Zzot!

Sure, I know how to do this, but would my Mom?

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Whoever sold this ad is a marketing genius. I mean honestly — if you were selling cookbooks, would you have realized you need to get on SourceForge? No, you wouldn’t have. You know why? I’ll tell you — you’re an idiot. Meddling amateurs like you or me would have been wasting our advertising budget on Food Network spots. Luckily, for all humanity, we have proper Madison Avenue types to save us from ourselves.

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I like PHP. I also like Ruby on Rails. So, it naturally follows that I would also like Rails ported to PHP, right? Well, maybe — but I’m not sure I’ve seen a good example of this.¹

Here’s a totally made-up example (in Ruby):

class RockStar < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :roadies
has_many :groupies
end


Sure, it doesn’t do much, but most of the interesting model behavior comes automatically (that being the whole point of Rails). So, here’s a fairly literal translation into PHP:

class RockStar extends ActiveRecord::Base {
has_many('roadies');
has_many('groupies');
}

Literal as in, I didn’t bother making it valid PHP; I just replaced the basic syntax elements with the PHP equivalents.² Ignoring the rather basic issue of namespaces, the interesting problem is that I called an inherited function in the middle of declaring the child class — PHP doesn’t allow this.

Here’s the thing; different languages are different. That doesn’t mean one has to be better than the other, it just means they’re different. The problem is most of the ports I’ve come across are losing something in translation.

The elegance of Rails³ is in the code you don’t write. There’s not a single line of CRUD up there; the base class sorts all that out for me. Sure, you could create some valid PHP out of that, but quite often that leads to Rails crammed into PHP syntax, instead of a real PHP equivalent to Rails.

Don’t get me wrong — has_many works well in Rails, but the next time I find a new `ActiveRecord` in PHP, I’d rather see some elegant PHP instead of the closest PHP someone could think of to some elegant Ruby.

1. I’m intentionally not naming names here; but some examples I’ve seen are much closer than others. [↩]
2. I also didn’t write a more complex has_many relation with a less obvious PHP equivalent, but that’s beside the point. [↩]
3. …or in any system, depending on who you ask [↩]

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This applies to software distributed on compressed disk images, which includes most indie software. It excludes software distributed on disk images that are then compressed, only because this annoying behavior is thankfully uncommon. I’m talking here about things that I see frequently.

Finder’s toolbar is hidden

The most convenient access to the Applications folder is almost always going to be the toolbar or the sidebar. The user is usually going to want to put your app somewhere, and most of the time, the disk image has a background image telling you to put it in your Applications folder. Which the software vendor has conveniently not given you access to. The most obvious workaround to this is to show the toolbar, which leads us to…

Window looks like crap with sidebar

Finder only stores one window size; the with- size. If a window doesn’t have a with- size, Finder guesses what you want — and if your Finder has the sidebar, and mine has for some time now, it guesses wrong. It adds the sidebar to whatever you’ve already got, throwing out whatever doesn’t fit. This blows the careful layout of the disk image, frequently hiding the damned application. The one I’m still trying to drag to my Applications folder.

I guess one is forgivable, but not both. Sure, I might be one of the eleven users with a convenient alias to the Applications folder, or think dragging the application, whacking my _show desktop_ Exposé key, hovering on my hard drive icon, waiting for its window to spring open, and then finally dropping on the actual Applications folder is easier…but I’m not, and I don’t think that’s unusual. Plus, if someone is horrified by the sidebar and instantly hides it, Finder obviously gets that right.

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It snowed here Sunday evening, and since we spend Christmas morning with L’s parents and the evening with mine, we had to drive through it.

It wasn’t a note-worthy drive because it was the first snow — that happened weeks ago. It wasn’t snowing especially hard, the roads weren’t glassed over with ice, and you could generally see things farther away than your hood ornament when you looked out the window.

So, why blog about unremarkable snow? Because people can’t drive. There were at least four accidents that featured cars with the headlights no longer pointed forward, and at least one case of tires not pointed down. You would think that, living in Michigan, people wouldn’t be flying off of the road like they’re giving out free t-shirts every time it snows. Okay, I would think that. I _do_ think that, in fact — even though I’ve been living here a while.

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It’s a simple rule, really — when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. It isn’t even a new one really (except to Sony apparently). It’s one thing (albeit an incredibly stupid one) to use a buggy rootkit in your DRM; it’s another entirely to tell the SysInternals guys how Windows really works in defense of your half-assed software.

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There’s sort of a weekend tradition in L’s family; doing a crossword puzzle. They never did anything for me growing up, but now staring blankly at the WSJ crossword puzzle is something I could get used to. The thing is, the Online Journal’s version of the puzzle is a Java applet, which just isn’t the same.

I spotted this in the Online Journal’s FAQ:

On Friday’s you’ll find the full contents of the Weekend Journal, including the ever-challenging Crossword Puzzle.

So, being the high-tech tangle of contradiction that I am, that sort of got to me, I e-mailed a response to that FAQ entry to the Online Journal’s customer support people:

While I suppose that is technically true; the Java applet (presumably) represents the same puzzle that appears in print, I don’t entirely agree with it. Most of the Online Journal has “format for printing” links, but not the puzzle. Perhaps for you, relaxing on the weekend with a crossword puzzle evokes images of a web browser and a java applet, but for me it evokes images of a pencil, paper, and the sofa. Is the puzzle there in a more low-tech format that I’m just not seeing? (it seems silly to have online subscribers also buying the print edition for only the crossword puzzle)

Their response:

Dear Ignats,

Thank you for your email message. The crossword puzzle cannot be printed off in its entirety to be completed. It needs to be done on the computer with an active internet connection. Your request that the puzzle be made available for printing has been forwarded to the appropriate department for consideration.

No, I didn’t actually subscribe under the name “Ignats”. While I’m not exactly holding my breath to see if the “appropriate department” actually does something, at least they thanked me for giving them the opportunity to say no. :)

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I use my PowerBook everywhere — including at work, where I am provided a perfectly functional Windows box to work on. One of the ongoing concerns of anyone who works similarly is security; how do you minimize the damage if some jerk swipes your computer?

So, having presented the background material, my pet-peeve every time I go through any list of common security precautions is screen locking. The little checkbox in the Security preference pane controls both screen-saver passwords and wake-from-sleep passwords; I only want to turn on one of those.

The thing is, my PowerBook starts the screen saver on me a lot when I’m still (more or less) working with it; when that happens, it irritates me to no end that I have to type a password, which ultimately leads to me turning the setting off again, even though I don’t want just any goofball to open up my PowerBook and start messing with my stuff.

So what’s the solution? I don’t know. My preference lately has been to turn screen savers off completely and fiddle directly with the “Power Saver” settings on all my machines. For my PowerBook I’m going to try having the least CPU-hungry screen saver (which appears to be Computer Name) activate a bit after the display goes to sleep, and check that password preference. In theory, I’ll react to the display sleep before the screen lock if I’m still there. In practice, who knows?

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So, I was reading this story on what might threaten iTMS, and what Apple might have up its sleeve to respond to such threats, and a quote in the middle really jumped out at me:

Meanwhile, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates followed with a few jabs of his own — proclaiming that mobile phones should replace the iPod as the primary device for listening to music, and hinting that Apple shouldn’t get too comfortable with its current position.

Now, I heard that Bill Gates said Apple shouldn’t get too comfortable on top, and I have no reason to think he wasn’t implying what that says he was implying — aside from it being a really dumb idea. I know a lot of people with iPods. I know a lot of people with mobile phones. All of the people in the first group are also members of the second group, so I guess iPod users largely already have mobile phones they could use instead.

The thing is, an iPod is a great mobile music player — I don’t know anyone who has a mobile phone that’s even a great phone. Is there really a growing demand from people who want to replace their lousy phone and good music player with one device that’s both a lousy phone and a lousy music player? Even if there is, who would want to be the major player in that end of the market?

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