When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · February
· · · · 17 (4 entries)
FSS: Wood in Black and White · Friday Slide Scan #23 is another December-1985 Pacific Rim shot; the wood is driftwood, most of its colour bleached out ...
Lower the Anchor · A decade or two ago, a new pattern crept into broadcast journalism. In both radio and TV newscasts, when there’s a report from an on-the-scene correspondent, the anchor drops into Q&A mode, “interviewing” the reporter: “Well, Joe, do we know what the neighbors think of this latest development?“ This is lame and stupid and it sucks and it’s time to stop doing it; the anchor should say “Let’s go to Joe, who’s on the scene” and then shut up. It may be the case that they’ve had time to script Joe’s report, or in a hot-news situation, they may just be tossing Joe the ball to give us his best judgment as to what’s most newsworthy; either way this is Joe’s story, not the anchor’s. At the end of the day the news anchor is just a good suit, good voice, and good hair. It’s the reporter who’s doing the actual journalism and that’s where the focus should be.
Mustang Beta · Check out Mark Reinhold’s excellent summary of the blogging flurry around the recent arrival of the Mustang Beta. Anything that has anti-aliasing in it is all right by me. I really like the style of Mark’s coverage, taking up questions about why the beta isn’t actually the latest build, potential license issues, and so on. I look forward to a time when anything less than this level of transparency is simply unacceptable.
On PHP · I should really buckle down and try writing a PHP app because, at the moment, I have an attitude problem. I know that IBM now officially loves it, and Tim O’Reilly’s been charting the upcurve in PHP book sales, and everyone’s saying that Oracle’s going to buy Zend. If you want your ears bent back, have a listen to Zend CEO Doron Gerstel; he’ll tell you that half the websites in the world are powered by PHP and that there are 2½ million developers and that the war is over and PHP won. So here’s my problem, based on my limited experience with PHP (deploying a couple of free apps to do this and that, and debugging a site for a non-technical friend here and there): all the PHP code I’ve seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places. Everyone agrees on PHP’s upsides: it’s written for the web, it’s easy to deploy and get running, and it’s pretty fast. Those are important advantages. And I’m sure that it’s possible to write clean, comprehensible, maintainable, PHP; only apparently it’s real easy not to. But PHP has competition, most obviously Rails; and don’t write the Java EE crowd off, they’re not stupid at all and they’re trying to learn the lessons that PHP is trying to teach. So PHP has earned everyone’s respect by getting where it is, and Sun should reach out to it more than we have. But in the big picture, it feels vulnerable to me. [Wow, I regret not having comments. There’s been some first-rate discussion in email and on other blogs. On this occasion, I’m going to create a virtual comment section by posting the good ones here.] [There is a new, good pro-PHP rant from Harry Fuecks, and with that I’m going to stop adding to this discussion, unless somebody says something strikingly new. Thanks everyone! I’ve added a brief Table of Contents to try to bring some order to the chaos.] ...
