A good end of the day
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I just have to write this post right this now, it can’t wait because tomorrow it won’t feel like does now. You’ll know what I mean in just a few seconds, read on.
I have a list of domains that are up for renewal. Most of them I haven’t used for anything, they’ve been parked since I bought them and are only costing me money. They are not very generic but good for what I bought them for, it’s just that I’ve never come round to implement the sites that I had planned to. I’ve learned this now, if I come up with an idea I no longer start the project by buying a suitable domain. The thing is, if the site is good and useful, the domain name isn’t really that important, people will find and use it anyway. I also don’t need a separate domain for each project. I will only keep the very good ones and make use of them, anything else is stupid.
Yes, I’ve done it. I bought a Mac. A Mac Mini to be precise. I have thought about buying one for quite a while, more than a year. The reasons for buying one before were that they are small, quiet and Unix compliant but now I also realized I want to develop applications for IPhone and for doing that I need two things: Read Post ›
I am working on a PHP thing where I need to be able to move array elements around based on their keys, the ordering is important. Non of the built in functions seem to do what I want and I could not find any similar problem/solution already posted somewhere so I made my own. In case someone needs the same thing, here it is, I place it in the public domain so feel free to use it as you want.
Late last night as I was uploading and fixing with a new site I’m working on, the server suddenly started to load extremely slow and after a short while didn’t load any pages at all. I was editing some configuration scripts and for a moment I thought I had brought it down myself by some unfortunate setting. I tested if a couple of other sites I have on that server could load but none of them did.
I’m working on a new theme for this blog and I decided to start using it from now. Even if I’m not completely happy with it yet I think it’s good enough to start using and it’s many times better than the old one. It has widget support for example, which the old one did not.
Now you can check out what web pages I’ve found in my link blog. It’s a little app I’ve been developing for some time and since a few days it’s a link in the sidebar to the left on this blog. There are still plenty of things to fix but it’s working and fills its purpose.
The first bookmarking application I made a few years ago never made it to launch. I was put off when I discovered other similar services like del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks so I never finished it. But even though I’ve tried those and a few others I never really feel that they worked the way I wanted. That and the fact that I no longer care if what I do is unique or not made me have another go.
I was thinking to release the script for anyone to use but it’s too early at this point. Even though I believe in “release early, release often” it would require some tinkering before making it public and I have other projects I’d like to spend more time on now. Please tell me if you are interested in an Open Source link blog application runnning on PHP+MySQL because if there is an interest from other people to use it I will feel more motivated to add missing features and make install scripts etc.
Have you ever read a piece of code, an undocumented piece of code that you didn’t quite get? Not to say that at first glance you had absolutely no idea what it did or was supposed to do, why it was there at all?
Thought so.
Imagine that someone that wrote code as described above has the twisted idea that it actually shows skill to be able to write working code that only he/she understands. If you don’t have to imagine, I’m sorry, I know how it feels mate.
A guy called Steve wrote in a comment to the article The Next Programming Skill You Should Learn:
I think some developers get an ego boost out of it. It gives them a (false) sense of skill/power that other people need their help to quickly see what their code is about.
Um, guys, anybody who knows anything about programming isn’t impressed. People can’t read my sloppy handwriting either, that doesn’t mean what I wrote is brilliant just that my handwriting isn’t as good as 5th graders.
Well put.
Just upgraded WordPress to 2.5. My first impression is positive, the admin interface is a lot cleaner than before. Haven’t checked out everything yet since writing this post is literally the first thing I do after upgrading.
Upgrading is straight forward. This is what I’ve done.
- Database backup
- Files backup
- Deleted old files
- Uploaded new files
- Ran supplied upgrade script
- Uploaded backed up plugins and themes
As you see, easy. That’s one of the reasons WordPress is so popular. It just works.
I saw an ad on Coding Horror where the text said “Use CodePlex to find open source software projects built by thousands of developers around the world.”. CodePlex? Never heard of it so I clicked.
Apparently it’s “Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site”. Doh! How did I not know this site? Weird. Ok, I’m a Java dude so I don’t actively look for .NET project hosting sites but still. Happy I “found” it.
Given the date of the site’s first blog post* it looks like it has been under my radar for almost two years. An observation is that, that first blog post don’t have any real comments. As I write this there are five pingbacks, one from an Italian developer in 2006, one from an MSDN blog couple of days ago, and the remaining three pingbacks that are copies of the MSDN one. Those last three are interesting in their own way as they are PingBacks from non-MSDN blogs that mirrors MSDN blogs. Clearly MFA sites(Made For Adsense).
*Ok ok, the first blog post doesn’t mean the site was launched then. A check shows that the first non-test project was added somewhere around Apr 28 2006 at 10:53 PM. Saved you some time now didn’t I? 
