No, I didn't read the article. I think we've all heard this argument enough times to know what it's about, and I really, really doubt this guy has stumbled on some new and revolutionary way to back it up.
First, the goal of linux is not to replace Microsoft. This may be the goal of some distributions, and more power to them. But linux (the whole experience, not linux proper) has as many goals as there are developers and users. The moment you forget this, you start getting silly screeds that start "Linux needs to..." Which is stupid - linux doesn't need to do anything, it's doing very well, thank you.
Second, users don't hate choice, they hate being made to choose. Once they get past a certain point, some like choice a lot. It's just that choices are very often presented at the wrong time - when the user is trying to figure out the basics, and before they've been able to absorb information required to make an informed decision. The cure isn't eliminating choice, it's deferring choice.
Finally, this fault barely exists today. Any distribution a brand new linux user is going to be exposed to is very likely one of the commercial distros that have a default already selected. Sensible defaults are better than no choices because they guide the user without constraining them.
Really, this is just getting silly. When did linux get popular enough to start attracting this kind of nonsense?
Further and further OT, but this is nowhere near the main page anymore...
Thanks for that link. To be honest, I hadn't even read that far down on the page (it is slashdot, after all;)
That's a fascinating article, and it didn't set off my crackpot detector either. I do plan on researching those claims a bit more. If true, they're stunning. I've been keeping an eye on the HIV/AIDS thing for years, and this was all news to me. As you mentioned, the fact that HIV has never been isolated, and maybe even more incredible (to me) that the clinical studies responsible for providing what linkage was claimed were so poorly run. Not isolating lifestyle factors is irresponsible in the highest degree. And even the criteria for diagnosing someone with AIDS...
I've been lucky in that I haven't known anyone that's died from this disease. I can only imagine how I'd feel if I did and it was discovered that it was the treatment that killed them.
If these claims are true, this would be one of the biggest medical tragedies every. All from pride, greed and the inertia of R&D money.
I'm sure you're post will attract a lot of flames, and I'll try not to add to the heat too much. As a former proponent of Intelligent Design, I do have some comments, which I hope you'll take in the spirit they are intended.
As long as something cannot be disproven, it is a valid theory.
This isn't quite true...if something cannot be disproven, it is an empty theory. The principle of falsifiability is a cornerstone of modern scientific understanding. If you cannot devise a way to disprove a statement, that statement can be said to actually have no content, because it cannot add to your understanding of the world around us. It may influence your perception of it, which is fine - perceive it however suits you best - but it cannot be said to contain information.
Evolutionary theories (of various types) actually do show (as much as science purports to "show" anything) that God is unneccessary. What it does not claim is that God does not exist, or did not use evolutionary methods in creation. Unfalsifiable claims can be added to any scientific theory, without adding or detracting anything from it. Adding a God hypothesis to a scientific theory does not add any information to the theory. It is merely a statement of perception about that theory.
I disagree strongly with the statment that "[e]liminating Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, from school curriculum amounts to nothing more than censorship, just like eliminating evolution", except perhaps in comparitive religion courses. Intellegent Design is a method for believers to integrate scientific knowledge into their faith. Teaching ID in school is tantamount to teaching faith, in that it does not teach you anything more about evolutionary theories, only how a certain religion understands and deals with the introduction of new scientific knowledge.
On a personal note, I went from belief in a literal translation of the bible, to science/faith integration tools like ID to a rather reactionary atheism, to agnosticism, where I now stand. I take that to mean that I cannot state anything about God (or any faith system) in such a way that it increases my knowledge of the world, and that therefore all such statements are empty.
Schools should teach reasoning, scientific method, and what knowledge we have gained from those processes. The public education system should not teach as part of a scientific curriculum methods that religions use to integrate scientific knowledge into their belief structure.
It's not so much dismissed (well, at least not by all) as considered less likely). I consider it far less likely, in the absence of proof, that there is a mystical, omiscient, omnipresent, all powerful being that favoured one small group of people out of all his creation with the secret of his existence than that religion evolved out of our (well known) desire for answers, story telling and fear of things that go bump in the night.
If you accept this opinion, it's intellectually dishonest to accept God as fact simply out of fear of eternal reprisals. Any god that I'd want anything to do with would understand this.
The Book of J is a very interesting book along these lines. I'm not sure about "oldest possible sources" (I can't recall the source material that was used for it, only that it was a fresh transaltion from the Hebrew).
The book is a retransalation of the Book of J, what is considered by many scholars to be one of four sources for the Pentateuch. Through the efforts of someone refered to as "the Redactor", much of this work was lost when he cleaned up the Torah. (If memory serves, many think this may have been Ezra. There were probably many redactors, but this one gets the capital R). It's partly a retranslation by David Rosenberg, and literary criticism by Harold Bloom. Because of the fragmentary nature of this "book", it's also part recreation, but masterfully done.
The Rosenberg portion brings out some of the best stories of the Old Testament, giving character to figures like Abram and Yahweh (their interaction is much more fascinating and human than standard biblical transations). Bloom does his usual excellent job of making us think about things in the text we wouldn't have otherwise noticed. (One of his more interesting contentions is that J was a woman, perhaps a scribe, in the court of King Solomon).
It's not a popular book in many Christian circles, but it puts a unique light on the origins of these stories, and presents J as equivalant to Homer in literary importance.
Another translation by David Rosenberg is of Song of Solomon (book of the same name), which restores the beautiful, lyrical nature of the book missed in standard translations. It's been a lot of years since I read it, but I remember enjoying it immensely
I'm too much of an agnostic to profess a religion, but if I was going to take one up, it would be Buddhism. I always loved this quote from Carl Sagan:
For example, in theological discussions with religious leaders, I often ask what their response would be if a central tenet of their faith were disproved by science. When I put this question to the Dalai Lama, he unhesitatingly replied as no conservative or fundamentalist religious leaders do: In such a case, he said, Tibetan Buddhism would have to change. Even, I asked, if it's a really central tenet, like (I searched for an example) reincarnation? Even then, he answered. However, he added with a twinkle - it's going to be hard to disprove reincarnation.
This is going to sound like such a flame, but it's not, honest. What's the benefit of using something like Smarty over just not putting anything besides control flow or variable output in your HTML files? I keep all the real work in a separate file, and never have anything more interesting than for(;;){ foo } in the file with the HTML. And no HTML in the code file, ever. It's always seemed like another layer of complexity (and overhead) for very little return.
Or am I missing something?
Re:The superiority of PHP over Perl
on
PHP Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
I both agree and disagree...
I hate having every_goddamn_function() in the global namespace. I would much rather drag in what I need when I need it, a la perl. However, what drove me from mostly perl development to mostly PHP development is that you're pretty sure you'll have most everything you need built in with the latter. The simple fact of not necessasrily having perl's DBI module installed on a server you don't control (and have no access to gcc on) forced the decision to use PHP for most things over here.
Of course, PHP might not have everything you need built in, either. Need to generate images? If the server doesn't have PHP compiled with gd support, you're out of luck. It does happen less often, though.
The one thing I would love to see from perl is a standard web app bundle. Something that was a no brainer for admins to install when perl's installed. DBI, AxKit or Mason or similar...etc. Something you could count on being there. Then I could get back to a language that fits my brain better.
I definitely agree about page-based thinking not scaling. We've got an in-house CMS that has a page based admin feature that started to bother me about half way through development. It includes modules for more complex functionality that you add to each page. I would have tossed it for another metaphor, but quickly realized there was no way we'd be able to get client's heads around something without folders and pages. So I hid as much of what's actually going on as I could behind page metaphors.
Dying for the resources for a redesign...;)
(By the way, my perl-based development has relied a lot on HTML::Template. Very nice, lightweight solution).
(Sorry about the code formatting. Slashdot's messing with it, and dinner's on, so no time to futz with it).
I make few claims to writing elegant PHP, and I'll generally sacrifice a few extra CPU cycles if it will save programming time. I have yet to run into a situation, even on high traffic sites, where this isn't a worthwhile tradeoff, as long as you're not writing horrendously inefficient code. If there are bottlenecks, I'll look to sections of code that are getting hit a lot and optimize on that level. You might have guessed that I'll take the performance hit and use objects if I feel like it will make my job easier. There are fancy names for most of this stuff, but never mind those for now.
What I do depends largely on the scope of the project, but there is one rule that I follow without exception. Nothing goes into the page that's being displayed but control flow statements and variable output. No assignment, no (god forbid) database calls, nuthin'.
For simple, one page, this-will-be-dead-in-a-year stuff, I put this at the top of the page:
and all the work goes into index_code.php. Beyond that, for this level of work, I don't worry much about elegance beyond the usual rules of breaking discrete bits into functions rather than allowing everything to string on for screens and screens of scrolling. This is mostly for my own sanity.
is much easier to make sense of than if all the work is sitting in between those conditionals.
For larger applications, I use a config file that contains any configuration I might need. Again, as little logic as possible. This is likely to be shared site-wide. An initialization file, also often shared, contains any beginning work that might need to be done. Checking to see if variables should be pulled from $HTTP_POST_VARS or $_VARS, calls to authentication routines if necessary, etc.
This will be driven from one file who's job is to figure out what needs to be done, and dispatch the work accordingly. Again, depending on scale, this may also contain common footers and headers. For bigger projects, all this does is dispatch the calls, and HTML is pulled from a template file, with content being inserted into it.
The dispatcher will call the appropriate code file and a matching file that contains the HTML and any required control flow stuff (as above) for content display. The code file doesn't contain anything "deep." Anything remotely heavy is done with classes included from a lib/ directory.
This structure gives the following benefits:
one place for site (or project) wide look and feel changes
easily findable files for the designers to mess with. Ours are more than capable of dealing with the occasion if or foreach
heavy code in reusable classes, centrally located. One stop bug fixing.
One last note. I don't use a templating engine. Things like smarty are nice and all, but with a little discipline, you can achieve the same effect with no added complexity.
Seeing as the post has a zero flame content, I will add that nothing I do in PHP ever feels "elegant." For me, PHP is a pragmatic choice (widely available). The language itself (to me) has a cobbled-together feel. I'm sure that will change as it matures, but I find that things I do in PHP often have a cleaner feel in perl. I'm learning Java, and so far I'm getting the impression of language-elegance from it as well. On a purely aesthetic level, I think the language you chose has a strong impact on how elegant your solutions feel.
I'm sure advances have been since 1952, but I still think I'd avoid St. Petersburg (or at least the outlying villages). It didn't work out so well for the Brits.
Artificial rain making operations may have caused a storm that nearly wiped out an English village in 1952. New evidence has emerged that the UK's Royal Air Force was carrying out cloud seeding experiments that could in theory have led to the disaster.
New Scientist Article
Funny thing, back in the day (my day - think Apple IIs and TRS-80s) we called anyone who mucked around in networks "hackers" (and it didn't occur to most of us that this could be malicious - you're just looking, right?). "Crackers" cracked copy protection and brought Tai Pan and Battlezone to the masses.
Generally, it's considered desireable to have the DNS functional before getting the rest of the site up and running.
Don't I know it! Unfortunately, it's an existing site on a (crappy) host that we're moving to a dedicated server. There's going to be disruptions (lots of data to sync), but as much as possible we're trying to keep it up and available. Also, unfortunately, we don't have access to the config files on the old server, so we can't do fun routing things.
Thanks for the offer of more details, but I've got enough to start on. Fortunately I'm not solely responsible for this. I just need to know enough to talk to the people that are. (MX records may be an option, though).
Ah, thanks...we requested number 2 yesterday, which is theoretically take care of. Number 3 may or may not be an issue - guess I'll find out.
Really, I'm just a web guy who knows enough TLAs that people sometimes think I know what I'm talking about. You've given me a good starting point for initiating the conversation, at least. Thanks!
I love it when slashdot has a story related to a problem I'm having at that very instant. How often does that happen?
Here's the thing: we're moving a site to a new server with it's own shiny IP address. There are many things on this site that send mail. None of these things will successfully get mail through in this circumstance because this IP doesn't have a DNS entry for it until the site goes live on the new server. Reverse lookups point to the current IP, not the shiny new one. Mail rejected as spam. And there's going to be a lag where some will get through and some won't as the DNS propogates.
Now, I can make sure that all the right things are happening, but everyone would feel 100% better if mail could get out to, say, the Chairman of the Board and he could say "ah, I got the test message, all is well." And the lag while the DNS updates is more worrisome.
It's entirely possible I'm missing some obvious way around this (google is my friend today), but this situation can't be uncommon, and I'm sure there are many similar situations in which entirely legitimate mail is being sent from an IP that can't be resolved in a reverse lookup.
God, yeah....Berman's idea of a different culture is one with an opressed third gender? Woah! That's innovation! And there's a male and female of the species and they're married? Unbelievable....
I've thought (and still do) that Enterprise had the most potential since TNG, which I rather enjoyed most times. The biggest mistakes have been a) trying to hard to shoehorn foreshadowing of every bloody event in the future into the show, b) slavishly obeying the "resolve in one episode" law (I'm very surprised that Berman's talking about going with a longer story arc - he's said in more than one interview that that was a bad and stupid idea), c) worrying way too much about consistency with the rest of the ST universe.
Theoretically, they were trying to branch out a bit, bring in some new audience to the show. And frankly, the whole ST universe needs a good shaking up. It really wouldn't have hurt them a lot to pay lip service to continuity, but ignore it when it made the story better.
Oh, yeah, and fire Berman. Get someone in there who can write a story without resorting to travel to other timelines.
We've been using jatol.com for hosting our and several client's sites. Good bandwidth, the few occasaions we've needed to contact support, response was great. Support is also available over IM, which is highly convenient. MySQL, PHP, Perl, crontab,.htaccess, shell access on request, and extremely reasonable rates. (I can't recall what they charge offhand, but they're one of the least expensive for non-critical web sites that I've seen).
No affiliation, just a happy customer, so I wouldn't mind tossing some business their way.
Some of our clients have been using phpwebhosting for minor needs over the past year. We've never had a problem or complaint, which is more than you can usually say.
There is something here I've been trying to reconcile for a while. Now, granted, everything I'm about to say is anecdotal, so it may mean nothing.
I do web development, primarly perl and PHP database kind of stuff. 90% of what I do is putting stuff into databases and getting it back out. Not complicated at all, and the kind of work that is prime for being exported abroad, especially given that I have met exactly one of our clients in person.
I do an unbelievable amount of cleanup work. Some is from obvious paper-certificate domestic developers. More is from overseas workers, prmiarly India and various African nations. There's a wide range of skill (or lack thereof) evident in both, but the overseas work is some of the most mangled, duct-taped-together, mind-bendingly screwy code I have ever seen.
I don't want to give the impression that I think overseas coders aren't as good as domestic ("oversease" and "domestic" being highly contextual, sorry), but the bad ones do seem to be that much worse than our home grown bad coders.
What I've been trying to put my finger on is why I have this impression. Is it communication barriers? Is it that it's easier for me to call up clients than someone in a 12 hour difference time-zone? Is it that here in North America we've had X number of years head start percolating in the coding culture and have just had a bit more time to learn these things on that subconcious level so much of culture takes place at?
I just want to emphasize that it's not that I think that there aren't just as many good "foreign" coders as "local", or that they are any less intelligent or hardworking. It's just that in my experience, there's a distinct different in how much work cleaning up is going to be.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I didn't read the article. I think we've all heard this argument enough times to know what it's about, and I really, really doubt this guy has stumbled on some new and revolutionary way to back it up.
First, the goal of linux is not to replace Microsoft. This may be the goal of some distributions, and more power to them. But linux (the whole experience, not linux proper) has as many goals as there are developers and users. The moment you forget this, you start getting silly screeds that start "Linux needs to..." Which is stupid - linux doesn't need to do anything, it's doing very well, thank you.
Second, users don't hate choice, they hate being made to choose. Once they get past a certain point, some like choice a lot. It's just that choices are very often presented at the wrong time - when the user is trying to figure out the basics, and before they've been able to absorb information required to make an informed decision. The cure isn't eliminating choice, it's deferring choice.
Finally, this fault barely exists today. Any distribution a brand new linux user is going to be exposed to is very likely one of the commercial distros that have a default already selected. Sensible defaults are better than no choices because they guide the user without constraining them.
Really, this is just getting silly. When did linux get popular enough to start attracting this kind of nonsense?
Further and further OT, but this is nowhere near the main page anymore...
Thanks for that link. To be honest, I hadn't even read that far down on the page (it is slashdot, after all ;)
That's a fascinating article, and it didn't set off my crackpot detector either. I do plan on researching those claims a bit more. If true, they're stunning. I've been keeping an eye on the HIV/AIDS thing for years, and this was all news to me. As you mentioned, the fact that HIV has never been isolated, and maybe even more incredible (to me) that the clinical studies responsible for providing what linkage was claimed were so poorly run. Not isolating lifestyle factors is irresponsible in the highest degree. And even the criteria for diagnosing someone with AIDS...
I've been lucky in that I haven't known anyone that's died from this disease. I can only imagine how I'd feel if I did and it was discovered that it was the treatment that killed them.
If these claims are true, this would be one of the biggest medical tragedies every. All from pride, greed and the inertia of R&D money.
I need a drink.
You're welcome - unfortunately, sometimes I can't pass up the chance to be a smart ass ;) Good thing I've got karma.
I've always been especially fond of the Albert Michelson quote. It's a good reminder about our own hubris.
I'm sure you're post will attract a lot of flames, and I'll try not to add to the heat too much. As a former proponent of Intelligent Design, I do have some comments, which I hope you'll take in the spirit they are intended.
This isn't quite true...if something cannot be disproven, it is an empty theory. The principle of falsifiability is a cornerstone of modern scientific understanding. If you cannot devise a way to disprove a statement, that statement can be said to actually have no content, because it cannot add to your understanding of the world around us. It may influence your perception of it, which is fine - perceive it however suits you best - but it cannot be said to contain information.
Evolutionary theories (of various types) actually do show (as much as science purports to "show" anything) that God is unneccessary. What it does not claim is that God does not exist, or did not use evolutionary methods in creation. Unfalsifiable claims can be added to any scientific theory, without adding or detracting anything from it. Adding a God hypothesis to a scientific theory does not add any information to the theory. It is merely a statement of perception about that theory.
I disagree strongly with the statment that "[e]liminating Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, from school curriculum amounts to nothing more than censorship, just like eliminating evolution", except perhaps in comparitive religion courses. Intellegent Design is a method for believers to integrate scientific knowledge into their faith. Teaching ID in school is tantamount to teaching faith, in that it does not teach you anything more about evolutionary theories, only how a certain religion understands and deals with the introduction of new scientific knowledge.
On a personal note, I went from belief in a literal translation of the bible, to science/faith integration tools like ID to a rather reactionary atheism, to agnosticism, where I now stand. I take that to mean that I cannot state anything about God (or any faith system) in such a way that it increases my knowledge of the world, and that therefore all such statements are empty.
Schools should teach reasoning, scientific method, and what knowledge we have gained from those processes. The public education system should not teach as part of a scientific curriculum methods that religions use to integrate scientific knowledge into their belief structure.
You're right, everything important has been discovered.
It's not so much dismissed (well, at least not by all) as considered less likely). I consider it far less likely, in the absence of proof, that there is a mystical, omiscient, omnipresent, all powerful being that favoured one small group of people out of all his creation with the secret of his existence than that religion evolved out of our (well known) desire for answers, story telling and fear of things that go bump in the night.
If you accept this opinion, it's intellectually dishonest to accept God as fact simply out of fear of eternal reprisals. Any god that I'd want anything to do with would understand this.
The Book of J is a very interesting book along these lines. I'm not sure about "oldest possible sources" (I can't recall the source material that was used for it, only that it was a fresh transaltion from the Hebrew).
The book is a retransalation of the Book of J, what is considered by many scholars to be one of four sources for the Pentateuch. Through the efforts of someone refered to as "the Redactor", much of this work was lost when he cleaned up the Torah. (If memory serves, many think this may have been Ezra. There were probably many redactors, but this one gets the capital R). It's partly a retranslation by David Rosenberg, and literary criticism by Harold Bloom. Because of the fragmentary nature of this "book", it's also part recreation, but masterfully done.
The Rosenberg portion brings out some of the best stories of the Old Testament, giving character to figures like Abram and Yahweh (their interaction is much more fascinating and human than standard biblical transations). Bloom does his usual excellent job of making us think about things in the text we wouldn't have otherwise noticed. (One of his more interesting contentions is that J was a woman, perhaps a scribe, in the court of King Solomon).
It's not a popular book in many Christian circles, but it puts a unique light on the origins of these stories, and presents J as equivalant to Homer in literary importance.
Another translation by David Rosenberg is of Song of Solomon (book of the same name), which restores the beautiful, lyrical nature of the book missed in standard translations. It's been a lot of years since I read it, but I remember enjoying it immensely
I'm too much of an agnostic to profess a religion, but if I was going to take one up, it would be Buddhism. I always loved this quote from Carl Sagan:
The Cosmos and Carl Sagan
This is going to sound like such a flame, but it's not, honest. What's the benefit of using something like Smarty over just not putting anything besides control flow or variable output in your HTML files? I keep all the real work in a separate file, and never have anything more interesting than for(;;){ foo } in the file with the HTML. And no HTML in the code file, ever. It's always seemed like another layer of complexity (and overhead) for very little return.
Or am I missing something?
I both agree and disagree...
I hate having every_goddamn_function() in the global namespace. I would much rather drag in what I need when I need it, a la perl. However, what drove me from mostly perl development to mostly PHP development is that you're pretty sure you'll have most everything you need built in with the latter. The simple fact of not necessasrily having perl's DBI module installed on a server you don't control (and have no access to gcc on) forced the decision to use PHP for most things over here.
Of course, PHP might not have everything you need built in, either. Need to generate images? If the server doesn't have PHP compiled with gd support, you're out of luck. It does happen less often, though.
The one thing I would love to see from perl is a standard web app bundle. Something that was a no brainer for admins to install when perl's installed. DBI, AxKit or Mason or similar...etc. Something you could count on being there. Then I could get back to a language that fits my brain better.
I definitely agree about page-based thinking not scaling. We've got an in-house CMS that has a page based admin feature that started to bother me about half way through development. It includes modules for more complex functionality that you add to each page. I would have tossed it for another metaphor, but quickly realized there was no way we'd be able to get client's heads around something without folders and pages. So I hid as much of what's actually going on as I could behind page metaphors.
Dying for the resources for a redesign...;)
(By the way, my perl-based development has relied a lot on HTML::Template. Very nice, lightweight solution).
(Sorry about the code formatting. Slashdot's messing with it, and dinner's on, so no time to futz with it).
I make few claims to writing elegant PHP, and I'll generally sacrifice a few extra CPU cycles if it will save programming time. I have yet to run into a situation, even on high traffic sites, where this isn't a worthwhile tradeoff, as long as you're not writing horrendously inefficient code. If there are bottlenecks, I'll look to sections of code that are getting hit a lot and optimize on that level. You might have guessed that I'll take the performance hit and use objects if I feel like it will make my job easier. There are fancy names for most of this stuff, but never mind those for now.
What I do depends largely on the scope of the project, but there is one rule that I follow without exception. Nothing goes into the page that's being displayed but control flow statements and variable output. No assignment, no (god forbid) database calls, nuthin'.
For simple, one page, this-will-be-dead-in-a-year stuff, I put this at the top of the page:
and all the work goes into index_code.php. Beyond that, for this level of work, I don't worry much about elegance beyond the usual rules of breaking discrete bits into functions rather than allowing everything to string on for screens and screens of scrolling. This is mostly for my own sanity.
if($foo) { doStuff(); } else { doSomethingElse(); }
is much easier to make sense of than if all the work is sitting in between those conditionals.
For larger applications, I use a config file that contains any configuration I might need. Again, as little logic as possible. This is likely to be shared site-wide. An initialization file, also often shared, contains any beginning work that might need to be done. Checking to see if variables should be pulled from $HTTP_POST_VARS or $_VARS, calls to authentication routines if necessary, etc.
This will be driven from one file who's job is to figure out what needs to be done, and dispatch the work accordingly. Again, depending on scale, this may also contain common footers and headers. For bigger projects, all this does is dispatch the calls, and HTML is pulled from a template file, with content being inserted into it.
The dispatcher will call the appropriate code file and a matching file that contains the HTML and any required control flow stuff (as above) for content display. The code file doesn't contain anything "deep." Anything remotely heavy is done with classes included from a lib/ directory.
This structure gives the following benefits:
One last note. I don't use a templating engine. Things like smarty are nice and all, but with a little discipline, you can achieve the same effect with no added complexity.
Seeing as the post has a zero flame content, I will add that nothing I do in PHP ever feels "elegant." For me, PHP is a pragmatic choice (widely available). The language itself (to me) has a cobbled-together feel. I'm sure that will change as it matures, but I find that things I do in PHP often have a cleaner feel in perl. I'm learning Java, and so far I'm getting the impression of language-elegance from it as well. On a purely aesthetic level, I think the language you chose has a strong impact on how elegant your solutions feel.
I'm sure advances have been since 1952, but I still think I'd avoid St. Petersburg (or at least the outlying villages). It didn't work out so well for the Brits.
Funny thing, back in the day (my day - think Apple IIs and TRS-80s) we called anyone who mucked around in networks "hackers" (and it didn't occur to most of us that this could be malicious - you're just looking, right?). "Crackers" cracked copy protection and brought Tai Pan and Battlezone to the masses.
Maybe it's a geographical thing.
Yeah, likewise. Can't say I blame, him, though. Would you stick around? The threads attached to his articles were just big flame-fests...
Don't I know it! Unfortunately, it's an existing site on a (crappy) host that we're moving to a dedicated server. There's going to be disruptions (lots of data to sync), but as much as possible we're trying to keep it up and available. Also, unfortunately, we don't have access to the config files on the old server, so we can't do fun routing things.
Thanks for the offer of more details, but I've got enough to start on. Fortunately I'm not solely responsible for this. I just need to know enough to talk to the people that are. (MX records may be an option, though).
Thanks!
Ah, thanks...we requested number 2 yesterday, which is theoretically take care of. Number 3 may or may not be an issue - guess I'll find out.
Really, I'm just a web guy who knows enough TLAs that people sometimes think I know what I'm talking about. You've given me a good starting point for initiating the conversation, at least. Thanks!
I love it when slashdot has a story related to a problem I'm having at that very instant. How often does that happen?
Here's the thing: we're moving a site to a new server with it's own shiny IP address. There are many things on this site that send mail. None of these things will successfully get mail through in this circumstance because this IP doesn't have a DNS entry for it until the site goes live on the new server. Reverse lookups point to the current IP, not the shiny new one. Mail rejected as spam. And there's going to be a lag where some will get through and some won't as the DNS propogates.
Now, I can make sure that all the right things are happening, but everyone would feel 100% better if mail could get out to, say, the Chairman of the Board and he could say "ah, I got the test message, all is well." And the lag while the DNS updates is more worrisome.
It's entirely possible I'm missing some obvious way around this (google is my friend today), but this situation can't be uncommon, and I'm sure there are many similar situations in which entirely legitimate mail is being sent from an IP that can't be resolved in a reverse lookup.
God, yeah....Berman's idea of a different culture is one with an opressed third gender? Woah! That's innovation! And there's a male and female of the species and they're married? Unbelievable....
I've thought (and still do) that Enterprise had the most potential since TNG, which I rather enjoyed most times. The biggest mistakes have been a) trying to hard to shoehorn foreshadowing of every bloody event in the future into the show, b) slavishly obeying the "resolve in one episode" law (I'm very surprised that Berman's talking about going with a longer story arc - he's said in more than one interview that that was a bad and stupid idea), c) worrying way too much about consistency with the rest of the ST universe.
Theoretically, they were trying to branch out a bit, bring in some new audience to the show. And frankly, the whole ST universe needs a good shaking up. It really wouldn't have hurt them a lot to pay lip service to continuity, but ignore it when it made the story better.
Oh, yeah, and fire Berman. Get someone in there who can write a story without resorting to travel to other timelines.
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No affiliation, just a happy customer, so I wouldn't mind tossing some business their way.
Some of our clients have been using phpwebhosting for minor needs over the past year. We've never had a problem or complaint, which is more than you can usually say.
I heard a rumour that the Iraqis hid their WMD under Mons Olympus...
(You should be there in a year. You're welcome).
ah...that would explain it. He was also a big Maceo Parker fan. Turned me on to funk, and a wicked custom espresso mix ;)
Enjoy Chicago...
Way, way, way off topic, but you didn't happen to live in Victoria, BC, did you? Your tag-line reminds me of someone I knew there some time ago...
There is something here I've been trying to reconcile for a while. Now, granted, everything I'm about to say is anecdotal, so it may mean nothing.
I do web development, primarly perl and PHP database kind of stuff. 90% of what I do is putting stuff into databases and getting it back out. Not complicated at all, and the kind of work that is prime for being exported abroad, especially given that I have met exactly one of our clients in person.
I do an unbelievable amount of cleanup work. Some is from obvious paper-certificate domestic developers. More is from overseas workers, prmiarly India and various African nations. There's a wide range of skill (or lack thereof) evident in both, but the overseas work is some of the most mangled, duct-taped-together, mind-bendingly screwy code I have ever seen.
I don't want to give the impression that I think overseas coders aren't as good as domestic ("oversease" and "domestic" being highly contextual, sorry), but the bad ones do seem to be that much worse than our home grown bad coders.
What I've been trying to put my finger on is why I have this impression. Is it communication barriers? Is it that it's easier for me to call up clients than someone in a 12 hour difference time-zone? Is it that here in North America we've had X number of years head start percolating in the coding culture and have just had a bit more time to learn these things on that subconcious level so much of culture takes place at?
I just want to emphasize that it's not that I think that there aren't just as many good "foreign" coders as "local", or that they are any less intelligent or hardworking. It's just that in my experience, there's a distinct different in how much work cleaning up is going to be.
Any ideas?