Having taken my programming roots in QBASIC (shut up), C, C++, and a very healthy self-administered dose of x86 assembly, I can say that for the most part I have a good sense of what programming is. All of what I’ve learned up until now has helped me develop my sense for good code, and helped me to write programs and applications that I can sit back and be proud of. I’ve been working with PHP for over 4 years now, and I have to say it’s the most ugly language I’ve ever used.

Let me explain. PHP itself is wonderfully loosely-typed, C-like syntactically, and all around easy to write code for. The syntax is familiar because of my background. The integration with web is apparent down to its core, and it’s a hell of a lot easier than assembly to write. When perusing through a project filled to the brim with C source code, I’m usually left thinking about how it works, why the developer did what they did, and why that makes sense for that particular application. I’m usually able to figure out these questions and there’s one main reason: the code isn’t shit. With PHP, I’m usually left wondering what the developer was thinking, the 100s of ways I could have done it more efficiently, and why this person is actually making money doing this.

With roughly 90% of open-source PHP projects, everything works great. I love it, clients love it, everyone kisses eachother’s ass. But then one day you get that inevitable change request…I want it to do THIS. A quick look at the source code reveals that, omg, it’s been written by a team of highly trained ape-like creatures! It surprises me that WordPress plugins that get 100s of downloads a day throw errors (unless you disable error output, which I never do on my dev machines). Whole architectures are written with random indentation, or indentation with spaces (sorry Rubyers, but space-indentation is an evil scourge on humanity). No effort is put into separating pieces of code that could so easily be modularized if only they were given a second thought.

Do I hate PHP? No, I love PHP. I think it’s a well-written, high-level web development language. It’s fast, portable, and scalable. It allows me to focus on the problems I face, not the syntax of what I’m trying to do. Paired with an excellent editor like Eclipse (w/ PHPeclipse) I’m unstoppable. But why can’t any other PHP developers share my love of well-written code? It’s the #1 critique of PHP, and rightly so. I’m pretty sure that all programming languages, save Python, allow you to write awful, unreadable code…but PHP’s culture seems to be built around shitty code, amateurish hacks, and lack of elegance. PHP isn’t the problem, it’s the people writing it who suck!

So I do love the language, but hate most of the implementations. I have to say though, nothing is worse than Coldfusion.

Holaaa. Added a code section on the main page that I plan to more more into. It’s got tag searching (intersection-based) for all two pieces of code posted (in case you can’t find one or the other) but there’s going to be more coming up, hopefully.

So go check it out. All the code on there is free to use, distribute, sell, whatever you want. Just give me credit, or prepare yourself for hand-to-hand combat.

kkthxbai

So you may have noticed some changes going on with the site. Don’t worry, these changes will continue. In fact, you cannot stop them, even if you pay me $1 million. You’re welcome to send me a check anyway though.

I’m adding a homepage (powered by aframe, site coming soon!) that shows links to sites, movies, etc…anything I think is worth checking out. I’ll be adding a code section soon to showcase how fucking good I am at programming.

Stay tuned for more updates.

With Amazon S3 being as good and cheap as it is, it’s almost essential for what I need it for…storing images and large static files. The problem is there is no interface besides SOAP, and if you don’t know how I feel about SOAP, let me tell you: it makes my head want to fucking explode. It’s insanely complicated for what it does. It tries to standardize so many things that it’s completely bloated…sending the message “hello” from one computer to another in SOAP takes oh about 10 years…5 years for a team of 50 supercomputers working in tandem to build the header and message body (which will total about 400 mb when finally complete), .02ms to send, and 5 years in decoding. Use JSON, you crackheads. Sure you’ll actually have to document it, but nothing is worse than SOAP, not even documenting.

That’s besides the point though. S3 chose to use SOAP, so I refuse to write my own client for it. This means that, as of late, the world is without a good free S3 uploading client. S3Fox, the firefox extension, is ok…it can’t handle SSL connections though, so expect to lose your private key to a sniffer about 10 seconds after your first request. JungleDisk is now a completely paid service (I already pay for S3, I’m not paying those guys to fucking USE it). Linux has some great command line tools for S3 (yay…), but that leaves windows with either S3fox, JD ($$$), or a handful of shitty S3 clients.

Right now, I have to use a PHP script I built around the S3 PHP Class to do any uploading that doesn’t make me vomit. The S3 class works REALLY well…it lets you assign ACL while uploading, change headers for images (for browser-side caching, mmm) and best of all, doesn’t completely suck. Let’s all thank Donovan Schönknecht for writing something that actually works well and communicates with S3.

Here’s a piece of code I wrote that wraps around the S3 uploader. It uploads images, sets Cache-Control headers, and removes the images. What you want to do is copy your images into a folder, run this file one directory up (change $start_folder to == the name of the folder your images are in), and sit back. It will upload all your images, directory structure preserved, publicly viewable and with cache-control headers.

< ?
	// quick config
	$bucket			=	'your.bucket.com';
	$start_folder	=	'images';

	// settings
	error_reporting(E_ALL);
	ini_set('display_errors', 1);
	ini_set('max_execution_time', 3600);

	// include S3 class
	include 'S3.php';
	$s3	=	new S3('[your key]', '[your secret]', false);

	// get list of files. if you don't want a subdirectory, just change this line to not need one. hopefully you know PHP...
	$files	=	recurse(array(), $start_folder);

	// loop over files and upload
	for($i = 0, $n = count($files); $i < $n; $i++)
	{
		$ext	=	preg_replace('/.*\./', '', $files[$i]);
		$type	=	'image/jpeg';
		if($ext == 'jpg')
		{
			$type	=	'image/jpeg';
		}
		else if($ext == 'gif')
		{
			$type	=	'image/gif';
		}
		else if($ext == 'png')
		{
			$type	=	'image/png';
		}

		if(
			!$s3->putObject(
				$s3->inputFile($files[$i]),
				$bucket,
				$files[$i],
				S3::ACL_PUBLIC_READ,
				array(),
				array('Cache-Control' => 'max-age=31536000', 'Content-Type' => $type)
			)
		)
		{
			echo '<span style="color:green;">Failed: upload of '. $files[$i] . '';
		}
		else
		{
			echo '<span style="color:green;">Succeeded: upload of '. $files[$i] .'';
			unlink($files[$i]);
		}
	}

	function recurse($files, $dir)
	{
		$d	=	scandir($dir);

		for($i = 0, $n = count($d); $i < $n; $i++)
		{
			if(!preg_match('/^\./', $d[$i]))
			{
				if(is_dir($dir . '/' . $d[$i]))
				{
					$files	=	recurse($files, $dir . '/' . $d[$i]);
				}
				else
				{
					$files[]	=	$dir . '/' . $d[$i];
				}
			}
		}

		return $files;
	}
?>

Feel free to modify, copy, blah blah…but give credit where it’s due. Let it be a light to you when all other lights go out. Hopefully it helps someone, because it sure helps me out.