Andrei Zmievski

It’s good to know that in these times of adversity, Russia has its priorities straight.

Ryan Norris has written up a good article on the benefits of tiered application development in PHP. As he correctly points out, there is a difference between keeping your logic and presentation completely separate and dividing it along the more appropriate line of business logic vs. presentation and its related logic. I have long been an advocate of this latter approach and a lot of it is reflected in Smarty, at least when I used to work on it. If you developing a PHP application consisting of more than a couple of pages, it would probably be a good idea to read this article and apply it to your project.

Dilbert right on the spot again. I actually came across a hotel clerk like that at the W Hotel in Seattle.

Now that is just asking for punishment. If you are enough of a moron to want to eat cow brains, I am not going to stop you.

I want one of these for my birthday.

So for those of you who haven’t heard, Queen Mary 2 ocean liner – “the world’s largest, longest, tallest, grandest Ocean Liner ever! ” – is ready for christening and its mayden voyage. That’s what they said about the Titanic about a hundred years ago…

From an Associated Press article:

President Bush will announce plans next week to send Americans to Mars and establish a permanent human presence on the moon.

The Mars and the Moon? Why doesn’t he concentrate on the budget deficit and other things plaguing the country? Because this is nothing but a sweeping promise in an election year, so don’t count on much happening. It just frustrates me to no end that the space exploration is still within the government’s purview. The NASA is continually underfunded and even with the funds in hand they have a high rate of failures and flops and no clear goals for the future. The rate of space development could have been so migh higher had it been more open to private companies. This is 21st century after all, it’s time to stop monopolizing the industry! That’s an election promise that could work.

Jeremy says he hired Merry Maids to clean his slobby apartment. I’ve thought a few times about trying them or a similar service, but I have a hard time getting over the idea that some strange people will come into my apartment and have fairly uninhibited access to my personal things and possibly documents (think identity theft and all that jazz). Of course, I can and will shred sensitive documents and try to lock up the valuables, but it all comes down to evaluating how much of a crimp this might put into my lifestyle versus the benefits I gain from not having to clean the place myself.

Simon Willison writes:

Looking back on 2003, one thing really stuck out for me: I didn’t learn a new programming language. The Pragmatic Programmers recommend learning at least one new language every year. . .

One new language every year? I have to question the validity of this advice. Programming language is just a tool, after all – the important thing is the knowledge of algorithms, complexity theory, data structures, protocols, and general computer science problem solving. The differences between mainstream languages may be significant, but the commonalities are overwhelming. The same solution can be implemented in roughly the same way in most of them. Knowing a language just for its own sake reeks a bit of hubris, in my humble opinion. Being comfortable with one language in each category makes more sense: one functional (Lisp, Scheme), one object-oriented (Java, C#), one scripting (Perl, Python, PHP), and a couple of specialty ones (SQL, HTML) provide a solid base and enable you to learn similar languages quicker, if need be.
Simon is probably going to resort to learning Snobol and INTERCAL in a couple of years, but that’s his choice. 🙂

The Onion rules again.