Blog posts in Programming
Why IE6 Just Won't Die
Today, Sept 1 2010, we are still stuck trying to get sites to work with IE6. To think just 2 years ago people were always saying IE6 is dying, and yet here we sit, stuck with the beast.
And you know, I completely understand that companies and individuals who have invested in their IT infrastructure …
My Little (Java) World is Crumbling
A relative of mine pointed me to some news articles of how Oracle is handling the various pieces of technology they inherited from Sun Microsystems. Needless to say, it's dismal.
OpenOffice - basically on the way out. OpenSolaris - killed. MySQL - serious question marks. And now they're also suing G…
Quick Rant
Just a quick rant today - I've been trying to use Tomcat 6 + Hibernate Persistence using NetBeans IDE 6.9 and so far, I am seriously unimpressed. In fact, aside from the Java language (which I enjoy programming in), the whole Java servlets system seems to be a fairly large mess.
Here's an example wi…
Ant-contrib + NetBeans
I've seen one or two posts on how to try to easily use ant-contrib from within a NetBeans project. I didn't like solution one because it requires changing files within the NetBeans directory structure (something I am always reluctant to do), and solution two seemed too rely too heavily on relative p…
Ubuntu 10.04 + PHP 5.3 + XMail
If you install XMail on your Ubuntu 10.04 server, you will find that PHP won't be able to send mail out. You will repeatedly an error similar to this:
/var/lib/xmail/spool/temp/1277773767000.23491.p2198888.pubip.serverbeach.com: Permission denied
Don't bother with file permissions - they don't work.…
Apache 2.2 + Tomcat 6 + mod_proxy
After stumbling around with lousy documentation and zero examples, I finally found at least one site which hinted at how to do this, and led me to this solution.
Your virtual host file should look something like this:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName j.digitalcove.ca DocumentRoot /usr/local/tomcat …
Lessons from the Past - Famous Quotes
I've always been struck by how people in the tech industry always forget lessons of the past, and always forget those little pearls of wisdom that came before. Here are a few choice ones, and my comments included.
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft build…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Steve Jobs Defends Apple's Position - What an Ass
So, it seems Steve Jobs has decided to push his reality distortion field beyond the bounds of his company, and in a response to Adobe's recent announcement of abandoning, release a letter in response.
Does anyone other than Apple fan-boys buy this rubbish?
Let's address a few of his claims, shall we…
Apple Alienating I.T. Companies
I'm not fan of Flash - anyone who knows me would attest to that. However, I will admit that it has it's place in the world. I do enjoy my little Flash games, as to millions of others.
Apparently, Apple doesn't give a toss.
First they slagged off Java (funny position, since their CPU for the iPhone w…
The Peculiar Nature of PHP
PHP has obviously been around for a while. Not quite as long as C, but by all accounts around 1995, the same year as Ruby and Java. And yet, I find it one of the most peculiar languages with regards to how people (those core to the language itself, as well as users) have developed using such a diver…
Apple Goes Further - Where Will It End?
Where will Apple's greed and disdain for developers end? probably never so long as brain-dead consumers keep gobbling up their rubbish trinkets.
I recently had an argument with a self-professed "developer" who didn't see how I could hold the opinion that Apple was unfriendly towards developers. Well…
PHP "Eval is Evil"
I keep seeing something which is beginning to annoy me - I keep seeing all these forum and blog comments saying how terrible PHP's "eval" instruction is, and how there is no reason what-so-ever to use it.
I wish people would keep their opinions to themselves simply when they cannot think of an insta…
New code Milestone
According to Ohloh.net, I have passed 200 commits across my open source projects.
Although this is a nice personal milestone, it does highlight the problem with a 9-5 job - no time for open-source development. I have so many projects I'd like to keep working on, but literally no time to do it in.
T…
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
- Shawn Adrian - talented graphic designer, bad driver, and all-round fun guy
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