The feature I’ve been looking forward to the most, merge tracking, made it into the latest Subversion release. I’m not sure why, but branching/merging has been a conceptually scary thing for me for a long time. I’d always be afraid that somehow I’d mess up the merge and lose updates or somehow mangle my code […]
Sandy sent me a link listing anti-patterns as applied to management practices. For those not up on the jargon, an anit-pattern is a bad practice that is repeated frequently. I first heard this term in terms of programming patterns and anti-patterns, but I’ve since heard it used in non-programming contexts. I can honestly say I’ve
Cal Evans wrote a straightforward and excellent tutorial on how to to use Zend_Auth and its OpenID adapter to authenticate users today. I was not only impressed by the tutorial itself, and I liked how he had code up front and so well commented, but also by how easy it was to implement the code
Zed Shaw provides a very useful insight into what makes a project work. I’m posting this here a) so that I can refer to it again in the future and b) the hypothesis passes my "Yup-I’ve-been-there" test. This method is based on a simple revelation about how clients and projects can be divided generally into
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Don’t expect to find it here, but Laughine Meme posted the most comprehensive one I could find. You would think that with the introduction in 5.2 of the DateTime and DateTimeZone objects, that date math would be a lot easier in PHP. Unfortunately, the implementation isn’t as advanced as I’d expected, maybe a case of
After two summers during high school where I had the pleasure of working with Visual Basic and Access, you couldn’t pay me enough to program with an MS designed language again. And, even though I have a basic understanding of Java, very few interesting web sites use Java as their foundation. But apparently, the marketplace
Why do newbies like to tightly couple systems to the point that a simple change is very likely to result in everything breaking? Is it just a lack of experience, ie not having a big system fail on you? Its a shame if failure is the only thing you learn from. The other part of
In an effort to learn a new skill and get some much needed exposure to another programming language, I’ve started learning Python. Its a very neat language, and its use of whitespace to organize code pleases the code style nazi that Sandy has instilled in me. Reading the code itself, its refreshing how uncluttered it
The more I use subversion, the more I find ways to make it do more heavy lifting for me. I’m not talking about the kind of subversion that gets you a one way ticket to gitmo, but the open source version control system. I use it to manage my websites here, to keep them updated
Version 1.1 of my my preferred javascript library, jQuery, was released today. They have a great motto – “write less, do more” and as far as I can tell, they live up to it. The release notes claim speed improvements of 10-20x for selectors over those in 1.0.4. The release includes some interesting new features