Funk Babblings

"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."

Update: I'm starting to think that the dumbest PHP programmers fall into that overlap as well. :-/

Lately I've been noticing a lot of cases where the successor to a given instance of web technology (specifically within the so-called "LAMP" stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python) isn't necessarily the next version of that instance, but rather something different. "Say what?" Let me explain with the specifics:

( Web Server: Apache 1.3 -> LightTPD )
( Programming Language: PHP4/Perl5 -> Ruby (On Rails) )
( Database Server: MySQL4 -> PostgreSQL ? )
( Operating System: Linux 2.4 -> FreeBSD ? Not much. )

After an exhausting day of multi-website programming debugging, I just have one question.

Whose bright idea was it to regularly use FIVE totally different but mutually interacting programming languages to create any given modern web page?

1. HTML
2. CSS (Cascading Stylesheets)
3. JavaScript (aka ECMAScript)
4. PHP (or Perl)
5. SQL (Structured Query Language)

And of course each one is implemented imperfectly or inconsistently, so properly-written code doesn't actually run properly everywhere it's supposed to.

My apologies to the vast majority out there who don't care about any of this....

( PHP is annoying )

( Soekris + m0n0wall = nice small firewall )

( Geek Showdown: Debian vs Cartoon Nudity )

Today was the first day of my new job at WRL Advertising, a small local company. Even though I've lived in Canton for three years and had two previous jobs in that time, this is my first job located in Canton rather than in Columbus.

What, an advertising company? Yeah, well, besides the traditional stuff they also do web work, creating web pages for clients. And some of those web pages are pretty in-depth, such as including online purchasing.

They originally wanted someone just to help with their PHP/MySQL programming (I'm now one of their two programmers, though I'm discovering a healthy distaste for PHP compared to Perl), but they also really liked my networking/sysadmin experience. The plan is to get some backlogged web sites done, then work on improving their network infrastructure, then start doing network stuff for clients who might otherwise take that business to consulting companies who can also do their web sites. So I'd be helping to avoid losing some web business.

Since it's a small company (though well-established) and I'm now the one there with the most networking and Unix experience, I'll have the opportunity to lead the way in where their internet department goes technically. Should be fun, once we get out from under the immediately pressing projects. One project will be to move their existing servers off Windows; it's more of a Mac shop than anything (with a few Windows people and two of us Linux guys doing the programming), so luckily that'll be more of a technical issue than a human one.

The worst part? They want me there at 8am. I'm used to going to bed at 2am and sleeping for eight hours. Meanwhile, some nights nontacitare doesn't get home until after nine. I guess I'll see her again at the next break she has.