This is the Charcoal chicken from Little Italy. It is a a testament to the idea that if you run a restuarant should have at least one dish that is so good people come just for it. For me this is the only hing I ever get here.
Baysian filtering is one of those subjects that got pulled from obscurity to prominace thanks to spam. There keeps being this little nagging voice at the back of my head that it could be useful some where else (For example as part of a triage system for a ticketing system) but I haven’t had time to build a test app.
Why Web Programming Matters Most
Python never had a chance against PHP
Ok so there are these two articles. Both start to deal with Python vs PHP. I suppose this issue is close to my heart if for no other reason because I currently manage an application that is half written in both. I have also gone down the path where I tried to do everything in Python because it was such an elegant language, and ended up giving up and switching back to PHP. Not just because of some issues I faced working with Python - but external ones as well.
Python suffers from a serious popularity problem. People who like it love it. But most people have never even heard of it (although this is improving). That has a dramatic impact on the usefulness of the language to me. Because even though it is much older and more mature than PHP, there are fewer people who:
- Build in it
- Release apps in it
- Write books about it
- Write web sites in it
- Run conferences about it
- Write magazines about it
- Train people in it
- Have experience with it
That means when I go to hire for python it’s harder to find canidates who are experienced in the language. When i need a tool to tack on to a project I’m buidling there are fewer choices.
Neither the Python nor PHP community is great at marketing. You have to assume that people are voting with their feet (or their typing hands as it were). And that is self reinforcing. Once you go to a book store and see 20 books on PHP/MySQl and find 2 on python - you get the feeling that everyone else is going one direction. So even if you add even more to Python in terms of features that doesn’t guarantee that you will reverse the trend that lots and lots of new developers cut their teeth on PHP not Python. And I will tell you if you don’t get them when they are young you will only convert the ones that are serious enough developers to learn more than one language.
A couple of years ago, I was at OSCON and a presenter talked about how when you pick a language you aren’t just picking a language, you’re choosing to join the community and people who work in that language. So to make a gross generalization, even though most developers can code confortably in multiple langauges - the communities related to each are very different. Just look at the Java community as compared to the Perl community to see a perfect example of this.
I won’t characterize the Python community because I don’t feel I’m part of it.
On the PHP side - here are just a couple of things that suck about PHP
- There are inconsitantly named functions.
- The language and be messy.
- It allows you mix your presentation and logic.
- It is terribly inefficient by recompiling the code on ever excution.
- $ variables are so 1980.
- The object model is only now starting to be fixed.
- Most of the code out there is complete crap.
I would say that the community is really like that old saw about the millions of monkeys at typewriters. You take all that terriblness,you add in tons and tons of coders who don’t know a data structure from their elbow, and you get a moutain of crap code.
But in the end - the monkeys produce Shakespeare. That’s right I said it. There is so much code out there that sometimes people get caught up in the crappiness of it all , but that doesn’t mean that all of it is crap.
For example right now I’m writing this using a piece of PHP software that isn’t crap called WordPress.
In PHP, people just get code out there. And yes it sucks, and yets it is terrible, but it is out there. And if it is a good idea it will get better.
Truth to tell I’m not sure any of the language advocacy really matters anyway. People choose a language and try to do what they need to do. If they can, they do. If not, they give up or try something else. It’s a simple loop that means people pick the first solution that is good enough. The market has already answered how it feels about PHP and Python.
I see a lot of parallels between this discussion of Mac OS 1-9 and Windows. I was an old school Mac user. I loved it. It was great. It had a few problems but they were nothing compared to the problems that I saw with Windows 9X. And I made the same kind of - why do people choose such a sucky platform - Mac is better arguments with my pc friends. And it didn’t change anything. Apple eventually understood that - they changed dramatically with Mac OS X. I will tell you based on the number of new power books I see among my peers they have done something right to turn the tide. If you really want Python to do the same, you need to figure out how to change the playing field. Otherwise accept that you have a great language that is clean and elegant and just not used very much.
As one last aside, I also find the advocay funny - because I don’t believe that the language is as important as I once did. Sure it can make things easier on you, but the reality is there are a lot of things that going to building a great application that have to do with presentation, flow, meeting a users need ….. that are the same struggle in all languages.
Ok so this year I was seriously busy. So I didn’t get to go to SXSW and spent an amazing amount of time watching movie after movie.
In the past, what would happen is I would see movies there and then over the next year the ones that got distribution would start appearing. Here’s one that I’m sure will be released at some point - and it looks pretty funny.
It Should Happen to You (1954)
I’m a big fan of Jack Lemmon. Once I decide I like someone - I end up working my way thru all of their movies. This was his first movie.
It’s a funny little romantic comedy about a woman who buys a sign on Columbus circle and ends up becoming famouse. Peter Lawford is in it as a smarmy executive.
In an odd way the main character reminds me of my mom, mostly because of the way the character ends up doing some outrageous things - not to be outrageous but because she is just doing what comes naturally.
On the Jack Lemmon side, it was interesting to see it since it was his first movie, but he doesn’t get enough screen time for my taste.
This is seriously not for the faint of heart. I can’t imagine doing this for anything less than a mod to allow my to use a 5GB hard drive on this beastie. But fortunately the Internet provides people with more money than sense to document this kind of madness.
Ok I can’t seem to access this thread any more which sucks since I actually have news to report.
I have David’s code in there as well a both some new features and a lot of code clean up. I’m hoping once the blade site comes back up I can get him to accept all of these changes into the main line of the code.
New Features in this version:
- Images can be refenced with place holder tags
- The system makes sure that you can resize images if you configure it to do so
- You can delay the publish date of an email with a simple delay:1d1h1m tag
You can now opt to allow raw html in your email body
Here’s the change log for this version:
- Added modification for placeholder support for images (David Luden)
- Added in support to automatically scale down big images (Dirk Elmendorf)
- Fixed bug with multiple emails all getting the contents of the first image tag (Dirk Elmendorf)
- Added option to allow HTML in the body and subject of the email (Dirk Elmendorf)
- Switch config options to defines to reduce the number of global variables (Dirk Elmendorf)
- Added tests to make sure there is a trailing slash on the DIR definitions (Dirk Elmendorf)
- Add tests to see if they have gd installed (Dirk Elmendorf)
- Seperate the scaling out to a function for easier usage (Dirk Elmendorf)
- Add delay feature for future posting. (Dirk Elmendorf)
- Added in ability to use strtotime if it is available (Dirk ELmendorf)
I just do not have good luck with my car. The temp gauge went off, I pulled over and boom it dumped coolant every where. WHat a pain!
Online-enabled PSP to hit Korea in May - News at GameSpot
Ok that’s just annoying. I have a PSP. I have wifi. I would love to be able to browse - and god forbid stream video to my little PSP :( I can only hope that it will come to the states in short order.
I found this strangely appropriate for today:
Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
Especially since I just spend that last day or so reworking my code generation system so it now generates 10,000 fewer lines of code on one of my projects.
I’m not sure if that counts as enlightened or not :)
