Archive for May, 2008

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter - partial rebuttal

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

It’s funny that after Ravi pointed out PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter at some point I came across Blogging Horror… While I’ve found a lot of posts on coding horror funny & horrifying over the years I find the issues being pointed at in the bulleted list under the Blogging Horror sub section absolutely horrifying as well. Credibility starts going out the window especially with Atwood’s example of MVC :(

I initially started this as an email, but considering the number of people I’d end up forwarding this to I think I’ll just slap it up here… Long story short I initially left ASP (and felt it sucked) because the community wrote crap code and I could never find any articles about advanced programming concepts. Although the PHP community contains a lot of crap code (hell, I think hotscripts started with just PHP crap code and has since added crap code from other languages) I found several people with lots of articles on advanced programming concepts and covering security issues.
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Posted in PHP, development | 3 Comments »

MythTV - An Installation of Epic Proportions

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

I’ve been talking about putting together a set of MythTV boxes for quite a while. I’ve been looking at hardware for the last couple of years and last summer I had stumbled across an mini-ITX board that I wanted to test, but I had need a file server, my job ended, and then I got overly busy with a new job. This last christmas I ended up buying parts for a new desktop (the timing just ended up being right) and the project got delayed again.

A friend of mine has kept nagging me about why would I want to build my own and possibly spend a lot of money on this crap if I could just spend money over time to rent a TiVo or whatever cable company’s DVR. When I was down in Tulsa this last year I did just that - I rented a dvr from Cox cable and other than the hard drive being to small (and not being able to upgrade), being limited to 2 channels total, and not being able to archive something for later viewing… it worked great! Well, at least until I was getting ready to move out… I had been keeping up with a particular series and hadn’t had time to watch a couple episodes and as I was heading up to visit my parents I figured I’d drag it along and show my parents the greatness of what a dvr does. I plugged it into the TV and got nothing initially. I then figured I’d plug it into their cable and see if that might help and if I might be able to record something from their cable provider… How niave. Plugging it into their cable provider completely reset the dvr (deleting everything I had recorded and had been hoping to watch). Ok, my stuff is gone, but surely I can at least record stuff for them - even on the non digital channels that don’t require a set top box? Nope, nothing… just sat there trying to configure itself and boot up. Of course, when I got back to Tulsa it came right up, reconfigured itself, and was ready to go - I think it even remembered what TV shows I was recording. Yay for proprietary crap.
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Posted in Hardware, entertainment, mythtv | 3 Comments »

Turmoils of Freelancing

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Last October a friend of mine contacted me about helping him finish up a project. I agreed because if we could pull this off it would mean more projects with his client. The due date was early December and by mid-November I had pretty much finished putting all the various forms together, the various category controllers, etc. All that was left was to figure out which categories the different forms needed to go into and connect them with the stored procedures in the database.

Then things suddenly got quiet. I didn’t mind because I was overly busy at work (see Jobs, Jobs, & More Jobs - Part 1) and was also in the process of getting another job (see Jobs, Jobs, & More Jobs - Part 2). After the job change I found out why - the client had hired their own programmer and told my friend not to bother doing anymore because it’d just be a waste of his time.
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Posted in Job, freelance, friends | No Comments »

RoR does not scale - Rails is a ghetto

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Somebody in chat posted a link to RoR does not scale? which I followed to Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails. Reading through this I found this tidbit, Earlier this year, one of the core community members and creator of the popular Rails web server Mongrel abandoned rails and trashed the community. and followed it to Zed Shaw Puts The Smack Down On The Rails Community. I liked the tidbits posted so I went on to read the original article that started it all - Rails Is A Ghetto (warning: lots of language).

I guess the best part about Zed’s rant is being able to learn from somebody else’s experience. While a lot of it is entertaining I also find it quite disturbing. I hate to say more for fear of limiting his entire rant to a mere sentence or paragraph. I will however pull out a small part because it makes me feel a bit better about the downtimes between projects. (more…)

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Posted in consulting, development | No Comments »