The FuzzyStuff: PHP

BlogBack: Followup on Miscellaneous Random posts

Thu, 05 Sep 2002 22:43:53 GMT

BlogBack: Followup on Miscellaneous Random posts

Just a follow up to different recent posts....

About this Blog
- I mentioned rearchitecting this blog (god I hate that as a verb) earlier and here's what it looks like. I'll make these sub blogs which don't exist yet
  - hightechmarketing101
  - inbox buddy
  - lessgeekyscott (for at least my mom and perhaps people who want my writing that is understandable to non geeky folks)
  - evectors
  - blogging
  - opensource
  - php & fuzzyoffice
  - searchcritic
  - webcritic
- Frequency on the sub blogs will obviously be less but this Radio blog will remain my "SuperBlog" and contain everything. Comments? This will all happen around next weekend when i have the time. A preview of 1 of the blogs is a http://www.hightechmarketing101.com/ with a small taste of the content and some problems with the CSS / broken links.
- All stories will remain here but be pointed to from the other sites
- Radio makes this all intricate to setup but not hard at all.
PHP Stuff
- I've been coding too much PHP to write some more but work is ongoing on FuzzyOffice and other things. Checking some of the domain names I've registered recently might be interesting for folks.
- www.oscommerce.com seems like an awesome open source replacement for the pain that is Miva Merchant. I'm still getting it running for a new test site but someone I respect greatly has it up and running already (from like Friday). And you have to love a product so good that it runs a cool online lingerie store.
- www.phpbb.com is outstanding !!!
Marketing 101
- John responded to my responses to his article. Got that ?
Rich Editing in Mozilla or "I Don't Wanna IE No More"
- Andy from www.surfmind.com is taking a swing at this. If you are interested in it, swing by www.surfmind.com and let him know or IM / email me and I'll hook you up.
- Xopus is another approach to it.
- Adam seems interested enough to at least respond to my email about it. A big name pushing for this would help a lot.
- Mozilla 1.1 is much better -- it runs well on my machine at least. And Andy is a huge advocate for Mozilla as always (side note -- it's astonishing how just one enthusiast can change your mind on an Open Source project; project leads take note)
Buffy Stuff
- I saw somewhere online that Faith is coming back for 5 end of season episodes
- At last 2 post 30 year old Buffy fans have admitted privately to me that they watch the show. It's ok people -- Joss is an outstanding writer and the humor is wonderful.
- I was wrong about Dawn breathing fire being new -- that's last season -- Thanks Deb !
- Can you believe that there is an honest to god Buffy paper magazine?
Copyright and RIAA
- WebRadio seems to be dying: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956730.html
- Napster is more dead than ever (big shocker there)
Web Development
- www.rackspace.com remains outstanding ! (had to plug a great company)
Windows
- Yet another Windows crash last night. Would you believe I found over 1.3 gigabytes of temp files on just 1 drive.
- I loathe and despise Microsoft more than ever for their shoddy engineering practices
- I got the CDs for Redhat 7.3 recently so my desktop Linux workstation will be updated and going back into daily use in a week or two
- Another bad security flaw in Windows: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-956729.html
Other Short Items
- Eszter is looking for help with cool PC gadgets -- got suggestions?

New PHP Conference Coming Up

Thu, 05 Sep 2002 14:31:13 GMT

New PHP Conference Coming Up

I just got the dates on PHP-CON, www.php-com.com, from the new www.phpjournal.com magazine. Just since I was listing to The Doors last night, I feel compelled to quote Jim: "Pretty Good, Pretty Good, Pretty Neat, Pretty Neat".
October 24 + 25, Millbrae California. Rasmus is doing the keynote and Jeremy Zawodny should also be speaking I believe.

Moving to the GNU Free Documentation License for My PHP Writing

Thu, 15 Aug 2002 09:16:17 GMT

Moving to the GNU Free Documentation License for My PHP Writing

I think it was last Friday when Nosuch convinced me to expand the scope of my writings on PHP from an isolated set of essays here and there into a comprehensive work on building a large scale PHP application. Since I'm building an Open Source project, FuzzyOffice, it actually makes a lot of sense. And using a blog as a documentation mechanism for an Open Source work just plain appeals to me. So this brings up the question of license. Sure my code is going to be GPL'd but what about the documentation? I could take the approach of making the documentation dry and boring and then saving the entertaining writing for a commercially published work. No. I'm not doing that.

I'm the author of two (well 1 full book and partial author of 1 is more accurate) commercially published computer books published in the past 6 years and I have to say that I am suffering with rage about the process. I don't want to bother people with a brutal rant. I will comment that during the writing of my most recent computer book, I was so frustrated that I took the time to find a professional literary agent and consult with him. After discussing the situation with him, he made a very interesting comment that has been zinging around my brain ever since:

If you can write ANY other type of book besides a computer book then you should do so.

His point was very simple -- computer books are easy to get published but the compensation basically sucks, the publisher has all the control and it's pretty much a rigged game. And, on this, I'd have to agree with him. I'd also add that publishers are pretty much incompetent in general.

So, if I have rage against the system then, based on yesterday's essay, I should Open Source the documentation. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm taking a lead here from Mark Pilgrim's use of the GNU Free Documentation License that provides a legal framework for freely releasing written works. Thanks Mark!

NOTE: I'm not naive. I totally admit that my releasing this work means nothing in the greater scheme of things. It won't affect the market for PHP books at all. What it does do is a) make me happy b) put one more quality (hopefully) work out there c) make it easier for people in developing countries to learn tools like php (I'm a big believer in the third world) and d) take a stand. Like Mark I think that's important. It's all too rare these days when people take a stand. Still I look at things like the most excellent Rute guide to Linux and I have to wonder.... The Rute guide is a comprehensive guide to Unix. Check it out. And it's free. Think about it -- do you really need to buy that Unix book?

I hope to have more later today and the release of the 1st few chapters. I've very, very pleased. We even made a cover graphic!

NOTE: If you are knowledgeable about Radio then you've probably been reading ahead already.

phpMyAdmin 2.3.0 is Available! Thank You Keith Devens

Mon, 12 Aug 2002 14:31:09 GMT

phpMyAdmin 2.3.0 is Available! Thank You Keith Devens

Somehow or another I wandered over to Keith Devens' weblog and I see that phpMyAdmin 2.3.0 is available. Keith did a great job summarizing the changes in this highly usable Open Source application:

http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/?id2630

I also learned a bunch of things from his blog. Nicely done. Recommended. Thanks Keith.

PHPLarge :: FuzzyOffice :: 000 - Genesis

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 09:45:13 GMT

PHPLarge :: FuzzyOffice :: 000 - Genesis

Well, all I have to say is that you really have to blame Alex for this series of articles / stories / essays / diatribes / fill in potentially derogatory statement here. Let me explain. Alex is also known as www.nosuch.org. Yesterday he popped into my IM space with a highly reasonable request. And we began chatting, discovered we have more in common than one would have suspected and then he made the responsible statement:

mrnosuch (08:57:04 AM): But my exp. is limited, and I'm just getting my head around the changes in 4.2.
mrnosuch (08:57:15 AM): I want to make sure I do things the "right way" (i.e. the secure way).
fuzzygroup (08:57:21 AM): Oh. 4.2. ACK FOO.
fuzzygroup (08:57:22 AM): http://www.fuzzygroup.net/products/fuzzyoffice/
mrnosuch (08:57:29 AM): Unforunately oodles of code examples and writings don't address it.
mrnosuch (08:57:45 AM): Well, if you have existing code, yeah, it can be a headache.
fuzzygroup (08:57:53 AM): Oh totally.
mrnosuch (08:57:57 AM): I don't have a lot, luckily, and I'd rather make sure I do things right going forward.
fuzzygroup (08:58:03 AM): do you control your php.ini ? Ah. Nvr mind.
mrnosuch (08:58:20 AM): Yeah, I do. But I actually don't use much PHP now.
mrnosuch (08:58:30 AM): The comment system, the glossary, cheap hacks.
fuzzygroup (08:58:38 AM): Ah.
fuzzygroup (08:58:43 AM): It's good for hacks too
mrnosuch (08:58:53 AM): But as I get a bit more clever, I want to be clever the RIGHT way.
fuzzygroup (08:58:59 AM): Yup.
mrnosuch (08:59:04 AM): And very little example code does it the new right way.
mrnosuch (08:59:11 AM): Being a coder, I learn best by example.
fuzzygroup (08:59:17 AM): I strongly discourage the php and html intermizxing that is so common
mrnosuch (08:59:28 AM): <- whistles innocently.
fuzzygroup (08:59:40 AM): lol
mrnosuch (08:59:44 AM): I agree, though.
fuzzygroup (08:59:52 AM): Almost all my stuff starts with switch($action) these days
fuzzygroup (08:59:59 AM): and when $action is null it goes to default:
fuzzygroup (09:00:17 AM): which just falls thru to a template driven page
mrnosuch (09:00:23 AM): Makes sense.
fuzzygroup (09:00:27 AM): it seems to be a _nice_ approach.
mrnosuch (09:00:42 AM): It's frustrating that so little out there really talks about full web app development in PHP.

So you see people -- it's all Alex's fault. He prodded me. He placed the idea in my head. And then when I found out that he's about to get married to Connie, my sole thought was "It's a damn virtual wedding present". (Sure it won't do anything for Connie but do the place settings you get in a wedding ever do anything for the man? This is something that Alex even asked for! I mean a wedding present that a man actually picked out himself. How strange). And, with that introduction, I give you ...

Building a Large Scale Application in PHP: FuzzyOffice: Genesis

==> Read Story <==

My PHP Writings

Wed, 07 Aug 2002 14:20:12 GMT

My PHP Writings

Alex (who I mistakenly called Adam in a blog post on Sunday; sorry Alex) asked me for a list of all my php writings. Ack! And his reward is this index to my php writings. I'll try to get them all. Not sure if this is complete and some of the articles are starting points only but there's code in them thar articles as they say. Libby may like this too:

Googling for Me and PHP

Complete

Blogged Stuff:

Incomplete, honestly no idea what state they are in. I started them, got pulled off and never got back onto them.

Now Alex also brought up an interesting point -- he's tired of small scale articles about PHP applications and wants to see a series of articles about a single large project built in PHP that showcases a large, maintainable PHP application. I have one in mind but I'm curious if anyone else would be interested in such a series of articles...

Email me by clicking here if you want to see it or here if you don't. The application in question would be a large scale open source groupware style thing. All features including kitchen sink. Heavily biased towards improving productivity of service organizations (Yeah... Scratching my own niche here).

OSX and Software Pricing -- Why is Software So DAMN Expensive?

Sat, 29 Jun 2002 10:36:08 GMT

OSX and Software Pricing -- Why is Software So DAMN Expensive?

One thing that contemplating the move to OSX for myself has made me realize is the huge investment in software I have. I mean here's what I own:

MSDN (that's everything MS makes and $1,000 per year minimum. I have probably 500 odd CDs from them easy)
Multiple copies of MS Office
Norton
Graphics Tools
Everything else you can think of

So I looked at the price of getting Office for my partner's iBook. Here's the link from www.pcconnection.com:

http://www.pcconnection.com/scripts/productdetail.asp?product_id=259224

It's $439. Let's see I paid $1099 for the iBook. That's 39.94% of the cost of the machine. In 99 when I bought my 1st ThinkPad I paid almost $2,500 for it. At the time Office 2000 for the PC was about the same price or $450 (I'd have to go back to receipts and expense reports). That's 18% of the cost of the machine. Now, don't get me wrong, I know all about software development. I know how hard it is, etc. Still it really seems to me like this software has to get a lot cheaper. I mean Microsoft may have to pay programmers and maintain offices and such but Apple has to have FACTORIES !!! What's going on here? Am I the only person out here that sees a problem?

Suggestion for Apple: Negotiate an upgrade program with software vendors for users to trade in their software. For example: trade in your serial # for Office on the PC for Office on the mac.

Recommendation for Everyone Else: Honestly ask yourself do you really need office? Or is AppleWorks actually ok? Or maybe it's time to look at Open Office / Star Office. I have it on the PC (I haven't yet installed it on the iBook, it's on the infinitely long and rapidly growing Todo list).

Other, Random if You're Geeky: And if you are concerned about file formats then take a look at what George and I are doing on rOffice, www.fuzzygroup.com/roffice/. It's an open source effort to break the MS monopoly on Office formats by using different people's copies of MS Office as a highly distributed conversion engine. We could use a PHP programmer or two as well as another Python guy or two. We've got initial file conversion implemented as well as a first cut at server to client interoperability using Jabber (and that's why I was coding PHP to Jabber stuff at 5 am a few days ago). It's a standard source forge project as well as being hosted on our own servers. Note -- George is a recognized Python expert as well as a computer science professor at Loyola. My credentials are, well, practical if nothing else.

The PHP 4.2 Issues In Detail

Thu, 27 Jun 2002 02:56:39 GMT

The PHP 4.2 Issues In Detail

All,

As I noted in an earlier blog entry, I got what I feel is HOSED (that's not good) by the 4.2 release of PHP when my ISP installed it today. Maxim, my editor in chief at www.phpbeginner.com, was technically savvy enough to attempt to make this acceptable to me. And he did a great job. But you'll see my final response at the end.

I'd also like to really, really thank Guy K. Haas who was nice enough to both edit this document and confirm that I'm not nuts (at least to him, or we're both nuts). Guy has a history of working at the ANSI standards level for programming languages so it's fair to say that he more than understands this.

Note -- This one is real geeky although at least one of the fundamental issues at hand is economic.

-- Scott

==> Read Story <==

Closing Comment: I let Maxim have the last word in the email exchange so I'll make my point here. I still think it was a bad decision on the part of the PHP developers. I totally understand the techical issues behind it. And while they may be right the overall decision was wrong. IMHO of course.

The Best Beginning to a Programming Article Ever!

Thu, 27 Jun 2002 00:03:51 GMT

The Best Beginning to a Programming Article Ever!

In the beginning, the file was void, and without text. The Programmer brought text to the file by saying "Let there be hello world" and there was hello world, and it was good. But soon hello world was not as good as it once was, and the Programmer said "let there be change!" And where there once was static content in the file, there was now variable content. Beholding the creation, the Programmer was happy, and all was well...

More ...

It's Great to Be Back!

Tue, 25 Jun 2002 09:43:38 GMT

It's Great to Be Back!

Ah, it feels good to be back in the saddle again. Not being able to get your fix of "must blog .... can't blog. Ack!". It feels great. And at least my desktop remains reliable. I strongly doubt I will ever buy another thinkpad (It's my 2nd thinkpad, my 4th hard drive, when will I learn that small, light, cool computers aren't necessarily reliable?). Not only have I now written my first blog entry of the day, I ground up an Outlook compatible Contacts database table model in SQL and got PHP and Jabber to interoperate! Want to see if my Jabber client is online? Go to:

Image Set 1: Text

Image Set 2: Icons

Not perfect and some bugs but damn cool. No I didn't write it myself, I did a Google query and found some cool PHP code for presence monitoring by David Creswick at: http://braznet.com/david/phpjabstatus/. Thanks Man! Great work.

iBook and OSX: Beautiful Computing Just Feels "More Right"

I spent a bunch of time on the road using Gretchen's new iBook and it was interesting. Once I found Terminal in System / Utilities, I was much happier -- "Look Mom, a console on a Mac! Will wonders never cease?". There were a bunch of things from the perspective of a die hard Wintel user that didn't make sense and I'm working on blogging them since it's probably useful to someone. The level of integration, fit and finish on an iBook continues to amaze me. I'd also make the comment that working on a machine that is just plain visually beautiful is, well, different. I can't really put my finger on it but the overall computing experience just feels "more right".

OSX and the Software Business

NOTE: I'm not bashing BBEDIT here! I know it's a good product. This is perspective!
Still, send the flames to the usual location.

I do think that OSX is going to wreak absolute havoc on the Macintosh software business though -- and people aren't really expecting that. Here's an example. I've heard about BBEdit for years now. Even I know it's a good product. So I went to look at it on www.bbedit.com and I see that it's $119 and expires after 24 launches. Hmmm... That's a lot more expensive than what seems to be a comparable Windows programming editor like www.editplus.com (approx $30) and the eval period seems, well, wrong. I mean I can launch an editor 24 times in about 3 days. That's not a lot of time to evaluate it. So when users start switching over, as I honestly think they will, they will bring their price expectations over and if they find comparable apps like this to be expensive then they'll turn to XWindows stuff that's recompiled to Aqua. As soon as enough of that stuff is available and there are more free options for OS X, will people still be willing to pay for software? That's very unclear to me.

Here's another example -- I don't know if The Gimp (www.gimp.org) is available yet for OS X or not but it will be soon enough. Yes, it's not PhotoShop, but $600 is a lot of $$$ for a graphics tool. And we all know that most people use about 10% of the features of any software product, so alternatives are a definite option. And while it may not be PhotoShop, the Gimp is awesomely impressive when you really give it a chance.

Comments on The Gimp from the Gimp Web Pages:

>> Many people do find GIMP very useful. But it is not a Photoshop killer (for real Photoshop users, that is), Photoshop has lots of features that the GIMP lacks. http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/

And I also think that Apple's absolutely brilliant bundling of iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes and AppleWorks is also going to create the same consciousness that Microsoft has created -- "You really don't need to buy software (other than Office that is)". So I'm really not sure how all this plays out in the long run. Given that I'm an open source advocate, it makes me happy but I am really concerned about ISVs (I was one once and will be one again soon).

Thoughts? Comments? Am I getting it wrong?

New Vanity Email Address and Looking to Write about PHP?

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 10:39:49 GMT

New Vanity Email Address and Looking to Write about PHP?

While the last thing I need is another email address, you can now reach me at scott@phpbeginner.com. Hmmm... Is that supposed to make you think I am a beginner? Or that I write for beginners for that web site. Too funny.

Cool Site for PHP==> www.phpbeginner.com

To make the obligatory plug for PHP Beginner, where I am actually a contributing editor, if you do PHP stuff and want to show off what you know or just get more experience writing, we are looking for new authors. PHP Beginner is a great web site which focuses on easy to use information for the, well, beginner. And, before you think, "Oh crap. Yet more newbies", I'd point out to you that it is far more challenging to explain anything to a beginner than it is to write for a fellow geek. And, while you do get some really interesting questions at times, it is tremendously rewarding. My one article on security in PHP has now gotten the single most hits of any article they've ever published and generated inquiries from all over the world (U.S., England, Australia, Asia). This is tremendously rewarding. And, I think it's good for your career as well. My friend Ray, the Satellite dude, indicated that while his articles didn't get him the job, they sure didn't hurt. Something to think about. Pretty much any topic is viable as long as it can be explained to a beginner. We even published an article about "Ternary Conditional Operator" in an understandable fashion.

Articles from Bloggers that write on PHP:

All my Articles
All of Ray's Articles
All of Demitrious' Articles (he's a blogger just doesn't use the term)

So, if you want to write for www.phpbeginner.com, email the editor -- maxim@phpbeginner.com and feel free to CC me on it. Or just email me and I'll do the forward.

NOTE: I've been lax on my php email, heck -- all email, for the past week due to "It's the return of SysAdminBoy!" I should be caught up later this week.

Anti Bias Disclaimer: This is an unpaid gig so I have no $$$ centric bias here -- I just want to see the site get better.

Adam's Latest: 26,747 New RSS Feeds Available

Thu, 13 Jun 2002 10:31:23 GMT

I know Adam a bit. Not a lot yet. But he's smart. Damn smart. He runs Radio under Linux using VMWare (yes -- it is possible -- and that's cool). And he's a fellow PHP guy that is tinkering around with RSS. Here's his latest:

26,747 New RSS Feeds Available. Taking to heart what Paolo said yesterday about aggregators not just reading news I sat down and wrote some PHP to turn all 26k+ artists on discogs (the most comprehensive electronic music database) into RSS feeds. You can use this page to find an artist, I've provided auto-subscription links for both Radio and AmphetaDesk users. So when a new release is added to discogs.com by an artist you are subscribed to it will show up in your aggregator. The next step is to tweak this a bit and allow you to subscribe to the 6,000+ record labels. [Adam Wendt's Agnostic Audiophile Smorgasborg

Good job. Thanks!

Ok. Maybe Framesets Aren't the Devil

Tue, 28 May 2002 19:43:27 GMT

Ok. Maybe Framesets Aren't the Devil

For a long time I've taken the position that Framesets for web development are the next best thing to, well, Satan (or at least Flash). They work ok for dedicated software user interfaces (and even there bookmarks are nice) but other than that I failed to see a use for them. Until Now. In an article on PHP Beginner, Mark Cloyd documents "Single Page Frame Sets". Mark is the owner of DTM2 Design and Development, a California based web design shop. What Mark talks about in this article is how to take advantage of frames while still having them be bookmarkable. Very cool stuff. I definitely learned something.

Disclaimer: I'm biased on this one. I write articles for PHP Beginner too and I'm an Editor as well. I also hold the quite geeky distinction of being the author of the article that has gotten the second highest number of hits on their site ever: Handling Users and Passwords in PHP. Can't disclose exact metrics though...

Cool Day for Me and RSS (Flowing Yahoo Investor Message Boards and Edgar into Radio)

Fri, 24 May 2002 17:06:00 GMT

Cool Day for Me and RSS (Flowing Yahoo Investor Message Boards and Edgar into Radio)

Last week I used RSS to flow two people's blog postings with separate copies of Radio into a single home page. Today I was talking to Ian in Hong Kong (gotta love Yahoo Messenger -- a free, high fidelity, 2 hour phone call). Ian says to me that he'd like to flow Yahoo Message Boards like this into his Radio:

too long to display
And SEC Edgar filings for companies he cares about (no example)

Roll up my sleeves. Swear a little. Grab some real time assistance from Kjartan (I had no idea that if you are debugging with IE and you change content types during the session, IE retains the old one). Thanks Bill! Not!.

So... Here's the question. Being the aggressive, sell snow to the eskimos guy that I am:

Anybody besides Ian care?
Any investors out there that need this?
Anyone willing to pay for this kind of a web services? Probably makes sense to license it on update frequency, amount of filters, need for archival and personal versus institutional type pricing. $5 per month?

sjohnson@fuzzygroup.com to give me input.

CTRL+A, CTRL+C or Your Condom Against Crappy Software

Thu, 16 May 2002 13:48:47 GMT

CTRL+A, CTRL+C or Your Condom Against Crappy Software

I seem to have a constant anger that is directed at crappy software. I'm constantly aghast and amazed at the quality of software globally. Here are two examples that cost both companies my business. I'm in the market for a new programming editor for Windows and I really liked both these products until their less than perfect quality made me give up on them (and, yes, this does loop into condoms at the end):

UltraEdit, normally an excellent product and one that I like, seems to be "allergic" to repeated FTP file saves. If you save often enough then at some point it will simply fail to save your file (no real error message). Your option is to copy the whole contents of your code file, close the copy file, re-open it, select everything and paste over the top.
EditPad Plus, also seemed excellent and I really, really liked it. Lately it has developed an interesting tendency to die fairly explosively losing all open files. Sometimes it even dies saving files (both to FTP and non-FTP, on 2 different Win 2K boxes), deleting your work (Sorry "Mr Client", our editor wiped out your project -- this is NOT good or acceptable).

Both of these are very recent downloads (last 2 weeks) so there's probably not an update. Here's my solution for everything involving my data from now on: Use a Condom. Think about it. If you CTRL+A (that's Select All) and then CTRL+C (that's copy) before you do things that are likely to fail like save files or post content to the web, it really is a condom against the software you use. I don't like this and I do feel it's stupid but errors seem to be a fact of life. And I sick to death of crappy software costing me data. I'll just teach myself to always, always, always CTRL+A and CTRL+C before I do these kinds of things. I can learn, I can.

NOTE: Before any hard core EditPad Plus users leap to it's defense with "it has automatic backup files!!!! You're an idiot!", I'd like to point out that a) they were on and b) they don't work with remote file saves via FTP.

Side Note from the Marketing 101 Perspective

You're probably thinking "but ... but ... there's probably a fix". And perhaps there is. Guess what? I don't care. As harsh as this sounds, this is the reality of life in a commoditized market (more details on commoditized markets next week thanks to Veer's suggestion). A commoditized market is one where there are lots of options for the customer. An example is an FTP client (see recent writings on that bloody fiasco). Look at how many I was able to try. Another example is a programming editor. Yes they all have different features and do differentiate from each other but, by and large, they are basically the same for the majority of users. When there is always another product to try and evaluate, any failure makes the potential customer just move on to the next vendor. People have about 10% tolerance for errors normally and less than 0% tolerance when a product costs them data. Here's an example of this: I actually continued to use UltraEdit for about 2 1/2 weeks even with the ridiculous workaround described above. Why? Because it was it didn't lose any data. As soon as I got the 3rd crash with EditPad Plus, I headed for www.download.com and started the evaluation process. And I got the idea for this posting.

NOTE: What's Less than 0% Tolerance? It's when you blog it and people get to find out about the errors.

A Reader Responds to: If You Write Programming Books

Mon, 13 May 2002 14:23:39 GMT

A Reader Responds to: If You Write Programming Books

On ?Friday? I wrote a small rant about how writers of programming books don't tell you where the code is. Dave Gulbran responded with:

Having worked with a variety of publishers, on a variety of books, let me tell you, singling out the *authors* for this transgression is a *mistake*.

I've worked on books that should have come with a CD-ROM, but only had a website. And I've worked on books that should have had a website, but instead had a CD-ROM. The common mistake most people make is that the author has final control over these elements. Maybe if you are a well-established author, working with O'Reilly. But not in the general trade press. As an author, I work hard to make my books the best the can possibly be, but without the publisher, my works wouldn't get read by anyone. He who has the press enjoys the freedom of the press.

I think Dave is definitely right here. And his comment about O'Reilly makes me happy since I'm now an O'Reilly author. But...

Authors have personal home pages. Readers have Google. The intersection of these, for the book I criticized gave me:

Link to the Book: http://www.zend.com/publishers/
Seems to Be Home Page: http://www.zend.com/zend/hof/andrei.php
Book Page: http://www.zend.com/publishers/show_publisher.php?id=1

And, of course, the obligatory link to the Amazon page. No where on any of these pages could I find a "Here's the Source Code" link. Great ... so I can type in 400 pages of source if I want access to every "recipe" (it was the php developer's cookbook). The shame of this is that it's an awesome book! Well written and clear. But it fails in a huge way for me (and I think lots of others -- it's interesting to me that Amazon has it listed as "out of print").

If the publisher screws it up, doesn't the author have an obligation to his readers to give them a correction?

Dave made the point that O'Reilly does better on this than others and I have to agree here (remember though I am biased). With an O'Reilly book I can always find the code. I might have to grovel a small bit but that's normal. With this book, I groveled, I begged and I asked nicely, all to no avail.

It's never been a surprise to me that year after year O'Reilly continues to be the best overall book company. Sure we may flirt with Wrox or New Riders but it's O'Reilly that every seems to come back to. Short and Simple: O'Reilly Gets It.

And if you want to try Cleansing Your RSS

Sat, 11 May 2002 10:32:50 GMT

And if you want to try Cleansing Your RSS

Here's a test url: http://www.fuzzygroup.com/savemyplace/cleanserss.htm

Thanks Brent!

If You Are Writing a Programming Book !

Fri, 10 May 2002 16:22:54 GMT

If You Are Writing a Programming Book !

I just bought the PHP Developer's Cookbook by Hughes and Zmievski and, Guys, Where the frack*** do I download the code? There's no cd and I have been all through the table of contents w/o seeing anything about it. Bloody well frustrating and as good as this book is I won't recommend it to someone else without that...

Radio as a Specification Tool

Fri, 10 May 2002 10:14:15 GMT

Radio as a Specification Tool

Well I just wrote my first technical specification for a team development project using Radio for a fast paced project with team members located here:

Boston (Me)
Boston (Designer)
Canada (Algorithms)
System Components (Bombay)

It'll be interesting to see how it works. 3 out of 4 of us are bloggers across two different platforms (Radio and Movable Type).

Quick Impressions

It's fast and that's good
The lack of formatting helps me focus on the content not the look and feel
Since it's in a data center already I can just link to it in an email and not worry about sending content which is cool
I'm pleased. Specs always, always, always is about as pleasant as, well, eating dried toads so getting out a simple spec for the application level help system in about 1/2 hour was great. Not worrying about formatting and emailing out a word file was even better

If You're Doing Any XSLT Work on Windows then Move to IE6

Wed, 08 May 2002 19:19:53 GMT

If You're Doing Any XSLT Work on Windows then Move to IE6

I've been working on and off this week on adding the OPML XSLT viewing I learned about from www.netcrucible.com to my opml viewing application and I keep hitting xslt bugs. Debugging via IM to Amsterdam?Holland? with the author of drupal (www.natrak.net) finally pointed it out to me: This just isn't going to work with IE 5.5 even with the latest XSLT patches. I did a full update 2 days ago and, again, it's dying on certain opml files. No idea why but it's pretty clear that it's not going to work. I guess I really have to update to IE6. If you do have IE 6 and all the XSLT updates and you want to see this then go to: Sample OPML Send me a screen shot if you can. I'd like to see it in IE6 myself.

Dealing with Platform Bugs Versus Writing Your Own Code

Tue, 07 May 2002 14:01:35 GMT

Dealing with Platform Bugs Versus Writing Your Own Code

Software development is really, really funny today. We work with smaller code fragments than ever before (at least for web development) but those fragments do more than you'd expect. Here were my two coding tasks this morning:

Get NetCrucible's XSLT Opml Viewing Working
Write a DB cleansing tool for my opml application. I didn't do a very good job on the initial opml parser so I needed a clean up tool.

The results were _interesting_. Here I was trying to just a) display data in the first task and b) write a network aware data cleanser and parser that also updated a database. Here is the length of each script:

a) display - 31 lines of code w/o the really pretty error page. Basically this script does the following:

Grabs the data
Does some basic error handling
Sets a mime type
Adds an XSLT reference
Outputs the data

b) cleanse - 164 lines. This script does the following:

Select only the unique urls from my opml table
- Loop over the urls
- Fetch the Instant Outline data
- Parse the Instant Outline data to extract the head elements like ownerEmail, title, etc
- Update each database record with the cleansed elements
- Add new meta elements for status and size so that InstantOutline "meta metrics" are captured
Generate output to the screen so I know that it's still processing (the full run handles over 400 Instant Outline urls so this is important).

b) is a lot more complex than a). b) has to get input from an RDBMS (MySQL), do network IO, parse data, calculate metrics and update the database.

Guess which took longer?

a) Just displaying the data! - approx 2 hours versus b) 35 minutes

And why you ask? Fighting with XSLT bugs in Internet Explorer 5.5. It turns out that Microsoft has mucked up the XML engine at least once and even if you download IE 5.5 then you also have to separately download the XML engine update and then some wacky little registry modification tool. Something's really, really wrong when dealing with platform bugs takes a lot longer than writing your own code. I should rant, I should vent, but, you know what, I wasn't even surprised and that's the saddest part of this tale.

OPML Application Fully Back Online!

Sun, 05 May 2002 20:09:34 GMT

OPML Application Fully Back Online!

My opml viewing application at http://www.fuzzygroup.com/opml/ is now fully back online. I had partially disabled it because of the hosting issues recently. Now I was able to fully test those changes that are much smarter about network I/O and it's done. Once again, if you are a PHP geek, look into Snoopy. It's simple, it's fast and you don't have to rebuild Curl for it. It even is error aware so that you can catch 404s versus 301s and so on. Thanks for your patience.

Thinking About Outages

The more I think about the recent outages in UserLand, the less I mind them. Sure it's frustrating and perhaps it shouldn't happen but it does. Mistakes happen. Never forget that technology is implemented by people and people are imperfect. The way that I look at it from a customer's perspective is that I vote with my dollars. When I purchased Radio I was making a conscious choice to support Radio and UserLand. If I was willing to make that choice a month ago when I barely knew the product then why am I bothered by what are transitory glitches? Bear in mind that none of us (or damn few) lost any content and that's what counts to me.

Quite honestly this stuff happens so often to us that we don't even make a big deal of it anymore. Do you complain to Sprint when you have a PCS error? For example, EVERY SINGLE TIME I cross the Boston to Cambridge bridge between MIT and Boston (the Mass ave) my call is dropped. I just shrug and move on. So do most people. We tend to notice outages mostly when they are prolonged. Dave owned up to it and did the right thing. Think about it: If we were using Radio by Microsoft and blogging to MSN, it would go down for days and they wouldn't admit it well or gracefully.

Spending money is a choice and I choose that my
dollars go to the little guy as much as I can.

Updates to the OPML Stuff

Mon, 29 Apr 2002 22:43:19 GMT

Updates to the OPML Stuff

I made a bunch of fixes today. Tomorrow will be more no doubt. Here's today:

Dramatically improved the speed of the chooseio.php routine by moving to a include file listing all IOs rather than a direct database query. I'll regenerate this multiple times per day until I stuff it in a scheduled script. Hey! Maybe I can write a UserTalk script to automate this (It's just an http post). Hm.... Dave's gonna get me into UserTalk soon. Maybe tonight or tomorrow.
Fixed automatic hyperlinks in plain text when the http:// is missing
Made a first pass at implementing the subscribe coffee cup in the rendered outlines and then pulled it due to missing parameters.
Added support for hyperlinks that aren't embedded in url elements (i.e. just as plain text)
Deleted all of Paolo's internal outlines from the back end database. I had a very nice exchange with him about his stuff and how a bunch of purely internal URLs made it out into the cloud. I permanently excluded them from the db. If anyone else doesn't want there stuff included in this OPML url database then email scott@fuzzygroup.com.
Switched the whole network I/O to Snoopy. Much, much better! A bit slower but it returns errors! Praise Be!
Fixed problems with IO urls containing single ' characters (hm... is that even legal?)

For the record, the OPML url database driving this now has 235 distinct OPML urls in it. Not bad, not bad. If I wrote a link walker for every OPML url then it would probably expand a whole bunch more. Hm....

Tools used include PHP, MySQL and Snoopy -- a really, really good Network I/O class for PHP. It doesn't require a full rebuild like Curl so it's much friendlier in hosted environments.

Whew! Never, Ever Add Code When Trying to Go Away from the Weekend

Fri, 26 Apr 2002 15:00:06 GMT

Whew! Never, Ever Add Code When Trying to Go Away from the Weekend

"Well DUH! says the experienced software engineer". Yes, I know this. Yes I used to beat up my engineers for this when I had engineers. Still working without a net is _interesting_. I added logging of OPML urls to my Choose IO to View page and then started navigating through OPML documents. Everytime I hit an OPML file with links to other OPML files, these were added to the database. Then when I went back to the choose page, more were displayed. Very cool. Until, of course, I hit xml parsing errors. Sigh. Fixing XML parsing errors when running out the door is NOT a good time. So I figured out which ones had problems and suppressed them. It looks like the error is coming from incorrect network IO causing 0 bytes of information to be retrieved and then parsing 0 bytes of XML causes the inevitable error. The solution is to move to CURL, a much better way of handling network IO in php. Think of it as LWP if you are a Perl programmer (and ignore that comment if you aren't). So, for now, some OPML urls won't be displayed. All OPML urls are being logged to the database and I should be able to fix this next week.

OPML Viewer / Rendered Updates

Thu, 25 Apr 2002 21:19:25 GMT

OPML Viewer / Rendered Updates

I just added support for:

a decent looking error page for when the OPML file can be loaded
correct link generation through the renderer when the link is to an opml file (i.e. link to the opml file will now be rendered)