Cubic

I might have finally lost my marbles. But don't run away. Let me walk you through the process. It used to be that we experienced freedoms: We could own our own PCs, computer equipment, laptops, etc. Our ability to repair or use our own equipment was not restricted in any way. Our lives were not spied on by cameras everywhere we go trying to track our behaviors and identify us individually to decide whether or not we are allowed to do something. Everything was generally affordable. The stuff we bought lasted many, many years. The software we used was optimized to run on a potato. And we were promised, at one point, fiber optic Internet would be run to every home. Then we wake up one day and see direct government intrusion, corporate greed, blatant disregard for the right to data privacy and personal privacy, alleged fraud and price fixing but no one held to account for those alleged crimes, and much more happening everywhere. Then you wonder what happened and, more impo...

I just discovered that PHP 6 is officially deprecating short tags. I'm sorry, but short tags are incredibly useful. They should be turned on for every server. They simplify coding dynamic actions within HTML. Plus, you get the added bonus of using: <?=$x?> Which is short for: <?php echo $x; ?> Compare: 7 characters vs. 17 characters. The latter is over twice the length, quite unreadable, and, from personal experience with large code bases, unmaintainable! Typing 'php echo' in every time I want to execute/display data that is hosted within the PHP engine is ridiculous. This is a step backwards going in the wrong direction. The lame excuse for removing short tags is XML. PHP is for HTML, not XML. I write PHP code quite regularly. Prior to PHP 5, PHP stunk. PHP 5 really changed my view of scripting languages. PHP 6 is going to ruin that view as we will return, once again, to the dark ages of software development. What really gets me is that someone made a decent r...

...onto your computer monitor and keyboard. Literally. Following hot on the heels of the " Perl is a terrible language " post comes the reason why I had to re-learn Perl in the first place. I just barely released MyProBB 2.3 . It took nearly two months to get this release ready. 1.4 months of that 2 months consisted of writing a single plugin for the forum. What follows is the shamelessly copied portion of text from the MyProBB 2.3 announcement post : --------------- [This plugin is] perhaps the best little gem to hit the Internet since AJAX-driven websites, er, Google... The Official Instant Message plugin . Yup. That's right. I single-handedly hold the distinction of having the first web software package that sends Instant Messages. I hold the distinction of being the first to send IMs to five major IM networks from a web forum. I also hold the distinction of having the only web forum software package that sends real Instant Messages. I even hold the distinctions of hav...

is source code. The various programming languages on the planet. It never ceases to amaze me, I can go to a page completely written in Japanese but the moment they get to source code, they start speaking a language I understand. I don't know a single word of Kanjii, but I do know C/C++ and even if the programming language isn't something I know, I can understand the gist of what the person is trying to get across. Unlike most languages that carry cultural baggage, source code is internationally independent. Sure it is "written in English", but that is inconsequential. Most of those same Japanese pages use unrecognizable variable names and comments, but it is really easy to figure out what they are saying based on the source code...even the Japanese parts. For some reason I see more Japanese results for really cool but slightly obscure stuff than any other country. And they seem to write better quality code than most American programmers. While businesses outsou...