GarfieldTech

Apparently, I share a birthday with the Internet. Who knew?

Of course, I also share a birthday with the Great Depression.

I guess it's a wash.

So it only took them a month to grade it (silly paper exams), but I finally heard back from Zend about the Zend PHP 5 Certification exam I took at php|tek last month. I passed, of course. :-)

Let the bad puns begin!

Over on the Planet, someone posted a link to a budding Drupal user who was having the usual first-time-user troubles. "I want to do X, Y, Z, but I can't figure out how and no one will tell me, help!" Been there, done that, I suppose. But how can that be if there's so much Drupal documentation? Simple. The questions most people ask are the hardest to answer, because there isn't just one kind of documentation.

Last week this web site developed a completely bizarre bug interacting with the database that affected only blog entries. I blamed the database. My web host insisted the problem was with the PHP code. So I took the opportunity to just upgrade the site to Drupal 5, finally, and see what would happen.

So I finally gave in and disabled trackbacks on this site. So far there have been two real trackbacks and about 50,000 (no joke) spam ones. It's really not worth the effort. I may bring them back if I come up with a decent way to filter them properly, but the spam module just doesn't have a high enough s/n ratio. Suggestions on a better method are welcome. :-)

The great question of the day has been solved, and it is Emacs that wins.

Not that I use Emacs, mind you, but I've said for years that sooner or later, GNU/Linux would go away and be replaced by your choice of KDE/Linux (KDE having taken over so much functionality that all it needs is a kernel) and Emacs/Linux (Emacs already being almost an OS, except for missing a text editor). The only question was which would happen first.

As both of my avid readers have likely noticed, this blog has not been particularly active of late. That is to say, today is the one year anniversary of the last time it was actually used. :-) So what do I do to celebrate? Rebuild the whole thing from scratch, of course!

Like most people on the Net, I make some use of Yahoo! services. It's not easy to avoid it. Hundreds of thousands of people have a Yahoo! email address, just as many use Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Groups is "the new usenet" for many subjects. That's not even counting Yahoo!'s various other branding efforts.

Before I continue, I'm going to drop the stupid ! in the company name. Yes it should be there for accuracy, but good grief can we be a little less self-important? Thanks. Anyway...

The advantage of one company offering all of those services is that you have only a single sign-on to worry about. One name, one password, one bookmark, and you have all of your services at your fingertips. That's great... right up until you get butterfingers. It's also a single point of failure; one problem can bring down your entire PIM network.

Recently I was working on-site at a client's office on a small PHP project. There was one other developer working on the project with me, one of the client's full time people. The client (who shall rename nameless, but suffice to say everything went well and this is not at all a gripe against them) was a solid Windows shop, unfortunately. Windows XP on the desktop, Windows Server 2k3 on the back-end, MS SQL Server running the database. That also meant Visual Source Safe for source code management.

This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I didn't even really like that movie, but I've been looking for a place to use that line for a long time and this seemed like a good place. :-) This will not be the most interesting post, no doubt, but a first post rarely is.

Greetings blogging world from your latest member, a freelance web developer and technophile. More information on me will likely be forthcoming eventually, but we'll get there later. For now, this blog serves two main purposes.