Over on Worse than Failure, there’s a thoughtful essay about the usual software is impossible: Avoiding Development Disasters. The graphic looks right to me. A dozen paths to failure. Success rare.

People don’t write PHP like this anymore, or, if they do, they get hurt badly. This is old code of mine. Timestamp is January 29, 2002. Yeesh. <? $where_they_are = ‘http://’ . $SERVER_NAME . $REQUEST_URI; if ($HTTP_REFERER!=”) { $recipientlist=’joe@artlung.com’; $emailsubject=”visit to $SERVER_NAME via ” . $HTTP_REFERER; $emailbody=”someone came to $where_they_are via $HTTP_REFERER ip address: $REMOTE_ADDR…

Thoughtful thinking from DVD Jon who knows about this stuff. Think Closed Has Nokia or Sony Ericsson ever bricked or refused service on an unlocked phone? Not that I’ve heard of, and if they did, they would have been quickly sued in several countries where consumer rights are more strongly protected. Did Sony ever brick…

I really like that Steve Yegge fellow. He’s funny and smart and he builds stuff with computers. That’s my kind of people. Stevey’s Blog Rants: Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume Face it: all the traditional advice about trying to convince the hiring manager that you’re a plucky, scrappy young individual from a…

I mentioned Pair.com‘s system upgrades the other day, which have now been accomplished and went off — from what I can tell — without a hitch for all the sites I host. Bully for them, and for me! Before the upgrade happened, I emailed Pair.com support and got a prompt reply that yes, indeed, there…

This week, my hosting company, Pair.com, will be making several upgrades to the machine I host with. The biggest transition is that my sites will now be running under PHP5 instead of PHP4. Yesterday I upgraded the blogs I maintain to the latest and best version of WordPress — version 2.2.3 — and for the…

#.htaccess SETTINGS TO TURN OFF # STUPID MAGIC QUOTES IN PHP # I HATE MAGIC QUOTES PROBLEMS php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off UPDATE: See Magic Quotes, and note: This feature has been DEPRECATED as of PHP 5.3.0 and REMOVED as of PHP 6.0.0. Relying on this feature is highly discouraged.

I can see the posts in the database, but something went wonky on the upgrade and everything before the upgrade is invisible. Woe is me till I find the time to fix it. Please stand by. I’m asking about it on the wp support forum. Update: And we’re back. The way I fixed it: running…

Dear LazyWeb: I discovered the Model-View-Controller pattern earlier this year. Well, not discovered, I had read about it in OO programming articles years ago. And it’s been around for decades. But this year I think I’m finally getting it. I think the reason I never got it was because I’d never encountered a system that…

When I was first playing with databases I was putting lots of stray stuff into mine. It was pretty fun, actually. mysql> select want_id, artist, title from music_wanted; +———+———————–+——————————–+ | want_id | artist | title | +———+———————–+——————————–+ | 0001 | Anderson, Laurie | Mr. Heartbreak | | 0002 | Cocker, Joe | Greatest Hits |…

Here’s my hello world moment for the programming language Python: #!/usr/local/bin/python print “Content-type: text/html\n” print “hello” if 1 == 0: print “1 is 0” else: print “1 is not 0” print “” print “word “*10 Which results in hello 1 is not 0 word word word word word word word word word word Expect more…

As my pal Matt Lee (Sassy) says: We are dorks. Read it

Although it’s being deprecated, this article on CDONTS Mail is worth me mentioning so I can find it in the past.

Lots of interesting chatter about SOAP, XML, APIs, and Web Services right now: Google’s Gaffe (this article asks if Google’s API is overly complicated by SOAP) SOAP Wars (the converse take) The always interesting Shirky with another take on Web Services/APIs SOAP vs. REST (Representational State Transfer) REST and Web Services Some interesting reading. Though…

this code is equivalent between postgresql and mysql: mysql: create table crawford_addresses ( id int(10) auto_increment primary key, … ); postgresql: create table “crawford_addresses” ( id serial , primary key (“id”), … );

“The story of Flash as told by its inventor Jonathan Gay” — kind of neat. At my first web job we did lots of Splash work, crazy crazy stuff. I have the old FutureSplash and Flash icons in my old resume (I’m not linking you to old resumes. Yuck. The brave and/or crazy may visit…

In the lab: camelCase <-> selector-case in JavaScript w/o Regular Expressions. Why? Because sometimes you gotta make stuff for no reason.

Last night and this morning I installed htdig as the new search engine for this site internally. Back in August I mentioned that I would start using google because the solution I was trying had stopped working with any reliability. ht://Dig is open source and originated here in San Diego at SDSU. Total time for…