ThankYou John and the NoSuch!  And I'm Away Until Wednesday...

I needed some help getting OSX upgraded and John and the Nosuch both came through with bells on.  John took care of a number of OSX idiocies on my part including helping me grovel through the OS X root account issue.  Many, many thanks to both of you. 

I've spent like 4 days straight using OSX now and while I do think it's beautiful, I think it's not right for me.  Having to keep a mental model of how OS X differs from Windows and Linux is just too damn hard.  If I could give up on one of the other platforms?  Maybe.  But that's never going to happen.  John said "You know too much" and maybe that's so.  Or maybe I'm too old (34, almost 35) and set in my computing ways. I've been on an Intel derived processor base now for 24 odd continuous years now and that's a long ass time.  I have nothing but respect for those that can concurrently use both but I just can't.  The mixture of keyboard differences, Windowing model differences, alt+tab, terminal's lameness, application installation differences, *nix subtleties (scp is subtly different as is ls and help has been removed from a number of standard gnu tools).  That said OSX is just beautiful and I wish I could tolerate it.  It's definitely the right choice for a lot of people.

But My iBook is now a demonstrable machine for PHP and MySQL apps.  And since I'm leaving on a trip until Wednesday where I need that, that's wonderful.   So, in my typical traveling disconnectedness, I'll be without email and without IM and without blog until Wednesday AM at the earliest.  Best to everyone. 

7:33:59 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Being Kind to Software Developers or "Why Make Extra Email for Yourself?"

I was just over on PHP Everywhere where I saw that Enygma, the person behind PHPDeveloper just lost his job.  That just sucks.  I don't know Enygma personally but I know just how hard it is to be out of work.  And these days it's even harder.  So best of luck to Enygma.  (Suggestion to Enygma, link to a resume of yourself next time from your blog so people can see who you are and what you could do for them).

Anyway I saw that Enygma just linked to an article on parsing RSS with PHP.  That's obviously cool.  So I went to check it out and NOWHERE in the article could I find a link to the entire code.  NOWHERE.  That just plain cruel.  Every programming language has novices.  Every language.  What they did was write the article so you could put it together i.e. a subhead was "Function ParseRSS" and then a paragraph and then the code but that's, to me at least, mind bogglingly dumb.  All this does is this:

• Make everyone have to work harder to use their code
• Cause novice developers to get confused
• It will almost certainly lead to one or more unwanted bugs from people that put it together wrong
• Lead to rants like this
• Cause the author to get more than usual emails from people saying "In this article I did X but it didn't work"

So people, if you are going to write a programming article, just toss in a link to the full source code.  Take a look at thsi article where I not only did it but also told you how to use php's source coloring function.  [ Go ]  It doesn't matter what language you are working in, having a link to the full code is always the right thing to do.

BE KIND TO SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS !

Disclaimer: Today's early morning bitchy post was brought to you courtesy of a) lack of sleep b) a really bad week c) stupidity on the part of Zend in publishing articles this way; what were they thinking?  And if they've done it this way forever then more shame on them

8:22:29 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This