Mr. Davidson saying that “FastCGI is weak sauce” and HTTP is were it’s at. Damn right. I am glad to see the Rails community is coming realizing the power of HTTP.
On Mr Yegge’s suggestion I recently upgraded to Emacs 22. I needed to do a Japanese localization of the web app on which I was working so I decide that now was the time to upgrade since apparently version 22 is pretty stable, even though it is not yet released. That has to be the [...]
Never provide representations of static resources by dynamic means. Or, serve anything you possibly can directly from a file on a local file system. There are several reasons for avoiding dynamic mechanisms whenever possible. The most obvious reason is that it is wasteful to generate the identical content repeatedly. If the resource never, or very [...]
In my new job I am getting a chance to really learn PHP. PHP is the workhorse of the web these days. There are tons of web applications written in PHP, probably more than any other language or framework. This is primarily because it is so productive, as I found out a while ago. All [...]
I have been working my way through Bruce Eckel’s collection of software related interviews recently. A couple of weeks before Mr Eckel posted these I recently realized that I had stopped listening to most of the podcasts to which I subscribe, except for the episodes that were interviews. So when I saw this set of [...]
While reading Oliver Steele’s article on JavaScript Memoization this bit jumped out at me. function Angle(radians) {this.setRadians(radians)} Angle.prototype.setRadians = function(radians) { this.radians = radians; this.getDegrees.reset(); }; Angle.prototype.getDegrees = function() { return this.radians * 180 / Math.PI; } memoizeConstantMethod(Angle.prototype, ‘getDegrees’); The reason that jumped out is that getDegrees is a function that returns a number, but [...]
I am regularly amazed by what ends up on the Internet. Today’s example is this Wikipedia article about the Magik programming language.Via [Charlie Savage](http://cfis.savagexi.com) Magik is a proprietary language developed by a company call Smallworld, which was later acquired by GE. I worked in the Magik programming language for six years and it is easily [...]
I am in the process of redesigning my blog. The default WordPress theme is nice and all but Charlie and Catherine have shamed me into doing something less mundane. One of the things that had bothered me was my blog roll. It was out-of-date because WordPress’s default way of handling links make it pretty painful [...]
TonicVia [Sam Buchanan](http://afongen.com/blog/) is a very promising RESTful web application framework for PHP. If you are doing web development in PHP I definitely suggest you take a closer look. I am always interested in how RESTful behaviors are implemented, regardless of the language and environment used so I went and had a little peek at [...]
On a recent project I ran into a situation where I needed some structural data. I was writing a conference registration application. Each track at the conference costs a different amount and attendees can sign up for more than one track. We already have an accounting infrastructure that has a concept of a “product”, which [...]
My name is Peter Williams. I am a father and software developer. (I do a few other things, of course, but family and software are what I am most passionate about.) This blog is primarily a place where I can rant without scaring too many people, but occasionally I record things of interest to my family here.
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