Looking for Something to Do in Boston Tonight?

Why not go to the Ryze mixer?  [_Go_]

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PHPBB, Sessions and Inbox Buddy

We use PHPBB, an excellent web discussion tool, to run the support forum for Inbox Buddy.  And lately it has been crashing with a "Error Creating New Session" issue.  And while I have learned to laboriously go into MySQL and purge the session table, they now have an officially sanctioned fix for it.  Apparently the issue is that a lot of bots are hammering sites trying to retrieve data and thus generating a lot more sessions than necessary.  Since sessions are stored in a heap table, the maximum rows are quickly reached and the sessions are maxed out giving the error.  The fix automatically deletes from the heap table allowing the error to (theoretically) never occur.  [_Go_]

This brings me to a larger session related php question -- are sessions good or bad in general?  It seems like lately whenever I encounter sessions in a large php application, they always cause some kind of issue.  Is this bad programming or simply the nature of sessions?  Clearly linking directly to specific things is more important than ever and sessions seem to interfere with that (at a minimum they mangle the url's length). 

Note: I haven't done much programming with sessions in PHP at all so I could be way off base here.  Perhaps they are the best thing since sliced bread and squirtable mustard and I just don't know it.

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Best Joe Millionaire Article Yet

John Dvorak of all people is the author too.  Go figure.  He raises some very valid points:

Has the Internet become the only way we can get a glimpse at facts? I think so more and more, despite all the hoaxes and fakery there. On the Net, at least you have a shot at finding out the truth.

My journey into the vagaries of truth begins with the Fox reality TV show, "Joe Millionaire." [_Go_]

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Marriage Without Sex

I know of at least two readers who've gotten married recently and this might be of interest to them.  All I can say is Yikes.  But I would have to agree with the thrust of the article -- this type of relationship is definitely out there.  Note that I didn't say "alive and well" since I'm strongly against this type of relationship.  But the article is a damn interesting read.  Long but Recommended.  Found via Halley.

During two strange days in New York last winter, three married people—one after another—confessed to me either that they had stopped having sex or that they knew a married person who had stopped having sex. [_Go_]

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Rant: Add to Cart ! Or Smack that Stupid Marketing Manager in the Head!

I was just over on Gizmodo reading something about how LCD TVs are now much, much cheaper.  So I go over to Amazon to take a peek and find this rather strange text:

To see our low price, add this item to your cart. You can always remove it later. Why don't we show the price?

And when you click on the Why don't link then you get this:

Price "Too Low to Display" Explained

The "too low to display" message indicates an additional discount is in effect, and this discount is calculated in the Shopping Cart. You can see this price by clicking the product name and then selecting the Add to Cart button on the product information page. Please be assured that simply adding an item to your cart does not obligate you to buy it--you can always delete the item from your cart if you decide not to purchase it.

I'm sorry folks.  Either the technical staff is incompetent and simply can't figure out how to apply a second discount or some dumb ass Marketing Manager came up with the idea "Well if we get them to put it in the cart then they're more likely to buy it".  And that dumb ass probably got a promotion for this. 

Sorry!  Buzz!  Game Over!  Now I can see this slightly working on cheap items where the effort of removing from a car (3 to 4 extra clicks) isn't worth it but not for this type of item.  The problem here is that:

• Amazon only does this on the more expensive items
• When they are more expensive you are going to remove them from the cart

So all this does is frustrate consumers and lead to pissy articles like this.  Stoopid.

Oh and if Amazon is concerned about screen scraping shopping bots, get over it.  If they want to then they are going to make the bot smart enough to have a shopping cart.  If you really want to solve the shopping bot issue then sent the prices down as an image file which just can't be parsed.

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Tekka's Up

Woo Hoo!  Tekka's up and running.  Tekka is Mark Bernstein's new online magazine.  Actually it isn't really Mark's but his company, Eastgate Systems, is the sponsor and that is how I think of it since to me Eastgate = Mark (but again even that's not true).  And the reviews are *damn* good:

They're intelligent and innovative looks at modern technology, drawing from classical sources in other fields. Tekka sounds like it will be quite fun to read. . . . Tekka starts from the assumption that the reader is smart and interested, if not knowledgable about every subject. Doing this makes for great reading. [_Go_]

I particularly liked Mark's article, My Friend Hamlet, which talks about what if a holodeck was really available.  Very cool.  [_Go_]

Since Tekka is a quite different concept in magazines, rather than try and describe it myself and not do it justice, I'm going to let Mark describe it by quoting from his blog:

The technical press seems to be obsessed with money: great software is whatever sells ad space and trade show booths. The remnants of the old new economy produce chiefly press releases. The first artistically-successful hypertexts are almost 15 years old (and still very much in print), and they've inspired an impressive array of books, essays, articles, and dissertations, but a generation of talented young scholars finds itself with no place to publish. Criticism has stalled, and critical standards are dismal.

We're bored now.

We're seizing this moment, inauspicious as it may seem, to launch Tekka, a new Web magazine about enjoying new media and creating beautiful software. Tekka is serious reading, for serious readers. No kid stuff, no management fluff. [_Go_]

Bias Disclaimer: I was a contractor on the launch of Tekka, writing the security, previewing and authentication code.  Because of this I didn't want to be the first one to blog it.  Also Mark's been a friend for more than 15 years now.

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Yet More Snow!

<RANT>Grumble, Bitch, Moan, Vent.</RANT>  Still my day won't be as bad as Kasia's was a few days ago since I work largely from home.  [_Go_]

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Honesty in Recruiting

I have to admit that I'm a sucker for a job ad with details like these:

Canidiates must be reliably quick-witted, humble and have a good sense of humor. [_Go_]

I love stuff like this but my ad for an HR person would be something like this:

Candidates must have good spelling or at least not be so egotistical that they don't feed difficult words through Microsoft Word when they are unsure.

Oh and in case anyone needs a job, this is for a Perl programmer in Marina Del Rey, California.

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Taxes

This is damn interesting:

WASHINGTON -- Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Tuesday that he wasn't totally convinced that a new round of tax cuts is necessary to bolster the economy and said Congress must make sure future budget deficits remain under control.

Greenspan's comments dealt a blow to President Bush's drive to enact a new round of $1.3 trillion in tax cuts, which Democrats have complained will lead to exploding budget deficits in future years.[_Go_]

This whole notion of YMTC (yet more tax cuts) seems just plain wrong -- at best it is a temporary bandaid on our economic woes and at worst its crippling for the years to come.  Sigh.  Oh and in an interesting side note to this, not one person I've discussed the tax cuts with thinks it is a good idea.  Not one.  And that includes one staunch republican who is so in bed with the party that he actually raises money for the party. 

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Open Source Conference on Open Office

I just got this in email.  Definitely interesting:

What: First OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon 2003)
When: March 20th - March 21st 2003
Where: University of Hamburg, Germany
URL:  [_Go_]

Meet the community, users, and OpenOffice.org sponsors at the first OpenOffice.org Conference. The conference will convene immediately after CeBIT, which ends on 19th of March. Hamburg is only 100 miles (160 Kilometers) from Hannover.

...

Miguel de Icaza and Bruce Perens both say that OpenOffice.org is THE most important Open Source project because people can try it without switching from Windows and if they do they'll discover
that Open Source can work for them. They no longer have to pay big bucks for office productivity.

This is very, very interesting -- and potentially scary for Microsoft -- people starting to push Open Office on the Windows platform.  We've seen some signs of it already (the bundling in Europe with Sony Vaio desktops) but this sounds like a much bigger push.  As the old Chinese curse goes "May you live in interesting times".

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