June 20, 2008
Had a decent amount of driving again in the last couple weeks:
419.6 miles - 12.33 gallons to fill up (@ $3.929 - not over the $4 some of you are paying, but still painful!)
That’s 34.03 mpg for the last fill up. I had some highway driving, which seems to really help kick it up past the 30-31 I typically get now.
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating some. SLOW DOWN and you’ll get much better mileage. 2 summers ago I was getting 25 on average. I now get 30 on average. That’s a 20% improvement.
I’ve started keeping track of my mileage over at http://fuelfrog.com. You might be able to see my mpg chart over at http://www.fuelfrog.com/users/mgkimsal/fuels/dashboard - not sure if you can see that if you’re not logged in to fuelfrog yourself.
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June 15, 2008
Exciting news - I’ll be presenting an introduction to Grails at the upcoming Codestock conference in Knoxville this August! The site doesn’t have full details yet, but I was just notified this morning that my submission was accepted. I’d actually submitted 3 options - my SOLR presentation, a “Continuous Integration with PHP” topic, and an introduction to Grails. The Grails topic was selected.
I’d like to thank Alan Stevens for the invitation to submit in the first place. I was a bit hesitant at first because the conference seemed very .net oriented. It’s being sponsored by the area .net user group, which makes sense. Alan let me know that they were looking for cross-platform topics, not just .net ones. However, it seems I may be the only topic that’s not directly related to Microsoft technologies. James Avery is presenting “10 Open Source tools you should use” - not sure if those are 10 tools in general, or 10 tools aimed at Windows developers (either way, I’m sure he’ll have a good list!). There’s another presentation on Mono and ASP.net. I’m the only Java-based presentation though. I hope it’s not too much of a ‘fish out of water’ thing.
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June 12, 2008
I just saw someone tweet that they’d received something in the post, and linked to a URL shortener service. It redirected to Amazon. Now I realize that Twitter is a pretty new service, but with mobile rising, I think we’ll see a need for short URLs more and more. Couple that with the slightly extra privacy you get with a shorter URL (someone needs to actually visit the link to know you’re pointing to furry handcuffs, for example), and the mindshare Amazon would keep by having “amazon.com/6hjw89eh9e7hds”, and the extra metrics they’d be able to capture with that (add a user key in the short URL) and this makes sense to me. The top of every Amazon product page would have a “Short URL” property available to cut/paste/whatever.
Someone should embed this in their ecommerce system to acknowledge and emrace Twitter, Plurk and the coming wave of microblogging platforms.
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June 12, 2008
My brother Mark has put together a comparison of addslashes() alternatives over at his blog. He starts off with:
I’ve seen a lot of people talking about mysql_real_escape_string() vs addslashes() vs addcslashes(). There seems to be a lot of real confusion about what these functions do (even with the php.net manual around), especially when it comes to character sets. I feel that some people are being scared into using some escaping methods with which they are not very familiar. So, I’ve decided to lay it all out in a few charts so there is no confusion about what each function does and how each can help protect against SQL injection attacks.
Read on if you’re interested in this sort of thing, and to get his final conclusion.
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June 12, 2008
I had the pleasure of talking with Randal Schwartz about his latest passion - Seaside - over on WebDevRadio.com. Check it out.
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June 9, 2008
I’m starting a new series today over at http://phpjobbook.com which will cover a number of job boards that are useful to PHP developers (in other words, they have listings for PHP jobs). If you’ve got a favorite job board you’ve used with good results, let me know!
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June 8, 2008
I found a review of my brother’s Magento book earlier today. Starting off with “However, I’m not really the type of person to give accolades unless something is absolutely stellar. As such, this post will primarily be about the shortcomings of the book” I wasn’t particularly surprised that there was more of a focus on negatives rather than positives.
Bearing in mind that I’m not the author, but I did see the process of writing the book, and helped put Mark and php|a together in the first place, I’ll address a few of the issues that Brandon brings up.
First to market
This became a bigger issue than I thought it would be. Varien promised last year that they’d have a 1.0 release in the first quarter of 2008. Look when Magento 1.0 was released - March 31, 2008. It doesn’t get any more ‘down to the wire’ than this. From what I see, they shipped to hit a release date, and (for what it’s worth) QA seemed to take a back seat.
What does this have to do with the book? php|a had committed to a certain ship date, which created a certain due date for Mark. About 2 weeks before the final Magento release, there was a very large codebase change, which affected large parts of what Mark had written. Having to go back and check/recheck the code, rewrite sections that were now technically ‘wrong’, and rewrite explanations about how some of the internals were working all took time which may have been better spent in other areas. This is not to throw the whole thing on php|a, or to point the finger at any one person, it’s simply what happened.
Missing info
This was sort of a design decision, compounded by the time decision. There was an effort to avoid rehashing a lot of what’s already been written in the online Magento guide. This may have been taken too far, in that Brandon felt there were things missing from explanations. There was likely an assumption that the reader would be reading the book in conjunction with having gone through online material as well.
Complexity
“However, the construction of a completely custom module seems so complex that Kismal either does not include all the finer nuances or simply cannot coherently describe its creation—a sign that does not particularly bode well.“ Doesn’t bode well for which party? The book, or Magento itself? I can tell you my own non-author impressions that Magento is likely far more complex than it needed to be for a 1.0 release. The phrase “bit off more than they could chew” springs to mind. I also understand that some of the complexity comes from rewrapping much of the ZendFramework with Magento’s code.
I fear I’m going to start to ramble, and I’m certainly not a Magento expert so I’ll leave some of the more specific issues to other people.
It may be hard to take what I say without a few grains of salt - Mark is my brother and we’ve worked together for a number of years. Those two points alone probably disqualify me from any claim of ‘objectivity’ (I’m not try to say I’m 100% objective either). There were certainly issues that, given more time, I know Mark would have wanted to delve in to. Also, given the fairly rapid changes that were happening in Magento, the curse of technical books in general - being out of date before the book is published - is something I know Mark was aware of, and I think tried to deal with as best as possible.
Having said all that, it was still good to find this first book review. I’m looking forward to reading more, and eventually reading some of my own book, the PHP Job Hunter’s Handbook.
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June 8, 2008
I just stumbled on this article Sunday morning. This snippet sums up the product:
There is a way of marrying the advantages of .NET development with Java deployment. Using Mainsoft for Enterprise Edition (EE), Visual Studio developers can write code in .NET and cross-compile it to Java. Not only code, but pieces of the Framework; Mainsoft has worked with Miguel de Icaza and Novell to port pieces of the Mono project to Java. Your limits in calling Framework classes, especially for Web apps, are almost nonexistent.
Sounds very intriguing. But, is it just a solution in search of a problem? Would many .Net shops embrace a Java app server for deployment? Is this too niche of a product to take off beyond a few edge cases? Or is this sort of thing the future?
What would, I think, be more useful for many shops is to take Java code and compile it in to something that targetted the .Net CLR. Are there any projects that do this/
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June 7, 2008
I relaunched the PHP Job Hunter Handbook blog. After a job move last summer, and the book getting shifted from self-publish to external publisher, I unfortunately let the blog grow stale. I’ve relaunched it today with an explanation about what happened, and some more detail about the progress of the book over the last year.
Also, I just did a soft launch of webdevjobs.com, the web development jobs board. I’ve had this up for a few weeks living off of the webdevradio.com at http://jobs.webdevradio.com. I decided to give it its own domain name and have redirected all the old traffic to webdevjobs.com.
Here are some ways you can help promote the WebDevJobs project:
Thanks!
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June 6, 2008
ReadWriteWeb had a thought-provoking article up today about what the future IT worker would look like. More specifically, what sorts of skills this person would need to have to be successful. Not surprisingly, the recommendation was, in a nutshell, the ability to communicate with other members of the business on their terms. I don’t think I’m dumbing the article down - that’s the gist I took away from it. And it’s not a wrong prediction, it’s just one that’s continually being made, and I don’t really see the situation changing dramatically.
I should start off by saying that I’m never considered myself the type of software developer that was mentioned in the article: “You know the type - the stereotypical introvert, who’s more comfortable behind the glow of computer screen than interacting with the rest of the human race. The one who likes to speak in acronyms that only he or she understands. The ones who know how to do everything from a command prompt. These folks will be a dying breed…at least around the office.” I’ve had more than a few people comment over the years that they didn’t think I was a programmer. I’ve typically not dressed like the ‘typical’ developer, or had many of the same interests as the stereotypical developer (Simpsons yes, Futurama no, gaming no, etc.). I’ve always wanted - nay, needed - to know what’s going on in other parts of the business to try to get a full picture.
Trouble is, that’s never worked out very well. One may argue that the way I went about it was never the ‘right’ way, but at the same time, I’ve been at places that paid lip service to ‘teams’ but still had the ’silo’ mentality regarding information. To be fair, I think widespread use of intranets may make that type of mentality less useful or even accepted in more companies, but even most intranets I’ve seen are very locked down - users in group X can *only* see group X documents, and can’t see what group Y sees, for example. There’s a certain attraction to that way of operating, I can see, but it continues the ‘us vs them’ inside many companies.
The example in the article about knowing “blogs, wikis and rss” is useful, in that it makes another point without perhaps meaning to. Currently knowing those terms and understanding how to implement them puts one at an advantage when being able to address company needs with technology. A few years ago, these concepts were black arts, but today they’re commoditized to the point where people can understand and implement them on their own. You don’t need to be the real hardcore software guy to put together those sorts of solutions, and less technical guys can get by with dealing with business needs on that level.
What’s not commoditized yet? A next wave of business needs is only now starting to get addresssed are business intelligence stuff (reporting engines, OLAP stuff, etc.). These sorts of technologies can still require full time geeks - not the sort of people that necessarily attend every business meeting, but more the sort described above: more comfortable behind their monitors. Successful businesses still need those people onsite. In a few years when we have ‘OLAP in a box’ and you get these sorts of apps for free in web developer magazines (like we do now with blog engines), we’ll be on to other more ‘cutting edge’ technologies which will still require some of the geeks to be around.
Certainly there’ll be a continued, if shrinking, need for hardcore geeks who work odd hours, have bad hair and sing Monty Python songs at random intervals throughout a work day. I’d grant that much with respect to the point the RWW article was trying to make. I just don’t think we’ll see a day when those types of people simply don’t exist at all in many companies.
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