Pointbeing.net
Look Back at 2008
I really hate those "lookback" blog posts that crop up at the end of each year, don't you? Good. That being agreed, here's mine.
I've had the Pointbeing.net domain since longer than I remember, but it was only in the first months of 2008 that I started to do anything with it.
I'm pleased that I did: the site is averaging 8,000+ page impressions a month, but only because people don't know how to create an auto increment column in Postgres. It's a shame that the Postgres community hates me for mentioning that.
Other things have happened here too.
My proudest moments of the year included being published twice. Subsequently I was honoured that the magnificent Steph invited me to become a Technical Editor at php|architect. 2009 promises to be a really interesting year for the magazine, so stay tuned.
My most ambitious moments of the year involved starting my degree in Semi-Advanced Boffinry, and becoming a blogger at Fifteensquared.
Fluffiest moment of the year was adopting my cats back in January.
Relatedly, the low point of the year was losing my princess despite countless sleepless nights and the best attentions of the wonderful Brockwell Vets. I loved her, she rocked, and she was so much cooler than you :P. I miss her.
Missed opportunity of the year was not submitting my proposal to speak at PHPNW despite the general encouragement of the community. Muppet.
How about you?
A Second Cheat Sheet: the Sine Rule and the Cosine Rule
More adventures in MST121: Using Mathematics. B3: Modelling with Vectors took an unexpected turn into matters of triangle geometry - and not the more beginner-friendly right-angled variety either - which left me getting to grips with the Sine Rule and the Cosine Rule.
Much like my experiences with Sigma Notation, the principles are straightforward, but I kept failing to spot which equations to apply.
So I've knocked up a further cheat sheet. Here are the files:
My First Contribution to Fifteensquared
I'm pleased to mention that earlier on today, I posted my first contribution to Fifteensquared.net. The post in question is Independent 6,912 by Dac.
For the uninitiated, Fifteensquared is kind of like a blog for cryptic crossword enthusiasts. Several invited bloggers post solutions and explanations for some of the day's main crosswords, and then we all have a bit of a natter about it.
It's gratifyingly nerdy, and is quite high profile within the cryptic crossword world, with many of the setters and editors visiting and commenting regularly.
So I'm pleased that my first post wasn't roundly jeered by the regulars. I'll be posting Independent solutions about once a week from now on, and I'm sure there will be tougher mornings to come!
A Project for the New Year
So I'm putting together a project for the new year. I'm telling you about it now because if I don't make public promises, it'll fall by the wayside.
The idea is this: every day in 2009 gets assigned a number. January the first is naturally 1, the second is 2 and so on...right up to the magic 365.
The project is structured like a blog, so each day we'll post a hopefully quite interesting fact regarding the day's number. 152 might be the number of executions presided over by George W. Bush as Governor of Texas; 1 might be the percentage of the earth's water that can be used for drinking by humans.
Bear with me, I'm pulling numbers out of the air for the time being.
Since each fact will have to be substantiated, unlike those above, with each post you'll get a link to a - again - hopefully quite interesting article. Where appropriate, a post may be illuminated using a Creative Commons-licensed image from Flickr.
Um, so that's about it. It's fairly simple, but it might make your - or at least my - day a tiny bit more interesting, and there's a lot to be said for that.
I'll accept contributions and give credit where it's due. It's unlikely that I'll be able to do this all myself, alongside working full-time, studying part-time, tech editing and writing for php|architect, and something else, about which I'll post next week.
The site will be not-for-profit, and will run on the blogging engine that I hacked together for pointbeing.net, so I have a bit of work to do to make it not suck quite so blowfully!
Thoughts/comments/ideas?
Copyright/License Comment Blocks Considered Harmful
Rant alert. You know what really grinds my gears?
It's those epically long license/copyright notice comment blocks with which some developers, particularly those behind open source PHP projects, insist on prepending source code files.
You've all seen this kind of thing. I'm using Wall4PHP to illustrate my point, but they're by no means the only offenders.
So tell me, why do I have to scroll down a whole page every time I open up a file to check out the source? That essay there tells me absolutely nothing of any value about the code in that file. Worse still is that this type of comment tends to prepend code that lacks useful, meaningful comments - as if the developer thought that copy-and-pasting the copyright notice would get them off the hook.
To me, this is an utterly inappropriate use of comments; an abuse of the very syntax that makes it possible.
Really, why is this stuff in every single file of your project? One would assume that this kind of epic duplication ("multiplication"?) would be anathema to any developer worth their salt, but apparently not.
Guess what? If you release code under a particular licence, that license applies to all of the code, regardless of whether you state it at the top of the file. Furthermore, if you create something original, you automatically own the copyright on it, regardless of whether you state it anywhere.
If you really must, why not just include a LICENSE.txt file in the root of your project's document tree, and be done with it? Do you really think that some nefarious good-for-nothing is going to follow this particular train of thought?
Man, this library is sweet, I'm going to steal me some of this code right here for some highly evil purposes
- Opens file, spots the 50-line copyright notice
Denied! Guess I can't steal that code after all :( I think I'll go and help out at the homeless shelter instead
You know what, (s)he's just going to steal it anyway.
I suspect the habit stems from a Well, we've always done it this way, and Project X always did it this way, so it must be sort of ok
mindset. It's probably worth taking the time to question that mindset.
Ok, I'm done now. I'm sure the eagle-eyed will spot that, for bonus irony points, I've illustrated this post by including an image which probably violates every copyright law out there.
Sigma Notation Cheat Sheet
I'm just over a quarter of the way through MST121: Using Mathematics, which I started back in September. My impression is that it's starting to get tougher, but it may just be that my mind has been elsewhere.
One concept with which I found myself to be less confident is Sigma Notation. The principle itself is fairly straightforward (it's kind of like a for loop, if you ask me) but getting actual numbers out of the other side was another matter.
The problem was that I was consistently failing to spot the patterns that indicate that you can substitute in other, hopefully simpler, expressions.
So I made a little aide memoire to print out. It covers the three four initial, erm, refactorings that have cropped up, and I figured I may as well share it.
The whole exercise also gave me an excuse to get to grips with typesetting mathematical expressions in the rather wonderful LaTeX. I've a fair bit to learn, so if anyone who's stronger than me at maths and/or LaTeX fancies sending me any pointers, they'd be welcome.
The cheat sheet is available as:
I'll try to update this post when I find the right tool + inclination to make a nice PNG of it. But first I've a few more exercises to run through to see if this has even helped.
"Working with... Zend Platform" Published
Another month must be nearly upon us, and with it comes a spanking new issue of php|architect magazine.
I'm pleased to mention that my article all about Zend Platform is featured, along with lots of other goodness.
I found Ivo's introduction to ATK particularly interesting, and it's a tool I'll be pressing into service before long.
I have a couple of ideas for future articles, but they may take a backseat to my studies for the time being.
I'm a Student Again
So it turns out that as of now, I'm once again a student, this time with the Open University.
Strictly speaking, the course kicks off this coming Saturday, but since I'll be in the pub from lunchtime onwards that day, and since they sent all the materials through a couple of weeks ago, I felt it might be worth cracking on.
The plan - which is subject to change over time - is to end up with a BSc (Honours) Computing and Mathematical Sciences. I've started on MST121: Using Mathematics, which so far has introduced me to Mathcad, and forced me to rack my brains to remember some rudimentary algebra from my disturbingly distant school days.
The maths course runs until June next year, and I may start M255: Object-Oriented Programming with Java in February, so as to avoid the whole degree course taking a decade or so to complete. Whilst I'll have something of a head start on the programming, tackling two courses at once whilst holding down a full-time job might be a bit of an ask, so we'll see how this first one goes.
In the meantime I'll be working through the rather plentiful course books, watching the occasional DVD and fretting about the quite intimidating assessment schedule. I'll also have to find out where Croydon is, and work out how to get there for tutorials every couple of weeks.
One or two people asked why I'm doing this, and that's a fair question. I don't need another degree: an MA (Honours) and an MSc should probably be enough for anyone. I don't really believe that this will help my career progression either: that would suggest that I've somehow been held back by not having a BSc in Computing, which is not the case. I have a vague feeling that I'd like better to understand the theoretical foundation behind the code that puts food on the table, but I've struggled to put that into words. Never mind, the fact is that I really don't have to justify this to anyone, so I won't.
So anyway, I was feeling pretty daunted by it all, but the recently-opened course website does a nice job of breaking it all into bite-size chunks and letting you know what to do and when to do it, so I'm feeling cautiously optimistic, for the time being.
All that remains is to find out whether this qualifies me for the greatly reduced student pricing for Future of Mobile 2008!
August '08 Issue of php|architect Magazine Out Now
I've just spotted that the August issue of php|architect magazine is now available for download, and it's a top quality issue as always, with articles on writing Wordpress plugins and Facebook apps, an introduction to Adobe's Flex, and finally James Cauwelier's case study of scaling out an e-Commerce site to support a million products.
I'm really pleased to have been involved with the technical editing of this issue, and there's a certain swelling of pride in spotting one's name in the editorial credits (alongside Richard Harrison, I note; Richard being the man responsible for putting ElePHPants on the desks of most of London's PHP developers).
Presentations on Slideshare
I've been doing a bit of presenting at work recently, which has meant getting my head around making up slides (using OpenOffice, of course). It all feels a little bit Dilbert, in a way.
Anyway, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking or PlayPhone-specific about these slides, so I've put them up on Slideshare in case anyone fancies a look.
The first presentation I did was on Zend Platform. Apologies for the garish yellow template.
Today's was an introduction to unit testing in PHP. It's necessarily quite introductory as it's intended for developers with little to no testing experience.
The demo code I knocked up for this one is sat over on demo.pointbeing.net.
Part 2 will be somewhat hairier, and I'll look at mocks, fixtures, some testing best-practices and a few other bits and bobs.