Ramblings of a web guy

We are just passed the time of year when we give thanks (in the US anyway) and we are coming up on the time when we all try and be giving.  I feel like my last few blog posts have been a little too negative and want to make up for that.  So, I want to say thank you to some people for what I have in my professional world.

Daniel deGrandpre and Richard Moss, dealnews.com
I have known both these guys since I was a kid.  I was so excited when they offered me a full time job working on the internet.  I was in a Dilbert world and they rescued me.  Richard gave me the best recommendation I have ever heard.  I listed Richard as a reference for the job I had before dealnews.com.  The interviewer told me that when she asked Richard why she should hire me, he said “Because if I had the money, he would be working for me.”  A year later, when I told her I was leaving she asked where I was going.   I happily told her, “Remeber that guy?  He has the money.”  Thanks Dan and Rich.

Rasmus Lerdorf, Zeev Suraski, Andi Gutmans and other PHP contributors
I was coding Visual Basic when I found PHP.  It was really cool to write code that could make these web pages with such ease.  It made sense and did exactly what I needed it to do.  With each version it has gotten better.  Despite any conflicts on some mailing list, PHP and its community stays the best tool for the job.  Thanks to anyone that has ever helped with that.

Monty Widenius, Brian Aker, Jay Pipes and others at MySQL
Along side PHP has been MySQL all the way.  Early on it was msql, but that did not last long.  Like PHP, MySQL has endured criticism and scrutiny to remain the best too for the job.  It has also gotten better with every year and I feel honored to be a part of the MySQL community if only from the edge.  I even started pronounceing it right this year at MySQL Conference.  (It’s my-s-q-l in case you didn’t know)

Apache Foundation
There are lots of people in this group that have given time to make my professional life what it is today.  I was a little active in the community a few years back, but have had little personal experience with the Apache foundation recently.  I still appreciate everyone that has had a part in it.

Thomas Seifert and Maurice Makaay, my Phorum cohorts
Last but in no way least are these two guys.  I had some help here and there with Phorum for the first few years.  But, Thomas has been on the team since 2001.  He took Phorum to a new level by adding user logins and other things he needed.  Maurice has been with us as a user for a while and a team member for a few years now.  Like Thomas, he has brought Phorum up a level.  Besides help with Phorum, they are great friends and another resource I can tap for help when I am confused about things.

If you read internals (and by read, I mean glance at the barrage of subjects in your inbox), you too have seen the flood of namespaces related emails. I have no technical expertise to add to the conversation. However, unlike the otehr 90% of the people that are like me, I decided not to get involved. The garbage collector being discussed is much more interesting. For those that have not been following along, here is the basics from the best of my memory.

People asked for namespaces.

The powers that be did not want to do them.

Someone with CVS access made a patch and suddenly it was a good idea.

Yay! We have namespaces in PHP6 and maybe 5.3.

Some people with CVS access decided they did not like them again.

Then other people defended them and get major kudos from all over the internet.

Then more patches were made to make them do what the haters wanted them to do.

And now people are again calling for resolution to an issue that afaik, was solved when it was commited to HEAD.

Then there are the pilot fish in all this. They swim along in the conversation trying to steer things their way. They want this feature or that feature or some odd thing that they used Super Pascal for AS400 in 1994. They say things like “while we are talking about namespaces, blah blah blah”.

Now, if you don’t care what I think about namespaces, you can stop reading here.

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Ok, still here. Namespaces that are one per file, but only protect the functions and classes in the file are pointless. It is syntactical sugar. Instead of my_function. I have the namespace my with a function named function. But, in some other file I can call my::function or use my; and then use function. Boy, that makes it all clear. Right? If it is going to be one per file, lets scope the whole file please. Some of us still use PHP as Rasmus intended (or as I believe he intended). To quickly build pages using includes sanely. My include “header.php”; beats your object with a header method any day. Every developer I have worked with understood include “header.php”; in seconds. But dammit, the down side is that something in header.php eventually makes my life hell because of scoping.

Most of all, would someone please just say the magic words to make the insanity stop. There is a “REAL” internals list somewhere that we can’t all see. You guys hash it out on there and then tell us what the plan is. All this back and forth is making us crazy. Maybe I should rehash unicode support again just to see the namespaces discussions die. I am not sure if that would be better or worse.

That is all that I have to say about that.

Planet MySQL dropped my blog for a while.  It came back, but not fully.  Several blogs are showing just an A as their content on Planet MySQL.  Maybe this will get their attention.

Planet PHP on the other hand has lost me and other completely.  They both happened about the same time.  I thought it was WordPress.com, but it was not just WordPress blogs and both the Phorum Planet and Chris Shiflett’s Planet have had no issues.

So, I wonder if the Planet PHP and Planet MySQL sites are running the same code for aggregating and something about is broken with some feed types.  Maybe this will get them looking.  The world is missing my wonderful content (heh).  And I am missing other’s great stuff.

I am glad I am not the only one that wonders what is up with the social network bub^M^M^M boom.

I will try and keep up with takedown notices as quick as I can.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/958560/here_comes_another_bubble/