ORM is only a subset of the Model in MVC
patrick — Fri, 2010-08-20 00:58
I've been trying to put my finger on why I think a particular set of classes a previous programmer wrote to interact with a payment gateway annoys the hell out of me. At first I just felt overwhelmed by the number of classes and their interactions. I then listed out the classes and used a simple diagram to show basic interaction. Class A has a process that uses data from Class B, runs it through Class C, dumps the results into Class D, & somewhere along the line Class E gets used as well.
thus spake the Oracle: "all your MySQL are belong to us!"
patrick — Tue, 2009-04-21 14:05
If you've not seen the news yet, Oracle is buying Sun for 10 cents a share more than IBM's final offer (Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems). And if you're really lagging in tech news, MySQL was purchased by Sun a while ago.
Many people were worried about Sun's purchase of MySQL and what that would mean. MySQL is an open source database and is in use all over the internet. I was somewhat worried about where they might decide to push the commercial product as that somewhat leads the open source project.
I'm thinking Oracle is primarily purchasing Sun for their hardware, not for MySQL - MySQL is just a bonus. However, as someone else pointed out, Oracle hasn't really been making anything new. Oracle has been buying out companies that make great 3rd party apps for Oracle, repackaging it with the Oracle brand, and selling as is - bugs and all.
VLC kicks even more butt - it streams!
patrick — Wed, 2009-03-04 11:16
I knew VLC was great for playing video files, especially those files I hadn't been able to play using other players... & it's even cross-platform! What I hadn't paid attention to before was it's ability to stream videos.
My friend, Craig Fowler (aka ToreadorVampire), recently ran me through the process rather quickly... I didn't have much time and he didn't have anything really written up... It was a last minute discussion over IM and I thought it could help to at least get people pointed in the right direction.
There is some documentation up at videolan.org (Streaming HowTo/VLM - VideoLAN Wiki) that shows how to set VLC up to do the streaming, talks about the HTTP interface, etc, but isn't an instant answer.
Sitepoint Helping Victims of Recent Australian Bushfires
patrick — Wed, 2009-02-11 23:59
Quick details:
- Offer ends on Friday 13th February (2009).
- 100% of the proceeds from this sale will be donated to victims of the recent Australian bushfires.
- Choose any 5 books (in PDF format) and pay $29.95 USD.
A friend of mine just sent me an email today with the subject line of SitePoint 5 for 1 Bushfire Relief Sale
and all the body contained was the link http://5for1.aws.sitepoint.com/. Copy/pasting the link into firefox dropped me at a page showing a fireman giving a koala a drink of water - how cute. Scrolling farther down the page past the form for selecting the PDFs you want I found the Why is SitePoint doing this?
section and I'm stunned! Wow! Over 170 dead, 5000 now homeless... I hope my friends in Australia are all ok.
Re: 10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks
patrick — Thu, 2008-12-04 04:37
This post is in response to my friend who pointed this out to me via Facebook/StumbleUpon - 10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks by Yongfook. I may come back later and add the header names for each item, until then each of mine relate directly to the items in the article.
CVS vs Subversion, Part 2 - git and bazaar
patrick — Thu, 2008-07-31 00:21
Wow, I made that last posting about CVS vs Subversion as my own little rant and posted the link in a couple LUGs that I hang out in on IRC & did I ever get it. Of course I was expecting certain things, Nobody ever said CVS was better than Subversion.
I realize that, that's why I was ranting about having to use it at work.
CVS vs Subversion
patrick — Tue, 2008-07-01 23:14
At work I'm currently stuck using CVS... I think we're planning to make the move to Subversion (SVN), but I'm not sure when. I've used CVS in the past, but I didn't know a whole lot about what I was doing and most of what I was doing was via a GUI on windows. I knew what CVS was doing with the diffs it was taking because I had messed around with RCS and looked at the version files RCS creates - CVS started out as a bunch of shell scripts for RCS. Beyond the basics of checkout and commit I'm really not all that familiar with CVS anymore. All I ever really did was either utilized a local repository or somebody else provided me with a checkout command for either a kserver or a pserver. I still have no idea what the difference is between a kserver or a pserver.
After I got started with SVN it seemed like all the esoteric wizardly commands disappeared. SVN seems to have a lot of sane aliases for various commands making them easier to remember. Let's take the delete command for example. On Unix to delete a file you use rm (ReMove) and on DOS/Windows you use del (short for delete), both CVS and SVN have multiple aliases, but it's not as obvious for CVS - you'll have to go digging pretty far through the man page to find them. Here's CVS help:
PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter - partial rebuttal
patrick — Fri, 2008-05-23 14:27
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.
