All blog posts from May 2010
Ubuntu 10.04 - Take Two
After working in Ubuntu 10.04 for a bit, I have one major gripe - OpenJDK/IcedTea. I have no idea whose decision it was to drop the official Sun JDK from the repositories (or if Oracle had a part to play in this), but OpenJDK is a pile of steamy dog-droppings.
Since upgrading (and being forced to sw…
PHP JSONz
At my place of work, much of the URLs we use internal to the system uses JSON-encoded objects which are BASE64 encoded in order to be able to use them as part of the path in a URL. The major advantage of this is that we can pass huge amounts of arguments with meaningful names a lot easier than using…
Java Applets + Ubuntu 10.04 = Clusterfuck
After dicking around for 2 days, I'm fairly convinced that as things stand right now, trying to develop Java Applets on Ubuntu 10.04 is a complete and total clusterfuck (no, I'm not being needlessly crude, it's a real term - look it up).
Consider the following:
- Sun JDK not directly supported under …
Function Aliasing in PHP
One question I've asked myself and I see asked on sites such as stackoverflow.com is if PHP is able to have "aliases" for functions. The answer is either, "no, you have to use a wrapper function" or to the more extreme "you can write an extension".
Since I'm one of those PHP developers who doesn't t…
6 Degrees of Separation
On the weekend, I was pondering the notion of 6 degrees of separation - if you're unfamiliar with the concept: the idea is that within 6 "degrees" (a degree being you know someone [one degree] who knows somebody [that you might not know - one more degree]) everybody in the world is covered. So - I k…
Blender 3D
Okay, so I know every now and then the Blender Foundation (which looks after the OpenSource Blender 3D software package) holds a competition for little movies created with their software. However, via a Slashdot article, I came across a preview of one such movie, called Sintel. I'm seriously impress…
Ubuntu 10.04 First Impressions
I just completed my upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 and here's my first impressions.
Honestly - right now I don't care for the new colours. The dark-grey menus are actually surprisingly hard to read. And no, I'm not blind.
The move of the close, min, max buttons from the right to the left is uncomfortable a…
Does Facebook Privacy Worry Me?
No.
It doesn't.
Because I'm not an idiot.
If there's something about myself I don't want the world to know, I don't put it in my profile. Anyone who complains about Facebook privacy is a moron.
End of discussion.
Class Proxy in PHP
One of the nice things with PHP is that if you include a file from within a class method, that included file can use "$this" to access the class which included it. Very handy.
However, today I wanted to make it even easier - I wanted the loading of content to exist in a separate class, but I still w…
Adobe vs. Apple: War of Worlds Escalating
With a new salvo, Adobe has upped the ante in the war of words with Apple.
Frankly, I don't care of either company, but I tend to lean more towards Adobe on this one (as you can tell from any previous posts on the issue in question). It's not that I prefer Adobe technologies to Apple's, or even that…
Is Valve Becoming Linux Friendly?
I came across a Slashdot article today which mentioned the Mac version of Steam from Valve, and the supposedly imminent release of the Linux version.
I'll admit, I was skeptical.
Until I found this job posting on the Valve website:
Senior Software Engineer
Description
Lead engineer and…
Nier Game Review
Give Us IPv6 Already!
I've been waiting for what seems like an eternity for IPv6 to be rolled out, as I'm sure many others have. I've always wondered what's the hold-up? By all accounts, we're rapidly running out of IPv4 addresses.
I know there have been several experiments to test the Internet's readiness for the switch…
Smartphones - Let's Hope The Tide is Turning
According to industry research firm NPD, Android phones have begin to outsell iPhones. To be honest, this is super news. As a developer looking into mobile app work, having the freedom to develop and run my custom applications as I see fit, which both Android and Blackberry allow, is of paramount im…
Lockable CRON Jobs
Where I work, we run loads of CRON jobs. For obvious reasons, it's the simplest way of executing regular processes. Since my place of work is almost exclusively a PHP shop, our CRON jobs are simply PHP CLI apps.
As you may expect, it is always a concern that a CRON jobs would try to run before the p…
MySQL Backup Script
Just thought I'd share this Linux BASH script which we run nightly to backup our MySQL database.
The features of this script:
- it keeps a revolving list of files for each day of the week, for each week of year, and for each month. We wanted some history, but not to get carried away.
- each table is re…
Apollo 11 Launch at 500 fps
Just stumbled across this video and found it interesting, so I thought I'd share.
Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.
A Case of PHP Annotations
I recently had the need for a simple ORM layer for a custom CMS framework I work in. I didn't want the typical huge ORM, such as Doctrine - just something small and simple.
Coming from a J2EE background, I learned to like annotations and wanted my PHP ORM to be similar. After searching (unsuccessful…
Thoughts on HTML 5
Since the Apple vs. Adobe over Flash issue flared up, I've seen it in several places now that HTML 5 supposedly has the capacity to completely void the need for embeddable content, such as Flash.
The problem I have with this is that the arguments focus 100% on video streaming.
What about gaming? The…
Visit my Friends and Family
If you've enjoyed my site, please take a moment to visit my friends and family, many of whom have some interesting insights, and entertaining thoughts and ideas.
- Crause Family - the family website
- Peter Crause - my father
- Justin Crause - my brother
- Cencina Photomagic - great photographer
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