Matt_ptr *

This is my first update in quite a while. I’m not dead. I had a few posts in draft mode, but I never finished them. The topics were:

• A web crawler script I wrote and some design issues I was having with it.
  - I actually figured out some of the problems with it and made it much more efficient. So there really wasn’t any point in finishing the post. It was more of a thinking out loud kind of deal.
• Why they should let MySQL die and why Monty Widenius should bite me.
  - This was going to be my response to Monty’s Plea to people to save MySQL from Oracle (I don’t feel like finding the link, just google it). The gist was that he probably shouldn’t have sold out to Sun, would be better concentrating on MariaDB — a supposed MySQL successor, and that generally MySQL sucks and there are better alternatives anyway. I also held him responsible for the countless headaches I endure while being forced to use MySQL, and thus decided he could bite me. :)
• How awful the jQuery plugin site is and some thoughts on how to replace it.
  - I started writing this post because I have such a hard time keeping my plugins up-to-date due to the fact that the plugin directory is terrible. I started writing the post and just went through the site listing the problems I saw. The list became so massive that it clearly was something that I couldn’t handle on my own, so the post turned in to a call to action with the suggestion of using Google App Engine to run the site. But, the number of problems is depressing and thinking about spearheading a project of such magnitude in my free time was not at all appealing.

So, the holidays came and went. The new year as well. I’ve been extraordinarily busy at work and at home, extraordinarily lazy and tired.

But I do have one small announcement. Off and on over the past year, I’ve been toying with ActionScript and Flash and Flex because a long, long time ago, I thought  I would pursue Flash as a game platform.

After some consideration, I will absolutely *NOT* be doing that.  While ActionScript, as a language, isn’t terrible, I don’t particularly like it. It’s similar to Javascript, but with more crap that you have to do. The real problem I have is with Flash as a platform. In short, it’s probably one of the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s slow, bloated, and full of known security holes. I could make a whole blog dedicated to how much I hate Flash and problems with it.

The only positive thing I can say about Flash is that it’s everywhere. Though, with all of the security problems, it may not turn out to be a good thing.

Instead — I’m trying to stay positive — I plan on focusing on some of the emerging Web App technologies as a platform. I have a feeling in 6 months, I’ll be back here griping about how ridiculous canvas, WebGl, etc. are.

I may try to write a simple game to test, or redo a certain game with flying corpses. So, until then.

I’m starting to think I’m a masochist. Examine the evidence:

• I’ve been in 2 serious relationships with crazy (and I do mean crazy) girls — both ended crappily.
• I still hand wind my guitar strings.
• I’ve worked with PHP since version 3 and I’ve had a job doing it for 5 years. I actually gave up a job doing embedded systems with C to keep doing PHP work.
• I keep thinking I want to learn Erlang.
• Lastly, and I think this is the big one, despite the fact that I’ve worked on no less than 3 failed IRC clients — I started working on an IRC bot project.

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A few months ago, I was contacted by the developer of Red Bean — a new PHP ORM library. He seems to share my dismay with the overall suckiness of every ORM library and he asked if I would give his project a looksee.

Before that, I have a few thoughts on Kohana and it’s ORM library.

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I realize that 99% of what I think would break 99% of all applications, but my dictatorship style is more of a slash and burn kind of style. Out with the old, in with the new.

• Replace the crappy dom, minidom and pulldom libs with lxml.
  XML support in python has always been kind of crummy, but lxml really changes that. It’s fast, robust, and way better than other xml libs that have been around.
• Remove Tkinter.
  It’s just taking up space.
• Remove the stuff for reading and writing audio files.
  I don’t really understand why Python and other stdlibs (I’m looking at you Windows) include stuff for outputting and/or manipulating WAV files. Yet there’s no other format support. This is something that’s best handled by a 3rd party, IMO.
• Replace telnetlib with an ssh library.
  I hope no one uses telnet anymore. I can’t remember the last time I had to telnet in to something
• Add an encryption library to the “Cryptographic Services”
  It’s just hashlib and hmac right now.
• I would also love for FTP to die, so replacing ftplib with an sftp lib might help facilitate that.

:)

So, among the Perl’s-Not-Dead crowd, there seems to be a pretty big buzz surrounding Catalyst, a web application framework that I’ve known about for a while. I first discovered it about two years ago while on one of my “I need to get out of PHP land” trips. I wasn’t very impressed with it then, so I decided to take another look today.

At first glance, their site looks nice and snazzy and web-frameworkish. Upon closer inspection, I want to rip my eyes out. The left column has a few statements that really punched my goat.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Thanks. You think I’m stupid. Wouldn’t, “Keep It Sublimely Simple,” have come across better?

Don’t Repeat Yourself.

I don’t know of a web framework that doesn’t say this, so no surprises. But…

There Is More Than One Way To Do It.

Am I the only one that thinks those contradict each other? If you don’t like the way something is done, then there’s another way to do it, thus introducing an element of repetition in to the equation.

*Sigh* I just don’t have the fight in me today.

Then I looked at the documentation and my head exploded. Note that the tutorial chapters are completely out of order. I’ll not bring up the fact that the CPAN color scheme is like staring at the sun for too long, so when I click on the tutorial overview, I’m greeted with a table of contents and then a *real* table of contents.

I’ve had enough. CPAN might be Perl’s strongest selling point, but to me, the I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-documentation attitude will forever keep me from using it. Not that Perl has much longer to live anyway. :P

Now, I’m going to go look at Django’s docs to be reminded of how things can be presented decently.

This has been on my mind for a long, long time. Having been spoiled with SQLAlchemy and Elixir, I am tortured with sub-par ORM libraries while at work. Granted I did get to use SA for an internal project, but the majority of the things I do involves PHP.

I’ve been stuck with it for years. It is the language of choice for people who run servers and hate web developers. So yeah, 5 years of PHP and MySQL …and using so many different libs for database abstraction has given me some room to shoot my mouth off.

Anyway, this is going to be a long post and not for the faint of heart.  I’m going to start off at the beginning…

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Awesome

I really, really, really, really want an old timey bathing suit.

See how awesome that is? That guy is picking up two chicks AND it’s a stereoscopic photo.

I want one for my next beach trip. Yeah, I haven’t been on a beach since I was twelve or so and I cook in the sun and it smells like bacon (Hickory Smoked!), but I think I could easily pull off the look.

Plus, I can use great pick-up lines.

“Hey dame, what do you say you and I go for some outlawed spirits while we buy stocks on margin. Later, we can head to my house where I have a light bulb!”

Or:
“Has anyone ever told you you’re the swinginest flapper who ever jabbed herself with a hatpin?”

Or: “Have you met the Great Gatsby?”

I. Can’t. Lose.
!

So I managed to get bit by a bunch of freaking IE bugs today:

1. The double-margin bug
2. The opposing floats bug
3. The IE8 horizontal-rule alignment crap — also in Opera :(
4. And the hasLayout bug in IE6 and 7…twice! Once has an element having hasLayout screwing up lists. The other was an element not having it causing a background to not show.

Ugh

Maybe there’s a way we can get people to switch to Firefox by offering a rebate? Give out a rebate code with a download. Or Chrome? Google’s got money…

I haven’t thought this through yet

Hardly.

After HostMySite’s apology, I agreed to hide the blog post. Someone actually admitted that the technician, who was telling our client I was doing it wrong, was wrong. Turns out he was talking about ASP, not PHP. It’s ok because I get those confused all the time.

(Editor’s note: I’ve never confused ASP and PHP. I’ve also never confused .Net and the JRE, Qt and GTK, Rails and Pylons, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, Grep and Awk, Bash and Zsh, OpenGL and Direct3D, or Vim and Emacs. Turns out some things are totally not like each other, period.)

Anyway, the matter’s done with. Til next time, I suppose.

I decided to try my hand at writing an RIA using Ajax again. It didn’t take long before I realized stuff wasn’t working or wasn’t going to work and I changed the architecture.

Then changed it again…
…and again…
…and again…

I must be doing something wrong, right? There’s no way it should be this hard in this day and age to write a really simple Ajax-app. Why can’t I wrap my head around the design phase. I get my plan in motion, then I just realize, “Oh that’s not going to work.”

Yesterday, I downloaded the free Adobe Flex SDK to give it a shot.

I must say, it’s very impressive. I felt like I was doing real programming and not just hacks upon hacks. MXML is a bit like XUL, based on my very limited XUL experience.

XUL was another candidate but, running XUL stuff isn’t as easy. There’s no guarantee that my target user will be using Firefox. Nearly everyone has Flash. The downside to Flex is that it’s probably a good deal slower than XUL would be. But that’s ok too — I’m not going for performance here, it’s more about cutting development time.

More to come later…