tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-179588272011-12-27T00:02:01.498+08:00Observations on the craft and art of software development. Moving the world with a virtual toothpick.Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.comBlogger1181100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-83089662815114355642011-12-27T00:02:00.000+08:002011-12-27T00:02:01.530+08:00

Here's a scary/stupid trick to pull if you, like me, are a finalist for Biggest Email Pack Rat On The Internet. Open Apple Mail's Preferences, select the "General" tab, and change Dock unread count from Inbox Only to All Mailboxes. I double-dare you. Or, it might just be too depressing. I went from a mere(!) 355 unread messages to… 56,232 Let's see, at an average of just under 2 minutes each (

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-71198646857184110092011-12-21T01:17:00.000+08:002011-12-21T01:17:03.651+08:00

As people who know me professionally and/or read my blog know well, I have been a (raucously) loud evangelist for test-first development (TDD, BDD, Scrum, whatever your flavour) for years now. If I write even an exploratory bit of code and don't have tests in place first, I get very uncomfortable. As complexity increases, without tests (preferably automated, repeatable tests), I argue that I

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-72235527421578385432011-12-20T17:32:00.000+08:002011-12-20T17:32:13.333+08:00

Like many of you, I expect, I take a good look around at tools like editors when my needs change dramatically. A new system, or a language or app type I haven't worked with in a while, and I'll go out and see what the community is using (or at least buzzing about), narrow that down to a list of 2 or 3 to try, and start trying them out. Usually, I'll try one for a few days and then switch to the

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-33853396975193451502011-12-05T22:56:00.001+08:002011-12-05T23:45:43.983+08:00

Hey, Apple… I like what works, and what helps me work better/faster/more enjoyably; the more of these boxes that get ticked, the better. After all, that's why I'm sitting in front of two iMacs with a MacBook Pro and iPad close to hand.However… The new iMacs are a wonder. A 27" display, 2560 x 1440 resolution; absolutely gorgeous. I can have two full-page views plus a Terminal open on the same

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-86210240105869177822011-11-24T17:00:00.000+08:002011-11-24T18:46:57.151+08:00

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, for it represents the fusion of State and corporate power.— B. MussoliniIf you've lived in the USSR, former Soviet republics, or much of south Asia (including Singapore), you're quite familiar with the concept of "exclusive distributors", which the Free World seems to have thrown on the ash-heap of history at roughly the same time as leaded

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-44843374350738401562011-11-24T00:56:00.001+08:002011-11-24T02:44:33.469+08:00

This started out as a reply to a comment on the LinkedPHPers group on LinkedIn; once I started writing, of course, it quickly grew beyond what was appropriate as a conversationally-inline comment. So I brought it over here. It's something I've been thinking about for a couple of weeks now, so let me get this anvil off my chest. To R Matthew Songer1: I'd advise adding Ruby on Rails to that list

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-48574812500300724772011-11-10T10:37:00.000+08:002011-11-10T11:58:41.538+08:00

As any developer who values his time, sanity, or amicable relations with teammates who have to maintain his code knows, one of the cardinal rules of modern programming is "Don't Repeat Yourself", or DRY. This is obviously something that should make reading code easier. Obviously, therefore, it should be applied except where the lengths you go to to not repeat yourself make your code harder for

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-31381787229064885802011-11-08T10:07:00.001+08:002011-11-08T10:14:15.326+08:00

Code is meant to be read, understood, maintained and reused by humans, and incidentally to be executed by a computer. Doing the second correctly is far, far less difficult than doing the first well. Innovation is utterly meaningless without effective communication, and that is at least as true within a team as between it and a larger organisation, or between a company and its (current and

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-25771797389996604802011-10-30T14:06:00.001+08:002011-10-30T14:06:34.812+08:00

…or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Serving Aboard Kobayashi Maru; a history lesson. Once again, I've had an interesting couple of months. Between modern Singapore's regular effect on my health, some insane work and the opportunity to get even more insane work if my two best references weren't indefinitely unavailable (but hey, Thailand is usually lovely this time of year…or anytime,

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-28283777516830453122011-10-03T19:15:00.000+08:002011-10-03T19:15:12.591+08:00

By the way, count me among those who find the new Blogger in Draft interface to be a huge improvement over the old interface. The composing interface is clean and functional, with few distractions to typing away. It has the bonus of peripheral features and actions being visible at the periphery, ready when you need them but not with a busy interface distracting you away from the cursor. Previews

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-9056728744930630602011-09-03T19:55:00.000+08:002011-09-03T19:55:25.922+08:00

(Yes, Westworld had a view of modern software that's not so far off the mark, considering it was made in 1973.)I use Macs for development, using both the native Unix OS and one or more VMWare Fusion VMs of Linux, BSD Unix or Windows, depending on the need. Even when I'm going to be deploying on a Linux or Unix server, I prefer to do my basic work using OS X native tools1.Usually, all that rather

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-10212643619803407482011-08-18T13:13:00.000+08:002011-08-18T13:13:31.857+08:00

Starting a new project for a new client, coming up to speed on a bit of kit almost like something I poked around with a ways back, and a ferociously Singaporean flu do not make for a productive week. I'm almost back to where I expected to be by noon on Monday. Since it's noon on Thursday…What I'm trying to learn and leverage is Chef, an automated-configuration tool for computer systems (mostly

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-26350839174439432672011-07-20T23:22:00.001+08:002011-07-20T23:22:28.470+08:00

My Apple Magic Trackpad died tonight, aged less than six months, after a week-long illness. Numerous battery transplants, resets and reboots were unable to revive the patient. In lieu of flowers, donations to its replacement are now being gratefully accepted.Whiskey. Tango. Fox?Hardware — any hardware, but especially Apple kit — isn't supposed to die after mere months of daily use. I expect

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0386 Tampines Street 32, Singapore1.3549471438759266 103.959116935729981.3544511438759266 103.95849993572998 1.3554431438759267 103.95973393572999tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-22447085569991620982011-04-25T02:33:00.000+08:002011-04-25T02:33:40.058+08:00

Apple's "post-PC," "new media" iDevices are selling quite nicely, thank you. Millions of people have become enthusiastic, loyal, even evangelistic customers without ever clicking a mouse on an Apple desktop or laptop computer. Given that Apple's profit from a laptop or desktop computer is several times what it is for an iDevice, it's almost imperative for them to find ways to make the Mac desktop

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-49543819865872988592011-04-14T15:43:00.001+08:002011-04-14T15:48:14.223+08:00

I've recently started as Senior Architect at Savant Degrees, a Singapore-based Web consultancy. Quite often, I feel like my job is as much "Senior Curmudgeon" as anything. According to Wiktionary.org, a curmudgeon is "[a]n ill-tempered (and frequently old) person full of stubborn ideas or opinions." I'm undoubtedly the oldest person among any of my colleagues that I've met, and I was told fairly

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-47272353266777823092011-01-04T12:40:00.001+08:002011-02-18T18:58:55.972+08:00

Several cultures share variations of a proverb which reminds us that you cannot build a house on sand and have it endure the test of time — or even the next tide.Skype learned that the hard way a couple of weeks ago. Like all peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks, Skype relies on (a varying subset of) its users' systems to handle routine network-housekeeping chores, including routing. Fine; that's the

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-36812560223302686692010-12-21T19:11:00.000+08:002010-12-21T19:11:51.817+08:00

And I understand that's the whole point. But sometimes, you're dealing with a concept or with data that is most naturally and properly organised in a structured hierarchy. While keywords1 are a very convenient tool for filtering ad hoc queries2, they're a poor stand-in for truly structured information.One (possibly trivial) case in point: managing your browser bookmarks. What I want to be able

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-3053923952196978482010-10-20T22:10:00.000+08:002010-10-20T22:10:50.406+08:00

For those of you a bit limited in your English knowledge, lucid means "easily understood; completely intelligible or comprehensible." My experience bringing up some Web servers on the latest release of Ubuntu Linux, release 10.10 aka "Maverick Meerkat" (replacing 10.04, "Lucid Lynx") left me feeling scalped by Apache (the Web server software). It's (usually) quite straightforward to bring up a

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-87271589398956372282010-10-05T17:10:00.000+08:002010-10-05T17:10:33.492+08:00

But you already know that.I've long been a supporter of free and open source software, even contributing to a few projects. However, my enthusiasm has cooled a bit in the last several years, as the time I've been able to devote to such projects has both dwindled and been divided among more projects.I'm continually flabbergasted by the number of open-source projects that cover the same ground, ad

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-3018697305978679912010-09-28T23:53:00.000+08:002010-09-28T23:53:38.313+08:00

This is a re-post of a comment I left to the post "HTML5 Support in Internet Explorer 9 on Louis Lazaris' Impressive Webs blog (which I highly recommend for people working in or interested in Web development). I've slightly edited a few places for clarity. The comments that had been left by people were almost universally complaining about Microsoft in general and IE's continuing history of

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-24624237446140279802010-09-28T14:27:00.000+08:002010-09-28T14:27:02.305+08:00

What follows is a critique and a complaint, not a rant. What's the difference, you ask? A rant, in my view, is a primal scream of frustration and near-impotent rage that often doesn't let a few (allegedly) non-essential facts get in the way of a good thrashing. It also takes far more energy than I'm able to summon at present, for reasons that may become clear below. As I've mentioned previously,

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-5915079169347750032010-09-14T16:13:00.004+08:002010-09-14T17:22:33.174+08:00

As both my regular readers well know, I've been using a couple of Macs1 as my main systems for some time now. As many (if not most, these days) Web developers do, I run different systems (Windows and a raft of Linuxes) using VMWare Fusion so that I can do various testing activities.Many Linux distributions come with some form of automation support for installation and updates2. Several of these

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-41173849658617106092010-09-02T23:36:00.000+08:002010-09-02T23:36:19.839+08:00

Well, that's a few hours I'd like to have over again. As both my regular readers know, I've long been a proponent of agile software development, particularly with respect to my current focus on Web development using PHP. One tool that I, and frankly any PHP developer worth their salt, use is PHPUnit for unit testing, a central practice in what's called test-driven development or TDD. Essentially,

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-84608395649003752902010-08-31T12:09:00.002+08:002010-08-31T13:23:30.076+08:00

This is the content of a comment I originally posted on ZDNet, in the Talkback section for the article New iPod Nano rumored to shrink further, by Jason D. O'Grady. Cupertino, CA (1 April 2012) (UPI) Apple Inc (s AAPL) today introduced the new iPod Implant, which is to replace both the existing Nano and Shuffle models. At the launch event at the now-traditional Yerba Buena Center, retiring

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-91898801217460016192010-08-17T23:15:00.000+08:002010-08-17T23:15:12.767+08:00

One of the best points about doing Web development in PHP is that it's so widely used; several respectable estimates by organizations that get paid to find these things out say that some varying number north of 50% of all sites on the World Wide Web use PHP as their implementation language. This includes numerous content management systems, or CMS, such as WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. One of

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0386 Tampines Street 32, Singapore1.3543507 103.95802811.3489877 103.95073260000001 1.3597137 103.9653236tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-10224318634805396002010-08-16T10:24:00.000+08:002010-08-16T10:24:00.727+08:00

Fair warning: Geekish laudatory rant ahead. Still with me? Good! I suppose it says something less than complimentary about our Craft that, when things actually work in a sensible fashion, recovering from Stupid User Actions™, it's surprising enough to be noteworthy. But I seriously doubt that I'm the only one who's noticed this. Case in point: yesterday, I started downloading the Debian Linux

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-24006381671267257822010-08-15T00:21:00.000+08:002010-08-15T00:21:08.541+08:00

Unless you've been working in an organization whose mission is to supply C++ language tools (and perhaps particularly if you have, come to think of it), you can't help but have noticed that a lot of people who value productive use of time over esoteric language theory have come to the conclusion that the C++ language is hopelessly broken. Sure, you can do anything in C++... or at least in C++ as

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-8794315889859940592010-07-28T22:47:00.001+08:002010-07-28T22:47:58.837+08:00

This is a bit of an introductory-level post/rant/tutorial, but I've been peppered by enough "why on earth would you do this?" questions by various (seemingly experienced) project team members and on various mailing lists that I thought I'd just write my own take on this and point people to it when useful. I'm pulling my (semihemidemiexistent) hair out on four different PHP projects at the

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-15471477428706458692010-07-07T23:49:00.000+08:002010-07-07T23:49:20.830+08:00

I want my hour back. No, seriously; that's what happens when you don't touch a tool for a while, but you spend a lot of time with its "kissin' cousin." Phing, if you're new-ish to serious PHP development, is your ultimate Swiss Army Ginsu Chainsaw™. It's a "build tool" that lets you automate pretty near anything, especially having to do with PHP. There are several dozen "tasks", like the

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-14092356184778202412010-06-30T10:27:00.002+08:002010-06-30T10:35:37.355+08:00

Rant mode: on. Some effort will be made to keep ear-steam to a minimum. Internet Relay Chat (better known as IRC), specifically Undernet, was one of the very first things I discovered on the (then-)text-mode-only Internet, Over the next 20 years or so, I've gone through varying levels of activity (including writing an IRC client for OS/2, the operating system that brought technology to a

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-19609644937294698472010-06-18T00:32:00.001+08:002010-06-18T00:34:52.847+08:00

...than hand coding. Either the PHP folks never got that memo, or I'm seriously misconceptualising here.Case in point: I was reading through Somebody Else's Code™, and I saw a sequence of "hand-coded" assignments of an empty string to several array entries, similar to: $items[ 'key2' ] = ''; $items[ 'key1' ] = ''; $items[ 'key6' ] = ''; $items[ 'key3' ] = ''; $items[ 'key8' ]

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-37566773676345931302010-06-01T12:06:00.000+08:002010-06-01T12:06:35.274+08:00

Just a quick note pointing out, once again, that when many of us foresaw gloom and doom from the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems....we were being hippie-pie-in-the-sky optimists. Item: A couple of days ago, I tried to log into my Sun Developer Network account, so I could grab the latest "official" Java toolset for a Linux VM I was building. I couldn't log in; neither the password that

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-73378175546088787762010-05-26T00:40:00.001+08:002010-05-26T00:41:41.069+08:00

...or, the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" monks' guide to making your Mac desktop work like a server, instead of going and getting a copy of OS X Server like you should... Mac OS X Server brings OS X simplicity and Unix power to a range of hardware systems. Most of the things that Server makes trivially simple can be done in OS X Desktop. Some of them, however, require the patience of Job

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-15740393574851953942010-05-17T01:32:00.000+08:002010-05-17T01:32:14.679+08:00

No, I'm not talking about Facebook and the idea that people should have some control over how their own information makes money for people they never imagined. That's another post. This is a shout out to the software folk out there, and the wannabe software folk, who wonder why nobody outside their own self-selecting circles seems to get excited about software anymore. Back in the early days of

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-64126602727939602512010-05-08T23:11:00.000+08:002010-05-08T23:11:10.135+08:00

The following is the text of a comment I attempted to post to an excellent post on visitmix.com discussing The Evils of URL Shorteners. I think Hans had some great points, and the comments afterward seem generally thoughtful. This is a topic which I happen to think is extremely important, for both historical and Internet-governance reasons, and hope to see a real discussion and resolution

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-83094088673147073452010-05-08T17:45:00.000+08:002010-05-08T17:45:55.383+08:00

...they're even likely to turn out to be good ones. As you may recall, I've been using and recommending the Kohana PHP application framework for some time. Kohana now offer two versions of their framework: the 2.x series is an MVC framework, with the upcoming 2.4 release to be the last in that series; and the 3.0 series, which is an HMVC framework. Until quite recently, the difference

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-14519564871848530892010-04-27T08:54:00.000+08:002010-04-27T08:54:28.796+08:00

For those who may somehow not be aware of it, LinkedIn is a (generally quite good) professionally-oriented social-networking site. This is not Facebook, fortunately. It's not geared towards teenagers raving about the latest corporate boy band du jour. It often can be, however, a great place to network with people from a variety of vocational, industry and/or functional backgrounds to get in

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-21961745931323370202010-04-16T23:58:00.002+08:002010-04-18T01:29:12.345+08:00

This started out as a conversation on Twitter with @cdegger, @ehrenfoss, @p2173 and other folks following the #opendata, #socent or #10swf hash tags. Twitter is (in)famous for being limited to 140 characters per “tweet”; with the extra hash tags and all, that's reduced to 96. I wrote a reply and used a text editor to break it into "tweets"; by the time I got to “(part 8/nn),” I knew it was crazy

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-57711836926004469542010-04-14T17:45:00.000+08:002010-04-14T17:45:17.991+08:00

...you can protect yourself and your team. Even if we're talking about topics that everybody's rehashed since the Pleistocene (or at least since the UNIVAC I).Traditional, command-and-control, bureaucratic/structured/waterfall development process managed to get (quite?) a few things right (especially given the circumstances). One of these was code review.Done right, a formal code review process

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-47595611920356518242010-03-07T23:50:00.000+08:002010-03-07T23:50:45.371+08:00

Just because something's the best you've ever seen at doing what it does, does not mean that it's perfect – or even necessarily consistently good. Sometimes the issue you run into is so bad, you wonder how the offender managed to live as long and be as widely respected as it has. As you probably know, every serious software developer, working on a project that has an intended lifetime measured

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-27055723337012245352010-02-27T15:00:00.000+08:002010-02-27T15:00:25.486+08:00

Nowadays, there's simply no excuse for any computer connected to the Internet, regardless of operating system, not to have both a hardware firewall (usually implemented in your router/broadband "modem") and a software firewall, monitoring both incoming and outgoing traffic. The software firewall I've been recommending to those "unable"/unwilling to leave the hypersonic train wreck that is

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-33388242507756664542010-02-23T09:57:00.001+08:002010-02-23T13:49:59.336+08:00

People who I've worked with, or worked for, or read my writing here and elsewhere, have probably figured out that I'm a huge fan of standards just about everywhere they make sense: data formats, user interfaces, and so on. After all, why should we have to relearn how to drive a car simply because we buy a new Ford in place of a Toyota that the Government doesn't want us driving anymore? (You see

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-21618750869567573062010-02-20T15:27:00.001+08:002010-02-20T15:27:50.293+08:00

Following is a comment which I posted to Jason Kincaid's article on TechCrunch, "Why Apple's New Ban Against Sexy Apps is Scary". I don't know why Apple seem to be deliberately shooting themselves in so many ways on the iPhone recently; I am sure that they are leaving golden opportunities for Palm, Android and anybody else who isn't Apple or Microsoft. Even if you're not developing for the iPhone

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-85775903309435908192010-02-10T17:56:00.002+08:002010-02-10T17:58:36.404+08:00

I want to say "thank you" to the anonymous commenter to my post, XHTML is (Nearly) Useless, who said "Paragraphs would be useful." Google's Blogger software, by default, separates paragraphs by an "HTML break tag" (br); this preserves the visible separation as intended, but destroys the structural, semantic flow. I recently discovered this, found the feature to turn it off ("don't put "break"

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-41725915650576516172010-02-10T17:19:00.001+08:002010-02-10T17:29:59.274+08:00

One thing most good developers learn early on is not to "reinvent" basic technology for each new project they work on, The common, often corporate, antithesis to this is NIH, or "Not Invented Here." But sometimes, it's hard to decide which "giants" one wants to "stand on the shoulders of." I've recently done a couple of mid-sized Web projects using PHP and the Kohana framework. A framework, as

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-50782592556721423142010-02-02T02:05:00.001+08:002010-02-10T18:00:57.348+08:00

Silly me. I've only been using, evangelizing and otherwise involved in open source software for 15 or 20 years, so what do I know? In reaction to the latest feature article in DistroWatch Weekly, I'm angry. I'm sad. Most of all, I feel sorry for those losers who would rather keep their pristine little world free of outside involvement, especially when that involvement is with the express intent

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-57875049039243004002010-02-02T00:34:00.000+08:002010-02-02T00:34:50.211+08:00

(which I remember from a Monty Python sketch but can't find attribution. Oh well; please feel free to comment and enlighten me.) About a week ago, I switched my domain hosting for my Web/mail domain, seven-sigma.com, from Simplehost Limited of New Zealand to WebFaction, based in the UK. Now, Simplehost are a good bunch of guys; their customer service is very responsive and you get knowledgeable,

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-87484954614469622352010-01-30T01:10:00.004+08:002010-11-02T23:12:39.299+08:00

What do I think about the new iPad? Glad you asked. What's that? You didn't, really – or not many of you did. But that's OK, really; at least two other writers argue that we're going from an era of "nearly universal literacy" to "nearly universal authorship", so here's my two rupiah worth. John Gruber, the blogger behind Daring Fireball, is a justly respected voice on a variety of topics,

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-12930298295596819552010-01-28T13:51:00.002+08:002010-11-02T23:14:23.660+08:00

Apple chose the only name that ever made sense for their new change-the-world device: the iPad. So what's not to like about it? Well, that depends on who you are and what you really wanted this to be. No surprise there. My biggest problem with it was summed up well by James Kendrick in his post, Thoughts on the iPad — Just Push the Buy Button, says Apple: it really is primarily about media

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-12212456541374268562010-01-19T16:24:00.001+08:002010-01-19T16:25:08.721+08:00

The leads in the classic 1973 movie, "The Sting", of course. Both leads were male, playing roles that were prototypically male in our social order. Why is that? Clay Shirkey has some ideas about that, which he wrote up as "A Rant About Women". Not "A Rant Against Women", mind you. Some did not see that as a difference that makes a difference, notably Zo at this post on her (misnamed)

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-57556124342071258442010-01-17T00:54:00.005+08:002010-01-17T14:05:59.855+08:00

Well, that's a couple of hours I'd really like to have back.One of the oldest, simplest, most generally effective debugging tools is some form of logging. Writing output to a file, to a database, or to the console gives the developer a window into the workings of code, as it's being executed.The long-time "gold standard" for such tools has been the Apache Foundation's log4j package, which

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-63232072584193026402010-01-15T19:36:00.002+08:002010-01-15T19:43:04.179+08:00

(As posted in a comment on a very detailed Ars Technica review: After giving PD5 and Fusion 3 full evaluations, I'm going back to Fusion for another cycle. A lot of what I do is testing software in odd developer builds of various BSDs, Linuxes and OpenSolaris; Fusion gives me the least trouble when venturing away from the Microsoft megalith. I have XP and Win7 VMs too; I just don't fire up either

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-36508511194009065572010-01-05T14:49:00.001+08:002010-02-10T18:10:59.380+08:00

This is a follow-up to a tweet I left yesterday, where I was praising a great little app called ABMenu. This little guy just sits in the system menu bar and gives you easy, two-click access to any entry in your Address Book. I'd installed it earlier on my main iMac. This morning, I noticed that it wasn't installed on the new, two-week-old MacBook Pro, and fixed that. Then of course I noticed

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-53912713931316334032010-01-04T01:21:00.001+08:002010-02-10T18:09:34.922+08:00

This is the content of a comment which I posted to a TechCrunch article on The World Doesn't Need Someone Telling Us What We Don't Need In Tech. For what it's worth, I hope the iSlate/iPad/iTablet/iWhatever is real this time; if we have another Charlie Brown, Lucy and the Football moment, I think the market will see this as one of Apple's rare blown opportunities - to the tune of maybe $50 off

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-72568819773097925342010-01-03T20:58:00.004+08:002010-02-10T18:14:10.943+08:00

If anybody has had doubts about the decline and fall of the English language over the past two or three decades, current media (print and online) should clear that up very nicely. If I see another reviewer who starts off with "I've had the (Product X) for a week and I am loving it," it will be very difficult to restrain myself from throwing a brick through the display. There's this widespread

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-52879151014195361962009-12-22T12:05:00.004+08:002010-01-21T22:33:21.009+08:00

Another in a continuing series... Microcomputer(as PCs were called before the IBM PC) veterans of a certain vintage well remember that most counterintuitively productive of productivity tools, WordStar 3.3 (and earlier). The hegemon of its day, WordStar used what at first (and usually fifth) inspection appeared to be whimsical, arbitrary key combinations for commands. Ctrl K-H for Help was

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-48877866882459004822009-12-21T20:12:00.001+08:002010-02-10T18:26:44.704+08:00

I've been doing a lot of software installation lately, on Mac OS X and various BSDs and Linuxes. Doing so reminds me of one of the major banes of my life when developing for Windows. If you're a Windows usee, you're acutely familiar with the concept. DLL Hell.On Windows, as you install a dozen apps, each of them will try to install their own versions of many

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-13108958292099758842009-11-23T00:09:00.002+08:002010-02-10T18:44:38.865+08:00

Everything gets recycled these days, including acronyms... Whether you're developing Web pages in your language of choice, writing a new game to take on the world, or (insert your project here), at some point, you're going to deal with structured data. You're quite likely, at some point, to deal with fairly complex, nested structured data - for configuration, to

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-6434931393196193882009-11-18T21:16:00.007+08:002010-02-10T18:56:18.776+08:00

Alternate title: ARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!! Both of you Gentle Readers may have noticed that I've been away from the blog for a while, and that a few posts that were previously published have gone missing. I've been busy fighting some other fires for a while, and my current network access has lacked the stability and efficiency that local propaganda would have you expect.

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-61853335397797131302009-11-18T21:11:00.004+08:002010-02-10T19:03:32.911+08:00

Not as catchy as the Beatles' Revolution, even if the meter works.... oh well.... Continuing from the first post in this tutorial. What do I think is important when starting to demonstrate some code? As with most writing, it depends on the audience. For the purpose of this series of posts, I'm assuming that you fit comfortably in or near the following:

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-64642973047409865822009-10-20T22:00:00.004+08:002010-02-10T20:53:52.209+08:00

I just spent three hours beating my head against The Joys of Wi-Fi Networking. No doubt because it saved $50 or so, the HDB public-housing flat I live in here in Singapore (which are "affectionately" known as 'chicken coops' for their quality and structural integrity) didn't put telephone jacks in every room. Nor did they run conduit between rooms so that suchlike could be added later. The upshot

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-51871977448404768312009-08-18T15:39:00.001+08:002010-11-02T23:22:52.410+08:00

This post is what would have been a response to a post on Elizabeth Naramore's blog, which she titled Gender in IT, OSS and PHP, and How it Affects Us *All*. Quite a good post, actually, with a long and often thoughtful (but as often thoughtless) comment thread following. I was hoping to respond to a comment on the post, but that apparently is no longer allowed, even though the "Leave a Reply"

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-5409609090534578232009-08-17T22:50:00.001+08:002010-11-02T23:26:38.722+08:00

We interrupt this tutorial to interject an observation about goals, methods and promises. Goals we have for ourselves as people and as professionals; the method we use to pursue those dreams; perhaps most importantly, the promises we make, both to ourselves and to our customers, about what we're doing and why. I consider this after reading the Website for some consultants who've done some (

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-51685480808375280452009-08-11T10:53:00.007+08:002010-11-02T23:29:24.585+08:00

A gent by the name of Brian Carey has written a very nice little tutorial on "Creating an Atom feed in PHP", and gotten it published on the IBM DeveloperWorks site. In the space of about ten pages, Brian gives a stratospheric overview of what Atom is and why PHP is a good language for developing Atom-aware apps, and then gets into the tutorial - defining a MySQL database table to hold the data

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-13674252603005442682009-08-06T16:29:00.001+08:002010-11-02T23:33:30.678+08:00

As people who've encountered the "business end" of Linux have known for some time, the system (in whichever distribution you prefer, greatly rewards (some would say 'requires') tinkering and customisation. This can be done with any Linux system, really; some distros, like LinuxFromScratch and, to a lesser degree, Gentoo and its derivatives, explicitly assume that you will be customizing their

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-27901931186488952282009-08-04T21:20:00.001+08:002010-11-02T23:40:21.381+08:00

I was clicking through my various feeds hooked into NetNewsWire, in this case The Apple Core column on ZDNet, when I came across this item, where the writer nicely summed up the perfectly understandable strategy Microsoft have always chosen and compared that with Apple and the Mac. Go read the original article (on Better Living without MS Office and then read the comment. As I've commented on

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-47138710678552965172009-07-31T11:24:00.013+08:002010-11-02T23:45:15.694+08:00

It's been known in the Web-development community for several years now that well-designed, semantic, standards-compliant Websites use dramatically less resources (such as bandwidth) than 1997-era tangles of nested tables and invalid HTML. But it's still refreshing to read confirmation that that truth is pretty universally applicable - especially when that reading doesn't depend on what we now

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-45328573980730742332009-07-20T12:54:00.007+08:002010-11-02T23:53:40.422+08:00

UPDATED 2 November 2010; see last paragraph. This blog, fairly obviously, is published on blogger.com, which is now owned by Google. Blogger.com is geared primarily towards people who want to write but don't want to have to worry about the nitty-gritty technical details involved (such as HTML, CSS and so on). Sign up, click the 'New Post' button, and off you go...almost easier than falling out

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-44367385663975846672009-07-19T19:40:00.010+08:002010-11-03T00:02:17.224+08:00

Doing a job search using various Websites became really popular about ten years ago as an easy way for candidates and companies to find each other without any (visibly obvious) middlemen directly involved. I understand that in some geographic and employment areas, it's still a useful tool. I've had myself registered on fewer than half a dozen for several years, even though my last 6 jobs were all

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-21996639340428638582009-07-14T09:42:00.006+08:002010-11-03T00:05:19.537+08:00

Anybody who's worked with me in about the last 25 years knows that I've been preaching the idea that software craftfolk should never stop learning. Further, I've always believed that learning new languages or tools is one of the easiest ways to accomplish this, keeping the mind supple and open to new ways of doing things. And by and large, I've kept this up, learning enough of a new or

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-29657748359011406992009-07-10T11:17:00.008+08:002010-11-03T00:19:46.110+08:00

One of the, shall we say, unusual things about being in this line of work is that you develop stronger-than-is-healthy bonds to particular bits and pieces of technology, both hardware and software. For example, I think that anybody who's worked on a Mac as their main system for a year or so would take a catastrophic productivity hit if they were required to work in a Windows-only environment.

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-69406390930897179012009-07-08T23:00:00.006+08:002010-11-03T00:27:41.718+08:00

One of the nice things about growing up around (almost exclusively) men who were master mechanics, carpenters or other such highly skilled tradesmen was that I developed an appreciation both for "the best tool for the job at hand" and "making do with what's available" — and whichever of these applied, accomplishing the task at hand to the best of anyone's ability. As I've progressed through my

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-86007890463341614132009-06-30T09:49:00.006+08:002010-11-03T00:30:51.485+08:00

Since upgrading to Safari 4 (why haven't you yet?), I ran into a problem with the single add-in that I've bothered keeping in Safari — Pith Helmet. If you're familiar with AdBlock Plus on Firefix, you've got the basic idea; an add-in to your browser(s) of choice that lets you block advertising, annoying Flash, or pretty much anything else you can identify by file name (e.g., "*.swf*) or by URL (

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-55585144774152838352009-06-27T16:43:00.007+08:002010-11-03T00:32:30.464+08:00

I've been doing some PHP development lately that involves a lot of SPL, or Standard PHP Library exceptions. I do test-driven development for all the usual reasons, and so make heavy use of the PHPUnit framework. One great idea that the developer of PHPUnit had was to add a test-case method called setExpectedException(), which should eliminate the need for you (the person writing the test code) to

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-41619697071717554972009-05-27T22:40:00.006+08:002010-11-03T00:34:31.335+08:00

One of the major influences on the middle third of my career thus far was Bertrand Meyer's Eiffel programming language and its concept of design by contract. With such tools, for the first time (at least as far as I was aware), entire classes of software defects could be reliably detected at run time (dynamic checking) and/or at compile time (static checking). I worked on a couple of significant

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-38105097118350990812009-05-14T11:10:00.009+08:002010-11-03T00:41:18.055+08:00

Just when you thought it was safe to forget that the 1970s ever existed... this gem shows up on the XML Daily Newslink, a mailing list I follow intermittently. (Actually, this was included in the XMLDN from Wed 11 Feb — an indication of how "closely" I've been following lately.) Developing a CICS-Based Web Service G. Subrahmanyam, G. Mokhasi, S. Kusumanchi; SOA World Magazine Web services have

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-63689135900320432622009-05-06T22:27:00.008+08:002010-11-03T00:43:29.059+08:00

Whereas a poor craftsman will blame his tools, poor tools will handicap even the most skilled craftsman. As I insinuated in my previous post, I'm getting up to speed on the Zend Framework, the "900-kg elephant" of PHP application frameworks. One major bone I have to pick with the ZF team is with regard to documentation: each time I've checked the site in the last couple of months, there's been

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-35707907520263811322009-04-16T23:40:00.006+08:002010-11-03T00:47:04.030+08:00

As some of you know, I'm working on a book on Web development, using off-the-shelf tools (frameworks, template engines, JavaScript libraries, etc.) to leverage semantic, standards-compliant, accessible, search-friendly Websites. (That's more a matter of adjusting your development philosophy and workflow than anything else, but I digress). As part of that, I'e been doing a (reasonably)

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-51459445785875959062009-02-24T22:13:00.006+08:002010-11-03T00:51:00.133+08:00

One of the things that a BSD Unix admin learns to rely on is the "ports" collection, a cornucopia of packages that can be installed and managed by the particular BSD system's built-in package manager: pkgsrc for NetBSD, pkg_add for FreeBSD, and so on. In nearly all BSD systems, the port/package manager is part of the basic system (akin to APT under Debian Linux). Mac OS X is BSD Unix "under the

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-15701608540368039242008-12-23T20:25:00.006+08:002010-11-03T00:56:22.486+08:00

As in, "bend over, here it comes again..." One of the things I have greatly appreciated about the Mac, especially with OS X, is how simple and straightforward software management is, compared to Linux and especially Windows (where every system change is a death-defying adventure against great odds). Operating system or Apple-supplied apps need an update? Software Update is as painless as it gets

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-54149331169436202982008-12-17T13:01:00.005+08:002010-11-03T01:00:32.120+08:00

Very much picking up from the mindset expressed in my earlier post... with the knowledge that this could (and probably should) be broken up into at least three different rants... I've been working heavily in Python for the past couple of months, regrettably letting some other projects slide a bit. Now done with that, I spent yesterday picking up where I'd left off in a moderately-sized,

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-76152643504293026552008-12-16T23:33:00.006+08:002010-11-03T01:01:52.668+08:00

If you're a Windows usee with a few years' experience, you've encountered the rare, monumental and monolithic Service Packs that Micorosoft release on an intermittent basis (as one writer put it, "once every blue moon that falls on a Patch Tuesday"). They're almost always rollups of a large number of security patches, with more added besides. Rarely, with the notable (and very welcome at the time

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-67188973213935683062008-12-03T18:09:00.007+08:002009-07-20T17:31:48.256+08:00

Sun have released NetBeans 6.5, which, among many other (potentially) useful and interesting features, claims to officially support Web development using PHP. This is, on the face of things, a major improvement from the situation under NB 6.1 and prior, which treated PHP essentially as other unsupported languages were treated: you could do raw text editing, but the features that are the entire

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-7363588354566450312008-10-12T17:57:00.006+08:002009-07-20T18:05:47.412+08:00

...or 'Blechhhh', as the case may be... I've been using PHP since the relative Pleistocene (I recently found a PHP3 script I wrote in '99). I've been using and evangelising test-driven development (TDD) for about the last five years, usually with most such work being done in C++, Java, Python or other traditionally non-Web languages (with PHP really only being amenable to that since PHP 5 in

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-88585971407210193312008-08-15T21:58:00.004+08:002009-07-20T18:03:10.371+08:00

A thought which ran through my mind as I was browsing some job requirements recently... Why are recruiters still hung up on "C/C++", years after even Microsoft got around to shipping a reasonably compliant compiler (depending on your prejudices and code needs, anywhere from Visual Studio 6 in 1998 to VS.NET 2003)? "C/C++" started life (or zombiehood) as a Microsoft marketing term back in the

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-76226776561504344552008-08-12T23:02:00.005+08:002009-07-20T18:20:26.541+08:00

In a continuing series... As current and former colleagues and clients are well aware, I have been using and evangelizing test-driven development in one flavor or another since at least 2001 (the earliest notes I can find where I write about "100% test coverage" of code). To use the current Agile terminology, I've been "test-infected". My main Web development language is PHP 5.2 (and anxiously

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-73928848212960898992008-07-23T22:58:00.008+08:002010-11-03T01:05:22.489+08:00

(as opposed to the Scottish proverb, "a difference that makes no difference, is no difference") This is a very long post. I'll likely come back and revisit it later, breaking it up into two or three smaller ones. But for now, please dip your oar in my stream of consciousness. I was hanging around on the Freenode IRC network earlier this evening, in some of my usual channels, and witnessed a

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-86568172072204783942008-07-22T21:46:00.005+08:002010-11-03T01:10:43.847+08:00

Yahoo! quite often releases interesting/useful/thought-provoking tools for people doing "serious" Web development. I add the modifier to specify that we're usually not talking about the Joe Leet three-page magnum oopus; a lot of what they do and talk about really only pays huge returns when you work with a site as large and complex as, well, Yahoo!. Recently, they brought out a couple of nifty

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-75649121993432210812008-07-11T23:29:00.005+08:002009-07-20T18:56:06.685+08:00

If you've got an ssh connection to a Debian or Ubuntu Linux box handy, and you have sudo privileges on that box, try this little experiment: ssh to your box as an ordinary user;sudo su to get a root prompt (you should be asked for your password - this is important);as soon as you get the root prompt, exit back to normal user, then exit your ssh session entirely.Now, here's the scary part: ssh to

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-14720967430913991552008-07-10T18:55:00.009+08:002010-11-03T01:13:38.591+08:00

The "World Wide Web", to the degree that it was ever truly universal, has broken down dramatically over the last couple of years, and it's our mission as Web development professionals to stand up to the idiots that think that's a Good Thing. If they're inside our organization, either as managers or as non-(Web-)technical people, we should patiently explain why semantic markup, clean design,

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-14196665302055798052008-07-02T21:18:00.008+08:002010-11-03T01:15:41.605+08:00

(playing softly, in the background of my mind, The Beatles'Revolution) ....between the Web developers promoting nice, clean development with RESTful, semantic (X)HTML judiciously enhanced with CSS and JavaScript (henceforth often referred to as the "Army of Light") and those using "popular", "mainstream" frameworks such as CakePHP and the Zend Framework, who route everything through a Front

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-83932756773699833262008-06-28T00:22:00.005+08:002010-11-03T01:20:05.540+08:00

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet has a very interesting post up, titled "Sticking with XP / Upgrading to Vista / Waiting for Windows 7 / Switching to Mac or Linux — There’s no single right answer". He puts forward the blitheringly-obvious elephant-in-the-room answer to the perennial food-fight question, "Which system is best?" Namely, "use what works for you." As I read through the post and

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-23884944843176878942008-06-24T19:10:00.006+08:002010-11-03T01:23:17.045+08:00

(Experienced Web developers know that the correct name for the program is Microsoft Internet Exploder — especially for version 6.) Case in point: I was browsing the daringfireball.net RSS feed and came across an article on the 37signals blog talking about Apple's new MobileMe service dropping support for IE6. The blog is mostly geared towards 37signals' current and potential clients who, if not

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-41894941104298807912008-06-19T11:16:00.005+08:002010-11-03T01:26:56.507+08:00

Anybody who's worked with me over the last 20 years or so knows that I generally evangelize conforming to standards when they exist, are relevant and widely agreed on. As the famous quote from Andrew Tanenbaum (in Computer Networks, 2/e, p. 254) reminds us, "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from." When "standards" are used to promote vendor agendas (e.g.,

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-11893221012986141462008-06-16T13:21:00.008+08:002010-11-02T22:59:17.121+08:00

Coming back up to speed on Mac programming, now that I've finally got a shiny new iMac. Their XCode IDE looks like a great tool (Objective C, C++, C, etc., etc.), but I was hacking around building some simple test code. Being a fully-certified Unix operating system, of course that's an easy way to get something done while minimizing the number of known and unknown unknowns that need to be dealt

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-77127879493713105012008-05-10T13:39:00.003+08:002010-11-03T01:29:37.415+08:00

(And Now For Something Different, for the 5LA-challenged amangst you...) I've made my living, for about half my career, on the proposition that if I stayed (at least) three to six months ahead of (what would become) the popular mean in software technology, I'd be well-positioned to help out when Joe Businessman or Acme Corporation came along and hit the same technology — with the effect of "

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-85990588766363212382008-05-06T20:55:00.004+08:002010-11-03T01:31:07.495+08:00

You no longer need to reboot a running Linux system to apply security patches to it. Check it out. Excuse me whilst I pick my jaw up from the sub-sub-sub-basement floor. If this checks out in the field, on multiple distros, then a lot of sysadmins are going to be able to get a lot more sleep at night. And the comment by one David Pottage: This should be good for distro kernels. Just think if

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-61334033234762931252008-05-03T13:07:00.006+08:002010-11-03T01:39:48.576+08:00

I read several different development blogs and message boards, such as those associated with phpclasses.org, codeproject.com, IBM DeveloperWorks, and so on. Usually pretty useful both for learning new techniques and keeping an eye on what other people are doing. Several of the boards, particularly on CodeProject, have been getting hot and bothered lately about the declining quality of questions

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-52888804730303419862007-12-01T14:29:00.003+08:002010-11-03T01:40:40.536+08:00

Scott Hackett over at SlickEdit has a blog entry where he talks about code scavenging as "a new software development methodology." The point being, of course, that code scavenging isn't new at all; it's at least as old as the UNIVAC I. Every new, and not so new, software developer has used it at one time or another, usually for quick bootstraps to get a specific part of the software under

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17958827.post-14342472381260231062007-09-18T10:35:00.002+08:002010-11-03T01:50:48.415+08:00

A link on the Agile CMMi blog had some very interesting things to say about a gentleman named Brian Lyons, the CEO (as well as CTO and founder) of Number Six, a Vienna, Virginia (Washington, DC area) software technology services/business consulting firm. Number Six quite obviously 'get' the concepts behind Agile CMMi, Hillel Glazer of the blog wrote. Interested, I flipped over to their site to

Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760673999356987827noreply@blogger.com0