Thursday, October 28. 2004

I stumbled accross this posting today.

Although frankly I really didn't feel the need to read the entire thread, I can tell you that the posting to the PHP 3 mailing list is related to the Smarty Templating Engine back in the day. In fact, I believe this was the original spec Andrei proposed before Smarty even existed. Although I don't remember the exact e-mail, this posting reminded me that there was a point in time I thought exactly this way... quoting myself:

"The differences between how I work now and how you propose work be done in the future is staggering -- you are asking me to let a designer that I don't trust to write basic HTML to write advanced control loops and logic blocks using a top-end system which converts this pseudo-language into PHP and THEN processes the PHP Code... FINALLY outputting the page to the user... assuming that designer wrote his code right AND the top-level parsing engine actually parsed it correctly. "

Man, considering I've given Numerous Talks on Smarty, am the author of IntSmarty, and this very web site is completely Smarty-powered, this posting is clearly a case of me shoving my foot deep down my throat. In my defense, it was written 4 years ago.... and I do still agree that there are circumstances when Smarty doesn't make any sense... but still -- well, needless to say its quite funny to read that posting now. Since it's out there, I figure I'd bring it to light myself and laugh before someone else beat me to the punch ;)

So I'll say it, everyone mark it down in your calendars -- I was dead nuts wrong. Okay, now everyone go get back to your real jobs. :)

Tuesday, October 26. 2004

By popular demand I've put together the example code I've used throughout some of my recent talks (most recently in my Object Oriented Programming in PHP 5 talk given at php|works) to highlight different features or functionality in PHP 5 / GD. I've released it under my self-dubbed Coggeshall.org License (Which is basically equals BSD) and gave it the very original name GDObjects.

The basic idea behind GDObjects is to provide an object-oriented wrapper library for the now very old (and relatively cumbersome) to use GD extension for PHP which is much easier to use and work with. Since I did write this code originally for the purpose of example, hopefully you'll also learn a thing or two about PHP 5 OO and advanced GD manipulations along the way. There are some neat things about it (such as centered cropping/text watermarking of images), and thanks to the wonders of PHPDocumentor there is even an API documentation for those interested. To me, one of the coolest things about this code is it unifies a lot of very similar things (different image and font formats) into a single easy to use API -- something I thought was sorely missing from the GD extension as it stands.

As with all of my code I release I am more than happy to hear your feedback. Moreover, I'm just tickled with excitement if you find the time to improve on them by submitting patches. (Okay, not quite that excited -- I just hope someone out there finds it useful).

Wednesday, October 20. 2004

For those who were still trying to download my RSS feed from this URL:

http://www.coggeshall.org/rss.php

I finally noticed you and have setup a redirect to the proper location:

http://blog.coggeshall.org/rss.php

Please update your readers if you are still pointing to the new locations. I'll keep the redirect in place but the new URL is where all the action is at. Thanks!

Wednesday, October 20. 2004

So recently I made time to maintain what was becoming a large digital mess inside of my computer at home. Although as one might expect my Redhat 8 installation was in perfect condition and operating just fine, the Windows XP installation I had for a dual-boot was all but completely shot. Since I installed Windows after Linux, and I figured it was time for a clean sweep anyway I just went ahead and nuked the entire computer (minus archive partitions) and re-installed fresh.

After installing Windows 2000 I did two things:

1) Downloaded Firefox to replace Internet Explorer

2) Went straight to Windows Update to fix all of the security holes they've found so far in the operating system.

One of the upgrades that Microsoft provides is of course for the vast quantity of security holes in their Internet Explorer browser (Service Pack 1). Although the download and installation went smoothly, upon reboot Windows 2000 was completely unstable. First off, I couldn't even get the system to boot without blue-screening about some sort of kernel-level uncaught exception, then once I got it to finally boot the scripting engine which powers so much of Windows was shot to the point where I could barely get IE to uninstall.

Needless to say, this is a perfect example of how an architecture which attempts to be everything to everyone is a really bad idea. That service pack should have never crashed the entire computer. However, it's a likely scenario when you tie critical system components like the kernel directly into things like a web browser as our good friends at Microsoft did when they attempted to side-step their legal troubles. Regardless of whatever stupid reason possessed them to do it, when upgrading your browser can take down your kernel there is an obvious and significant flaw in the architecture -- one that once again reaffirms my loyality to alternatives.

My advice? Do what almost 20% of all internet users are doing now and go download Mozilla firefox. I promise you installing it will never bring down your kernel, isn't prone to system-threatening security holes, and best of all just works.

Monday, October 11. 2004

There are a lot of people who have inspired me, some times you don't even realize they have done it until well after the fact. Although I never knew the man personally, I just wanted it to be known that Christopher Reeve was one of those people. He died Sunday at the age of 52 from complications relating to his injuries.

The thing that sticks most in my head when I think of this man was an interview I happened to catch with him on Larry King Live. Here was a man who arguably had the world in his favor one moment, and then found himself losing one of the most fundamental freedoms that we all take for granted. Yet, despite all that was against him I watched as he proudly showed off how he had relearned to move his finger. The movement was so trivial, yet it represented a optimisim and hope that I think should serve to inspire us all.

The measure of man can't be weighed in the humility brought by success but the courage and grace shown in the face of failure. As we all move along in our day to day lives we are assured to face uncertainity and adversity; we should take notice of what this man stood for. I hope in my best, or worst, of moments I can be half as courageous as this true Superman.

Saturday, October 9. 2004

Since I had some time and other interest in exploring the possibilities of tools like PHPDoc for some projects I am working on, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to add a little documentation to my IntSmarty project.

After a lot more playing around with it than I really should have had to do, I finally did manage to get the documentation to generate properly. Unfortunately, none of the tools I found to generate the documenation actually did the job as painlessly as I had hoped. Does anyone know of a better OSS PHPDoc tool? If so, I'd love to hear from you.

Oh well -- at least I got some documentation online. The direct link to it is here. I am still looking for someone to write up some quick how-to points when it comes to actually using the class -- I'm just way too busy to do it myself.

Monday, October 4. 2004

Last night, I was browsing my logs as I sometimes like to do and discovered I was slashdotted on Weds for my PHP 5 talk I recently gave in Toronto at php|works.

As a few slashdotters pointed out to me, there seemed to be misc. Typos and such on the slides. What happened as far as I can tell is apparently I mistakenly put a draft copy of my slides online. Sorry to those who considered it unprofessional, It was an honest mistake. I'll try to find a few minutes sometime today to dig up the real deal from my laptop and update them.