Entries in Mar, 2004
Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2004 × Month: Mar × Sorted by date
PHP and Apache 2.0
For as long as Apache 2 has been stable, the PHP manual has carried this strongly worded warning:
[... 274 words]Omit needless words, codified
I continue to try to improve my writing. “Omit needless words” is all well and good, but identifying needless words can be a difficult task for the untrained eye. Paul Ford’s Passivator bookmarklet highlights adverbs and passive verbs, both of which can indicate weak writing.
[... 46 words]It’s only going to get worse
This analysis of the spread of the witty worm is fascinating for a whole bunch of different reasons.
[... 395 words]Conferences with Macs
Three reasons Macs make excellent companions to geek-centric conferences:
[... 226 words]Quicksilver
I found out about Quicksilver via Ted Leung a couple of days ago, and it’s already become an indispensable part of my OS X desktop. On the surface, Quicksilver is very similar to LaunchBar which I’d tried and liked but not enough to justify the price tag. LaunchBar lets you launch any application on your system by hitting CMD+space and typing enough of the name to highlight the application you want. Quicksilver takes the same idea but expands it to cover address book entries, iTunes playlists, documents, bookmarks and more. It’s incredibly slick, highly configurable and doesn’t cost a penny.
[... 173 words]Pydoc
Pydoc is awesome; I don’t know how I missed it for so long. Simply type the following at the command line:
[... 96 words]Zend PHP 5 Goodies
Zend have quietly released a veritable treasure trove of PHP 5 tutorials via their PHP5 InfoCenter:
[... 212 words]Democratised Namespaces
The New York Times: Get out of my Namespace (via Diego Doval)—a well-researched look at the huge problems (and frivolous lawsuits) being generated by the global quest for ownership of unique names.
[... 267 words]Avoiding protracted debates
I love Charles Miller’s Fishbowl. His latest entry introduces his rules for argument. Read them, follow them and save a truck-load of time avoiding protracted debates in the future. Heck, if everyone stuck to them the overall productivity of the internet would probably increase by a factor of ten.
[... 51 words]Internet culture
In what could be the most significant internet cultural event of the decade, Strong Bad has answered his 100th email. Attempts to guess the URL ahead of time were futile.
[... 69 words]PHP 5 Release Candidate 1
I haven’t blogged much about PHP in a while because I’ve been up to my nose in mod_python and loving every minute of it. This news is just too important to miss: PHP 5 Release Candidate 1 has been released, bringing the first production-ready release tantilisingly close. While I doubt PHP 5 will tempt me back it’s definitely an exciting upgrade—my biggest complaint with PHP 4 is the brain-dead object model which defaults to copying whole objects rather than passing references, and this is one of the many things addressed by PHP 5. The new libxml2 powered XML features sound really powerful, and SQLite as an on-board database should be ideal for knocking out small stand-alone applications without needing to set up a mySQL database for them.
[... 173 words]SXSW 2004
SXSW 2004 was a blast: by far the geekiest weekend of my life. I was planning on writing a few updates from the conference but quickly discovered that laptops and socialising just don’t mix—there were just too many interesting people to talk to!
[... 270 words]SXSW on a shoe-string
So, in customary last-minute style I’ve decided to go to SXSW Interactive this year. I can get a student ticket on the door so all I need to sort out is transport and accomodation. The cheapest air fare I can find at this point is $700+ (Expedia quoted me $415, then at the last minute laughed in my face and told me I couldn’t book the ticket). The Greyhound is $220 and although it’s a 20 hour journey each way the timetable is actually pretty decent, getting me to the conference for Friday evening and back by early Wednesday morning. It looks like I’m going to experience America close-up!
[... 124 words]Lockergnome reverts
I decided to hold off commenting on the news that Lockergnome were dropping their CSS layout in favour of a table based alternative until I had seen the new design for myself. I figured that they were probably just going to move to a transitional tables/CSS combination design with tables used to bypass some of the more taxing cross-browser issues. I think the following code snippet from their new front page speaks for itself:
[... 182 words]We’ve found the weapons of mass destruction
At work while poking around the official website for Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority we stumbled across some interesting meta tags:
[... 85 words]Ghost town, sponsored by Google
Via Boing Boing, this fascinating and utterly chilling photographic journey through the abandoned ruins of the Chernobyl dead zone.
[... 61 words]Attribution
Via Kevin Fox, Wired are running an article that claims that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution
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Two handy FireFox extensions
Just a quick plug for a couple of FireFox extensions I’ve been digging recently. Chris Pederick’s Web Developer toolbar / menu extension combines ideas from a whole bunch of other extensions and bookmarklets in to one extremely useful whole. The usual assortment of validation and element outlining options are present, but the really useful tools are “View Cookie Information” and “View Response Headers”. I’ve used separate extensions for these before but it’s handy to have them all in one package.
[... 118 words]LugRadio
LugRadio rocks. It’s a collaboration between Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Stephen Parkes and Matthew Revell, all members of the Wolverhampton Linux User Group. They’ve just released their second episode after over 1,000 people downloaded the first one. It’s witty, laid back, saracastic and quintessentially English—in fact just listening to some genuine British banter is enough to make me a little homesick. Thoroughly recommended.
[... 71 words]In praise of Apache documentation
I spent much of today upgrading a distinctly hairy Apache 1.3 server to Apache 2.0 as part of a routine OS upgrade. It certainly wasn’t plain sailing—I still have a few crinkles to iron out—but that’s more down to the weirdness of the existing configuration than any problems with Apache 2.
[... 180 words]