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Wednesday, July 02, 2003

What I'd Like in PHP 5

I've been largely sitting out the PHP 5 debate but something just occurred to me. And its really simple:

Why isn't it easier to debug php code?

I mean how about these things:

A directive you could put at the top of the script that prevented var_dump calls from being shown in production code?
Line numbers of errors that more often bear a passing resemblance to where the error actually is
When the error is in a subroutine, tell me what line called the damn subroutine too since that matters more often than not
Why do I have to output <PRE> tags around my var_dump when 95% of the use of php is web apps?
Cold Fusion like error display (CF may blow green chunks but it has great error displays when a script hoses up)

Yeah I could go on but I suspect everyone knows what I mean. I know I can get around this myself (sometimes). But it strikes me that we all spent as much if not more time debugging as we do coding. Why doesn't the language make it easier? And why isn't it easier for the type of teletype debugging (aka print statements) that we all do for web apps the bulk of the time. Most web developers, at least the ones I know, don't use IDEs. So why not make debugging easier? Yeah there's lots of cool stuff but how about some bones for people who don't want Namespaces / Objects / Advanced Computer Science Thing Here.

When: 9:08:40 PM | Permalink:

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Oops...

I seem to have broken url queries temporarily with the new engine. I'm restoring that feature now but it might not return until tomorrow.

When: 8:59:47 PM | Permalink:

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Yep. Feedster "Turbo" is here. Welcome to something that is much, much, much faster. We're tuning the UI now and making fixes but its very, very usable.

When: 5:39:54 PM | Permalink:

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So You Want to Support Safari But You Don't Have a Mac.... Use Linux!

I redid the user interface for the Feedster Preferences page yesterday (no its not live yet) and all of a sudden Francois said something like "Dude. What are you thinking ????". Now I was testing it on Firebird and IE and all was happy DIV Goodness. But on Safari it was DIV Hell. So I tried it in Konquerer under Linux and got EXACTLY the same error.

How'd I solve it? I cheated. I put a Smarty if statement around the DIV tags that made it work i.e.

{if $browser eq "safari"}
HTML JUNK TO MAKE IT LOOK RIGHT (it breaks my blog template)
{/if}

For some reason that makes the DIV stuff work on Safari. No clue why. And the thought of manually counting DIV tags to make sure they are all balanced makes my skin crawl. So I'm back to browser specific hard coding. This looked perfect on IE PC / IE Mac / Mozilla Mac / Firebird Linux / Firebird PC but not on Safari and Konquerer (Safari uses the Konquerer rendering engine). So all I can say is:

THANK YOU SO MUCH APPLE FOR NOT USING THE GECKO RENDERING ENGINE

But it does say a lot though about how Apple has come back that I took the time to make it work on Safari, doesn't it?

When: 4:23:06 PM | Permalink:

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Yo! Meetup! Go Bite Me! Or Why I'm Not Attending a Meeting on Howard Dean

Sigh. Meetup.com just seems to always piss me off. This time I was over at Exploit Boston (I was testing Feedster's new "Smart Case" searching) and saw that there is a Howard Dean meetup event on July 2nd and I thought maybe I might rouse my indolent political arse up and attend. But Exploit Boston lacked a place but was linked over to the Meetup event which wants me to bloody well login to find out when it is. Sorry. Too bad, so sad, not glad -- not worth the trouble.

Score:

Meetup: -1 (not even 0; for user hostility, they get a -1)
Dean: - 0 (for hitching yourself to a silly ass service)

Note: If you claim that I'm not a real Dean supporter since I won't even bother to login to see when the meeting is, that would be right. I'm not. I'm someone who is interested enough to attend but when a roadblock like login is thrown up in my face then its not worth it.

A Note for Developers on Why Login is a Road Block

Once upon a time, back in the dot com days, I was in charge of engineering for an educational dot com and we did real user testing since our product required login. What we found was not that surprising but most of our developers didn't understand or "Just remember a username and password. (Moron!)". Specifically:

Every user has troubles because not only do they have multiple logins but multiple passwords
The format for logins and passwords invariable changes between systems
Browsers routinely forget passwords. Internet Explorer is a sterling example of this pathetic and distressing behavior.
People ***HATE*** to have to admit they don't remember their password. That makes them feel stupid which makes them run away when its required for something trivial (like the Meetup example above)

The 4th bullet is why this stuff pisses me off so. I'll admit that I forget my passwords and Meetup makes me feel like a moron -- which makes me angry -- when they require it for something trivial.

When: 2:52:51 PM | Permalink:

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