Not anymore. Starting a few years back, I’ve done all of my development in Eclipse. It has wonderful plugins for PHP, C++, Javascript, etc. The past week or so I’ve been weening myself off of it and diving into vim. What actually got me started is I bought a Droid 2 off ebay for various hacking projects (I’m planning on reviewing it soon). Well, it was really easy to get vim working in it (sorry, lost the link already). I thought, well, shit, I’ve got vim, what the hell can I do with it? First things first, let’s get a plugin for syntax coloring/indentation for a few of my favorite languages. What?! It has all of them already.

Ok, now I’m interested. I installed vim for Windows (gvim), which was followed by a slow-but-steady growing period of “well, how do I do this” and “HA…I bet vim can’t do THI…oh, it can.” There are “marks” for saving your place in code, you can open the same file in multiple views (aka “windows”), you can bind just about any key combination to run any command or set of commands, etc. I even discovered tonight there’s a “windows” mode for vim that mimics how any normal editor works. I hate to admit it, but I’ll be using that a lot. One feature that blew my mind is the undo tree. Not stack, tree. Make a change, undo, make a new change, and the first change you did before your undo is still accessible (:undolist)!

The nice thing about vim is that it saves none of its settings. Every change you make to it while inside the editor is lost after a restart. This sounds aggravating, but it actually makes playing with the editor really fun and easy. If I open 30 windows and don’t know how to close them, just restart the editor. There are literally hundreds of trillions of instances when I was like “oh, shit” *restart*.

Once you have a good idea of what you want your environment to be like, you put all your startup commands in .vimrc (_vimrc on Windows) and vim runs it before it loads. Your settings file uses the same syntax as the commands you run inline in the editor, which is awesome and makes it easy to remember how to actually use vim.

So far I’m extremely impressed. The makers of vim have literally thought of everything you could possibly want to do when coding. And if they haven’t thought of it, someone else has and has written a plugin you can drop into your plugins directory and it “just works.” Speaking of plugins, vim.org’s plugin list seems neverending. I was half expecting to see most plugins have a final mod date of 2002 or something, but a good portion have newer version released within the past two weeks. It seems the ones that are from 2002 never get updated because they’re mostly perfect. Excellent.

I do miss a few things though. First off, the project file list most editors have on the left side. I installed NERDTree to alleviate that pain, but honestly it’s not the same as having my right click menus and pretty icons. I’m slowly getting used to it though. The nice thing about a text-only file tree is that in those instances where you only have shell access and need to do some coding, there isn’t a dependency on a GUI.

Tabs are another thing I miss. Gvim has tabs, but they aren’t one tab == one file (aka “buffer”) like most editors. You can hack it to do this, sort of, but it works really jenky. Instead I’m using MiniBufExplorer, which takes away some of the pain. I actually hacked it a bit because I didn’t like the way it displays the tabs, which gave me a chance to look at some real vim script. It’s mostly readable to someone who’s never touched it before.

That about does it for my rant. Vim is fast, free, customizable, extendable, scriptable, portable, wonderful, etc…and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

It seems that since widespread adoption of the internet, although more and more people have become seemingly connected through social networking and other mediums, people are drifting further and further apart. A friend is no longer a friend. A real friend is now what a friend was, and a friend is someone you say “damn we haven’t talked in years, how r u?” to. Communities are popping up everywhere online that replace the communities around us physically.

This in itself I don’t feel is bad. A lot of people who never would have met are meeting and sharing new ideas. Information spreads more rapidly. Cultural consciousness is more global, which in most cases is a very good thing.

I think things start to go wrong when people get addicted to this information overload though. They use it as a fuel for everyday distraction, a replacement for the communities they live in, and a tool to deliver opinions and beliefs to them when they would have otherwise had to think (although this last item is true of most media).

Also, it’s one thing to not be in front of someone when you talk to them. A voice conversation can have emotion and depth, but it can also be quick and effortless. The fact that it’s being replaced by one-off messages that are 100% ignorable and have no real content to them is kind of sickening. I’ve heard arguments that “I text someone when it doesn’t make sense to have a whole conversation,” but I’ll see the same person texting back and forth with someone for 10 minutes straight. Or a text is delivered and the person who sent it squirms in anticipation for the reply, which may never come.

What’s wrong with a phone call? Granted, if you’re in a bar and it’s very loud, texting would be appropriate. If you call someone and they don’t pick up, either they don’t want to talk or, god forbid, they aren’t right next to their phone all times of the day. If you want to talk to someone, just call them. I don’t believe texting is a viable replacement for what was the last string of human contact we had.

That all said, I know it’s a giant ball and it rolls where it rolls and there’s no stopping it. There’s no problem with being aware of things that are going on around us though. I feel like each time a real connection between two real people is replaced with something artificial, our culture as a whole goes just a little bit more insane. I’m interested to see how this all pans out, mainly because I don’t have a whole lot of attachment to what our culture is now.

That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. What kind of business limits the usage of its products to upstanding citizens only? Last I checked it was the government’s job to impose its views on businesses, not businesses imposing their views on their customers.

I have to say, it’s nice that someone is using their business to take a stand, I guess I’d just prefer it to be in defense of free speech and expression. Sure ALL porn is smutty and violent, but that’s expression in itself. Also, can you fight basic human nature? Perhaps, on a personal level. Repression of sexual tendencies is a lot different than acceptance and non-action though. My point is that pornography is the one place where sexual fantasies are allowed to exist in any way shape and/or form, and Americans, being extremely sexually self-repressed, need that outlet, not more repression.

I also think it’s funny when someone tries to be exclusive because they’re SO awesome when someone else is doing it way better…

Let’s first talk about what an ORM is. Basically, you have an app, and you have a database. As the case with most apps, it needs to actually communicate with the database, usually by using queries. Queries are a language the database understands. They allow the application to ask the database for very specific information. An ORM sits between the application and the database. Its role is to give the application an object to communicate to. This object pretends as if it is a piece of data in the database, and allows the app to do things like data.update() or data.delete(). The ORM will write the appropriate queries to the database, regardless of the type of database. A good ORM can also perform joins between pieces of data and perform somewhat complex queries on the database. The purpose is to give a standard interface to communicate with any database.

So here’s my question: on a simple application, an ORM may be a good idea. It provides a standard interface to communicate with, and also allows the database to be “easily” switched out without modifying the main application code at all. But on any app I’ve worked on, there are many, many queries written that an ORM wouldn’t be able to map or understand. So what is the point of an ORM if it can’t handle everything? It’s a standard interface that becomes non-standard the second you write your first non-ORM query.

There is no way anybody could ever write an ORM that handles every query that possibly needs to be written. And instead of defining relationships between data in your queries, you have to define the relationships through the code.  Also, the argument I hear over and over and over: “it allows you to switch out your database easily.” Who the hell switches out their database? Why not just pick a database that does what you want from the beginning…and for the most part, they all do the same damned thing. Also, SQL is kind-of standard, so even without an ORM it’s not like you’ll be rewriting every query from scratch…most likely you’ll have to rewrite a few database-specific functions (think SELECT last_insert_id()). Is it really so hard to do this, especially if you only do it once? If you are switching from Oracle to PGSql to MySQL to MSSQL every other day, then yes, an ORM would probably make sense, but otherwise I don’t see the point.

Data is data, it is not another object. Moving everything under the sun into the object-oriented model does not make anyone’s life easier. SQL is good. Procedural is lightning fast. Learn how to use these, because OO will not solve all your problems.

I welcome use-cases besides those I have mentioned and arguments for/against ORMs in the comments. I’m speaking from personal experience and not married to my opinion…so I’m actually very curious if any of you successfully use an ORM that does everything you need it to.

It appears Google is on a mission to alienate and anger their users. Mission accomplished. You know why I don’t use other searches? Because there’s too much clutter in the results. Google is simple. You type something, it shows results. Thanks. End of transaction. No need to show me “OH! Because you typed ‘gonorrhea’ you might like AIDS!!!” or “See news about ‘gonorrhea!’” No thanks. Just show me the listings. Or would you like to see images of gonorrhea?? If I did, I’d click the “Images” link you so graciously supply on top.

So now Google is on a quest to be more like Yahoo. Idiots. Google, why do you think nobody uses Yahoo? Why do you think everyone uses Google? IT’S THE FUCKING INTERFACE, you dumb shits. Are you really too fucking stupid to realize this? The more you copy other search engines, the more your appeal slips into the ether.

I really want to not hate you Google, but you make it so hard lately. PLEASE STOP FUCKING WITH YOUR INTERFACE.

Rackspace is an amazing company. They are know for having great servers, great support, great everything. You can’t beat them. Mosso was a side project that was swallowed up by them which aims to run websites in a real, actual cloud. This is a valiant cause. To be able to upload a site to one server and have it scale infinitely over however many servers their datacenter has without ever having to touch it…that’s a miracle. It’s a great idea, that unfortunately just doesn’t work.

Mosso has repeatedly let us down, again and again. Their service is always going down. It’s hard to find a month where one of our sites hosted on the “cloud” hasn’t seen at least an hour of down time. I’d expect this from a shoddy “HOST 100 SITES FOR $2.99/mo!!” host, but not from someone charging a base rate of $100/mo. Here’s what it boils down to: you’re paying Mosso a lot of money for the privilege of beta testing their cloud architecture. Great business model.

And while Rackspace is known for fanatical support, the Rackspace Cloud is known by us for support that is fanatical about ignoring or avoiding the issues plaguing them on a week-to-week basis. Questions go unanswered, support requests ignored, etc etc.

So all in all, it’s been a terrible experience. And yes, we have been using them for more than a month…a little over a year now. Yes, we stuck it out and payed outlandish hosting rates for horrible service. Why? Because I really do wish it worked. I wish I could put a site on it and have it be up 100% of the time. That’s the point of a cloud, no? To have >= 99.999% uptime? I really wish I could put a site on there and let it scale with demand as it grew without ever having to touch it – and I can do this – but the price is my site goes down for long periods of time at short intervals (oh, plus the $100/mo). We tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, and tried to believe them every time they told us that this was the last downtime they’d be having (yes, we heard it a lot). I just can’t lie to myself any more though. Mosso sucks.

So please save yourself some time and realize that it’s too good to be true. The Rackspace Cloud is the most real and cool cloud hosting you’ll ever see, but as far as I’m concerned they are still alpha-testing it, and your site WILL go down. Want hosting that scales automatically, is zero customer maintenance, always up, and has amazing support? You won’t find it anywhere.

Mosso comes close, but they just can’t get it right. Save your money and learn how to scale on a good VPS provider.

So, in case you haven’t heard, Apple took their iPod touch, made it 5x bigger, and are now marketing it as the iPad (or “Tablet”). Where does that leave us? A portable device that’s not portable and really fucking difficult to use. The reason laptops have keyboards and pointing devices is because people don’t like on-screen keyboards. They suck. It’s necessary on small and mobile devices like the iPod touch, but on a bigger level it’s not…which why laptops exist.

So before you follow the marketing hype and buy your new $500 tablet, ask yourself “What the fuck am I thinking?! I already have an iPod, and I already have a laptop. Those swindling asslickers don’t need more of my money!”

That’s right, the iPad is a shitty in between piece of shit which is shitty and smells like shit. It’s not quite a laptop, and it doesn’t quite fit in your pocket. Stay away!! Don’t be a dweeb!

<rant>
What the fuck? Your search page was so simple. So clean. There was nothing to fix, nothing to make simpler. There was minimalist navigation on the top, and a few links on the bottom. It worked very well and was very good design.

You took something very simple, and tried to make it simpler. You have not succeeded. You took what you view as a problem and swept it under the rug. Your homepage isn’t simpler at all…it just LOOKS simpler at first glance. Then with first mouseover, it fades in?! What the fuck are you thinking?

This is the kind of childish effect a high-schooler learning HTML 4 would hack into his first homepage with shitty javascript. It looks nifty the FIRST TIME but after that it’s completely obnoxious and frustrating. I don’t want to wait to click on Images or News. Even if it’s 1/2 second.

To use the words of a blog commenter: “Imagine being at your desk preparing to work, but the desk chair would not appear until you try to sit down.” This is exactly how I feel.

If you really want to keep your juvenile display of javascript skillz, please give people an option to disable it so we don’t have to keep a bucket nearby in case new the homepage induces violent bouts of vomiting. Until then, I (and several others from the sounds of it) will be using Bing.
</rant>

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.

We’ve all heard of howtobepunk.com, the world’s best guide on the punk subculture. Weighing in at over 15-billion page views per day, it’s one of those sites people just expect to see up…and every person on earth checks it on average 2.3 times per day. The domain recently expired, and oddly enough, I wasn’t warned.

I’m not too bent out of shape about that, it’s happened before (and many times it has been my fault). What really chaps my caboose is the transfer process. See, I hate GoDaddy with a passion. Always have. Since NFS.net started doing domain registration, I’ve been pretty gung-ho about using them. I decided to transfer HTBP.com to Nearly Free Speech.

GoDaddy, to the full extent the ICANN let’s them, makes this the most difficult and tedious process you can possibly imagine. Every guide you find on their site about transfer domains assumes that you want to transfer the domain TO them. Why would anyone, after all, want to transfer a domain away from the best registrar/host/whatever else the fuck they do in the world? You’d have to be crazy.

Call me a fruitcake. Anyway, I finally got through the whole process, activated the transfer, blah blah. GoDaddy sends me an email saying it’s all successful. Great, I can sit back now.

NO!!!!! I can’t. There’s some sort of domain transfer “pending” system that holds on to the domain for a week (or until you approve it AGAIN). GoDaddy decided to hide this at the bottom of the email they sent telling me everything is fine.

Anyway, dealing with those guys is a nightmare. Only one domain left on there, and once it comes up for renewal I’ll never host another domain on GoDaddy again. Their system itself works fine, but even a highly skilled web developer has trouble using their shitty interface. I can’t imagine how some average douche who wants to register mydogsparkyiscool.com would make heads or tails of it.

</rant>

Ever see this? The file upload.php exists at that location. Checking the source shows that, indeed, the script loaded and threw and error. Why then, pray tell, does firefox insist on persisting in its endeavour to destroy my life and career and steal all my friends?

I’ve found no documentation of this “feature” so have been thus far unable to get rid of it. Any ideas?

So why do I hate it?

<rant>
There’s no fucking point! All bad programmers write bad code. Why create a language within a language just to force bad programmers to do one thing right? I realize that Smarty does enforce separation of logic from display very well. I’ve used it in several projects. But if its capabilities are so strikingly similar to PHP that for most things there is a 1-1 reference, why bother? Why not just use PHP code?

Also, the plugins (and {php} tag) allow you to make logical decisions, run mysql queries, send rockets to the moon…there’s nothing you can do in PHP that you cannot do in Smarty…which makes Smarty completely worthless for what it’s trying to do.

If you want to promote good programming, you don’t need Smarty. You can rewrite Smarty as a PHP object that sets variables and includes a template. I’ve written this a dozen times over…and it does the exact same thing, except templates are in PHP so everyone can understand them, there is no caching trickery going on, and best of all you don’t need to reference some stupid guide on how to display something in a strange language which you already know how to do in PHP.
</rant>

So, in summation, please don’t stop using Smarty. It’s a good piece of code for people who don’t understand the basics of separation of logic from display…but realize that Smarty is a hack, a patch, a band-aid. The REAL problem is bad programming, not something inherently wrong with PHP that needs to be rewritten.