Matt_ptr *

Added a new example to the Programming page. It’s a short, short file that is a pretty decent example of Python Metaclass usage.

I was, at one point, a big fan of the Visual Studio Environment. Yesterday, my appreciation of it was crushed — perhaps permanently.

See, every once in a while, I’ll get the urge to program something. Yesterday, I went to start up a new WPF project in C# Express. I wanted to code myself a little forecast/weather grabber from the NOAA NDFD Forecast Soap Service which I had experimented with before. So I added the service to the project and had Visual C# generate the code, as has been the way for a long time.

Lo’ and behold: it didn’t work.

Turns out that the service didn’t specify an encoding or didn’t encode properly. C#  wants everything to be UTF-8 or UTF-16, and dies thusly. It wasn’t dying or throwing a warning about the encoding while generating the code, or even instantiating the service, but only when data was recieved after the method call. Turns out, the way to handle encodings other than UTF-* is so unbelivably complicated that I don’t care to do it, especially when specifying the encoding could easily be an option when generating the code.

So while I’m debugging this project and trying to get it to work, a “Help Update” dialog pops up and prevents me from doing anything. I try to stop the debugger at least, so this update can complete and VS tells me that it’s waiting for the update to complete. Ok… so I wait. And wait…wait and wait and wait… nothing. According to Task Manager, this update is burning up 100% of my cpu, so I get mad and terminate the process. It takes me two or three times of terminating the process before I can actually get it to die and get control of VS back. As I stop the debugger and prepare to close the IDE, the update dialog comes back, continues to burn up my cpu and my patience.

“Something must be messed up,” I think. So I repair the MSDN install. It comes back. I repair C# Express. It comes back. I uninstall MSDN, effectively removing what needed the update (or so I thought), and it COMES BACK! I uninstall C# Express and the problem goes away :)

So I’m done with Visual C# Express for a while and my high opinion of the MS development tools is shattered. It’s a shame too — I had high hopes for XNA.

Oh yeah, my computer at home is kind of shot and I can’t afford to get a new one. So this site will probably go unmaintained for a bit.

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…

(more…)

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…

So today, I had to comment out a bunch of links on a static website. It was only linked from 10 or so pages, so I thought writing a regex to comment out just that link would be too bothersome. I decided to just use VIM. Here’s how easy it was:

<Enter>  -- Open the file in WinSCP
:41 -- go to the line number of the tag to comment out
vat -- select all of the tag
<Alt-X> -- Comment out the selection with the EnhancedCommentify plugin
ZZ -- save and close
<Down-Arrow> -- go to the next file in WinSCP

That’s all. If I had more commands to do, I could record a macro and get everything down to around 6 keystrokes. Can’t beat that.

Qt 4.5 has been released. What’s that you say? Why does it matter?

This is the first release that includes an LGPL licensing option. This means you can use Qt in anything provided you distribute any customizations made to the Qt Libraries. For those uninitiated in the world of cross-platform gui development toolkits — Qt is, in my humble opinion, better than life itself.

I will download it tonight when I get home. While I’m at work today, I will daydream of all the applications I can write and distribute under a BSD license. :)

Hopefully, PyQt will follow suit and also create an LGPL license, even though event handling in PyQt is kinda crummy. Kinda really crummy.