I've finished translating a nice looking mockup into a nearly perfect and fully functioning web page that works in IE, Firefox, and Safari, and I did it all without tables (well, there's one tiny, tiny portion that was frustrating, but I'll fix that eventually).
I really wish that some design companies that make mockups for web pages really took the web into consideration. There's a tiny anomaly that bugs me, and I know how to fix it, but then I'm committed to locking the size of the content area, which I don't think I can do given the other pages I'll need to create around this design. There might be one other solution, but it just becomes too tedious in the end. Sigh.
I'm proud of myself, though. Not so proud that my posts are turning into tech stuff. Need to change that. Maybe I need a separate journal for tech musings. And become the trend despite having a journal way before it became trendy. Ironic?
But I think this summer is going to mark the return of the old Kaiser. Or rather, the spirit of the old Kaiser with the skills of the new Kaiser. I've got a new design in mind, because this one sucks.
And Asma and I are planning a trip to Prince Edward Island in August. Exciting times await! I feel so free now.
I made a big, if not overdue, decision yesterday.
I don't wan to generalize, but it seems that people that latch onto Ruby all of a sudden has an epiphany that nothing else is as good, or that Rails is a godsend. Not that I have a problem with that, but PHP is almost always cast off as the dull, adopted brother that was once the jewel of the web development family. The condescension is annoying.
Take ‘Are you a Rails developer on the inside?’.
No, I'm not. I've used Rails and the best consensus I can give to this post is this: Ruby is a nice language. I'll get to Rails in a sec.
What bothers me most about the post is the ‘PHP Ghetto’ reference. Yes, you've hacked things together over the years and know a fair amount of PHP. That fact that you haven't really learned from your previous work, though, isn't a reflection of PHP but of you. And I say it because my development and coding style is hundreds of times more polished than when I first start hacking things together. I didn't need a package that did everything for me to see the light.
I built a PHP framework that, with a little more work, should easily rival Rails. And it has nice features that Rails lacks (like form validation: why in hell would you tie validation to a database object? Not every form on a site has some table in the background that the information gets stored to. And why is simple searching/querying and outputting search results such a chore?). And let's be realistic: Ruby without Rails means no Ruby on the web. Ruby isn't a web language; Rails provides a lot of things in a nice way that PHP (which was built specifically for the web) already had as part of the standard package.
Every project I made, I always had some bits of code or knowledge that I took with me to the next project. I built a a little library of objects, I knew how to organize my code and files better, and I moved on. And it got to a point that probably other framework developers got to, where all that experience led to a certain methodology. Mine, it turns out, is like MVC (a natural solution), but not quite.
But I had that idea without being familiar with other frameworks or framework methodologies. I spent countless days thinking about the flow and organization of everything, scribbled out pages and pages of diagrams and notes. I wanted things to be perfect, and it was agonizing. I was proud of the first version of qkFrame for all of five minutes before I saw lots of flaws and inefficiencies. So a few months later I had the second version up, which is much more agile and organized and powerful. Still has a ways to go, but pretty damn good as is.
And I leveraged PHP in a good way for all of it. Every piece of code aside from Smarty was written from scratch. The code is pretty and readable and, to the best of my knowledge, efficient. And just because PHP doesn't have a magical Date or Time object doesn't mean no one can write one. Write it, share it – if it never becomes part of the standard distribution, at least it's there for others who want that functionality.
So maybe it's a difference between those with a knack for development and those that use programming to just get by, where the end justifies the means. Ruby as a language is in many ways more superior than PHP (it'd be great to have things like natural mixins, operator overloading, and declarations within an object, though I hate the 'syntax optional' features – VB[Script] has that, and the code gets pretty ugly). And Rails is great for anyone that hasn't experienced building a cohesive and flexible application before.
But really, a good programmer could make any code look beautiful – it's not the language. That's like saying one color of paint is inherently better than another.
This wasn't meant to bash anyone or anything, or to staunchly stand my ground and say PHP is the greatest. I'm just giving my personal experience on why there are several ways to see the light. I made something as close to equivalent as Rails, minus the niceties of Ruby. It all boils down to what type of person you are, not what tools you use.
The one great experience I've had with an IBM-compatible PC is that I've never had a hard drive just die for no reason. Not in 14 years.
Hats off to the great Apple. It took you guys 2 months.
Pompous assholes.
I spent over an hour trying to install GD and it finally works. Yay! This how-to guide helped out a lot, even though I had to do some brainwork to get through a couple of trouble spots.
And remember, it's always a good idea to restart after compiling and installing new things.
Over the weekend, the Chinatown metro station replaced its 'warning' lights (lights that run alongside the entire platform that either blink when a train is approaching or stay lit when the train is on the platform). They used to be ambiguous on the whole, with some lights always flickering or out, and dim in general – you had to notice the lights out of curiosity or accident.
They are now a luscious orangeish red and should be impossible to miss for most people. It was strangely satisfying to see them – they're a pretty constrast to everything else. I hope WMATA will replace the lights for the rest of the stations.
