Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Blog

  • SharpReader Gone

    SharpReader is outta here. Last night’s crash wasn’t a fluke; after I downloaded the latest version and restored my feeds, I went back and added two Amazon feeds and sure enough, it crashed again. Turns out the URLs for Amazon’s feeds are too long for SharpReader to handle.

    The worst part is, after last night’s second crash, SharpReader wouldn’t even start back up at all—not last night, not today, nothing. So, it’s gone and I’m done with it. Won’t be going back.

    Right now I’m playing with FeedDemon. Seems pretty nice so far.

  • SharpReader Crashed

    Grrr… SharpReader, the news reader I use to read RSS feeds, just crashed on me, and lost all my feeds—data and URLs. After I’d added four of the new Amazon feeds. Shit.

    Oh, well. Fortunately, I had a recent backup of the OPML for my feeds, so I was able to get them back quickly.

  • Disposable Paperboard Computer

    Pen and spiral notebookRouted via Slashdot comes the story of the disposable paperboard computer, which can “can collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data.” It even has a generous 32KB of memory.

    After reading about this, I couldn’t help but thinking that we’ve already had disposable, paper-based computers around since, well, forever. It’s called pen and paper.

    And hey, if you throw in one of those sweet old-school PeeChee folders (why the hell can’t I find a web page for those things?? Other than online school supplies lists, I mean), you’ve instantly upgraded: not only your storage capacity, but processing power because you’ve got all those conversion and multiplication tables and various references at your fingertips!

  • Amazon RSS

    Another piece of news everyone pointed to yesterday: Amazon is now offering RSS feeds. A list of all their feeds can be found at the Amazon.com Syndicated Content page. Looks like they’re offering feeds for each top-level category in their hierarchy. The next logical step, of course, would be to offer a personalized RSS feed of your recommendations…

  • Water on Mars

    Forgot to point to this the other day: Opportunity finds evidence of water in Mars’ past. Probably you’ve all heard this by now, but it’s still incredible.

    “Liquid water once flowed through these rocks. It changed their texture, and it changed their chemistry,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the science instruments on Opportunity and its twin, Spirit. “We’ve been able to read the tell-tale clues the water left behind, giving us confidence in that conclusion,” he said.

  • Rasmus is the Man

    … Rasmus Lerdorf, that is, the creator and godfather of PHP. He’s got an article on the Oracle Technology Network titled “Do You PHP?” that’s definitely worth a read. Here’s a sample:

    What it all boils down to is that PHP was never meant to win any beauty contests. It wasn’t designed to introduce any new revolutionary programming paradigms. It was designed to solve a single problem: the Web problem. That problem can get quite ugly, and sometimes you need an ugly tool to solve your ugly problem. Although a pretty tool may, in fact, be able to solve the problem as well, chances are that an ugly PHP solution can be implemented much quicker and with many fewer resources. That generally sums up PHP’s stubborn function-over-form approach throughout the years….

    Despite what the future may hold for PHP, one thing will remain constant. We will continue to fight the complexity to which so many people seem to be addicted. The most complex solution is rarely the right one. Our single-minded direct approach to solving the Web problem is what has set PHP apart from the start, and while other solutions around us seem to get bigger and more complex, we are striving to simplify and streamline PHP and its approach to solving the Web problem.

    The guy just oozes common sense. Here’s another bit about PHP that he wrote on the PHP-DEV mailing list about two years ago, one of my favorites that just sums up beautifully the philosophy of PHP:

    The golden rules of PHP are to keep the WTF(*) factor low and the POTFP(**) factor high.

    (*) What The Fuck
    (**) Piss Off The Fewest People

    No two ways about it: he’s one of my heroes.

  • Catching up on email

    I’ve been terribly lax lately in responding to my emails that are ebook requests. I’m awfully sorry about that; I’m responding to some tonight, but if you sent me a request for an ebook and haven’t heard back from me, I apologize.

  • Advanced PHP Programming

    The book Advanced PHP Programming is out, by George Schlossnagle. Looks like it might be pretty interesting; there’s certainly a scarcity of good PHP books that cover advanced topics—most of them are targeted at the beginner and the basics, and don’t have anything to offer me.

    (Quick disclaimer: some of the Wrox books actually look like they might be decent, but I haven’t had my hands on a Wrox PHP book since the first couple they published.)

    There was a time when I wanted to write a PHP book. It was going to be an advanced book, called “PHP Secrets” and cover all sorts of topics. I never really pursued it, though, largely because of a general disillusionment in the computer book industry: you spend a year or more writing a book on a subject, and by the time it gets published it’s obsolete.

    Thinking about it now, though, maybe a better venue for such a thing would be online, like what Mark Pilgrim did with his Dive Into Python book. That might be kind of cool; a live work-in-progress that I could (theoretically) keep up-to-date. Hmmm.

  • The Pine Tavern

    When it comes to dining in Bend, Oregon, few places compare to The Pine Tavern. Located in Downtown Bend, just off Mirror Pond and the Deschutes River, the Pine Tavern Restaurant is one of the signature establishments of this town and one of the best places to eat, period.

    Good food, good drinks and good service. I’ve never had a bad meal there. And inside is one of the most unique features you’ll find anywhere around here: the restaurant is built around a large, live ponderosa pine tree that is the centerpiece of the dining area; the trunk dominates the room and rises through the ceiling with the top of the tree high above the building. Windows in the ceiling afford the full view. It’s quite amazing.

    If you happen to be visiting Bend, you should definitely consider having dinner at the Pine Tavern a requirement. Even my in-laws, who are notoriously picky about what and where they can eat, love the place and have at least one meal there every trip. On the other hand, if you live in Bend and haven’t been, then I’m seriously thinking about revoking your Bend card.

  • Language

    About a week back Andrei Zmievski blogged about taking linguistics classes and on the fluid nature of languages, and got me thinking about them. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in French with the equivalent of a minor in Russian (and yet I work in the computer industry… funny, eh?), but I’m far from fluent in either language, even though I’d like to be. And I’d like to learn other languages, too, if I had the time.

    I think every American should learn a second, maybe even a third language. Especially when a good part of the educated world beyond our country is multi-lingual; I think it puts us at a definite disadvantage.

    Yes, I know there’s always someone who will disagree with me on this point. English is quite the lingua franca, and will continue to be, so it’s easy to argue that there’s no need to learn another language in today’s world. Not so. I’ll touch on this in a future post.

    And of course, this always brings to mind one of my favorite rants from Dennis Miller, about the English language:

    I understand that English is a protean, evolving language that must constantly change in order to remain relevant. But let’s not go out of our way to appropriate words from other cultures simply to justify making something more expensive. Hey, you can add all the Italian suffixes you want, you’re not fooling anybody over there at Starbucks—it’s still just coffee. Now ring me the fuck up, you frappaloser.