trying to get more awake time?

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Posted in Ideas, Personal

blogger meetup

June 6th, 2006

Having a good time here at the raleigh blogger meetup. I’ve met the guy behind the Citation machine site, and he was telling us his experience about recently adding google adsense to his site. Apparently the results were quite impressive. :)

Another guy (Wayne) just recently put up a page looking for donations to help his family computing habit – helpmeget2macs.com.  If you have extra cash and want to help spread the cult of Macintosh, go donate to the cause.

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Posted in Blogging