Author: tychay

light writing, word loving, ❤ coding

You Used PHP to Troll WHOM?! (PHP and Enterprise Scalability Part 1/5)

Why Enterprise Web Scalability is Science Fiction. Its five part mission: to explore myths of PHP, to seek out this “Enterprise Scalability”, to boldy go where no web developer would bother going before… *queue music*

  1. You Use PHP to Troll WHOM?! <——THIS POST. The wherefore of this article and an introduction.
  2. Even the Pros are Cons. Why PHP’s advantages in enterprise are a form of backhanded compliment.
  3. Sinking a fleet of FAIL. Reasons for why PHP should not be used in enterprise fail you.
  4. Time to set my phasers on “kill”. Deconstructing the use of the word of “enterprise” as an adjective modifying “web development.”
  5. Defensing the indefensible. Don’t bother defending your B.S. it only makes you look more stupid.

(I apologize for the book-like length of this article, Paramount wouldn’t buy the movie rights.)

…

Some people have asked me to respond to this article.

Time to whip out the tychay

“Rip this guy a new one, please :-)”—Ben Ramsey

“Yeah, yeah, what Ben Ramsey said! (Make sure you beat him for using a f—ed up title like that too.)”—Elizabeth Naramore

“+1. That dude needs a taste of Terry Chay in the worst, most serious kind of way.”—Robert Gonzalez

This is what I get for being a self-styled PHP Terrorist. *sigh*

Honestly, I don’t know if I have anything to add beyond the total and complete humiliation the author and his editor received in the 50 replies it received.

I suppose this is what it feels like to put down a lame horse.

[Why me? after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 18

Geek. Set. Match…

Just now, Mager messaged me:

“I am excited for Lunch two dot oh—I don’t say “point-oh” anymore.

Flashback.

…

In the summer of 1992, a friend was reading me a geek purity test he got from USENET.

One of the questions was:

Do you pronounce “*.*” as “star-dot-star?”

Of course, since he was reading it aloud, I heard:

Do you pronounce star-dot-star as star-dot-star?

Needless to say, I was quite confused. 😀

[More geek after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 5

Starbucks mastermind

All month, the closest Starbucks’s chalkboard has read: “Try a Skinny or Mocha Cinnamon dolce Latté A Non-fat, Sugar-free dairy delight!”

I had to stop ordering them because I dislike the sugar-free aftertaste. This means that I’m now faced with the question, “Do I want whip cream in it?”

Of course, when given an option for my food, I almost always say “yes,” and I started to realize that this is eating into my need for variety. How to balance those two?

[choice, choice, and more choice after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 11

Twat

At dinner with Morgan the other day, someone pointed out the past participle of “to twitter” should be “twat,” or perhaps “twatted.” As in, “That’s what she twatted.” Or, “I twat that.”

twat

In twitter-speak, OH means “overheard” which is a polite way of saying, “I don’t want to embarrass the person we all can guess must have said this. *wink* *wink*”

In an early draft an article, I tried the word out. But I ended up editing it—it felt uncomfortable writing about someone’s “twat.”

Posted on by tychay 11

Analog blog 2

I blame Merlin Mann of 43 folders. He’s the one who popularized Moleskines years ago.

How else can I explain that right after I wrote about my analog blog that Brian Moon pointed me to the very next xkcd about that. Which caused my friends to point out the sequel article:

journal 2

Journal 2 by xkcd

Which gave me this weird flashback to the Kubrick and Cupcakes Get Satisfaction/Songbird party, where I caught both Ramon and Dave McClure as being one of the few without hats.

Ramon

Ramon
Terra
South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D70, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/20sec @ f/2.8, iso640, 21mm (31mm)

Ramon is almost always styling with a hat. Since everyone else is with hat, I suppose he is doing without.

Dave McClure

Dave McClure
Terra
South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D70, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/10sec @ f/2.8, iso640, 18mm (27mm)

Dave wears 500 hats, but the only one he has on this day is his party hat.

[Why Merlin Mann is the anti-christ after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

The best blogging system ever

Hmm it looks like my rant touched off a spirited defense from the writer of Mephisto.

Hey, that’s my blogging system! I’m just curious what kind of error page a bad url should show? Something like this?

And yes, the mephisto title is me having fun. Lighten up, dude 😀 I never said it wasn’t shitty, but it scales just fine.
—rick, the creator of Mephisto

I’ll admit, I was a little harsh on Rick. Shit, anyone who calls himself “technoweenie” is probably someone I need to kick of few beers back with—preferably with the Plasq peeps so we don’t have to spring money when Skitch is out of beta.

Any way you cut it, it’s ballsy to say Mephisto “scales just fine” given that WordPress does not and it’d pretty much crushes Mephisto out of the box on on availability, ease of install, extensibility, performance, and scalability.

That’s typical of Ruby programmers, always making outlandish claims that aren’t true and then saying that I have the burden to prove the negative.

Speaking of Skitch, How’s this for “lightening up”?

Mephisto the best blogging system ever

“I’m Rick Olson, I invented friggin Mephisto. Have you heard of it?”

You’re not going to demand that I prove that Mephisto isn’t “the best blogging system ever” are you, Matt? 😉 (This is a reference to WordPress’s funding.)

BTW, unlike his Ruby compatriots so quick to throw him to the wolves, I actually like that he is writing Mephisto in Rails. When Matt was forking b2 to write WordPress in PHP, I thought MoveableType had won and I was perfectly happy installing mod_perl. So what do I know?

As to Rick’s “curiosity,” Mephisto shouldn’t generate or allow a post slug with “/” or “:” etc or, if it does allow it, it should encode it. In the screenshot you linked, I don’t have that post slug on this blog with that URL and WordPress wouldn’t allow it so the screenshot he took is moot. It does, however, show my great taste in WordPress themes.

[more Ruby bashing after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 11

LEGOs of things past

Scott Beale notes the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick.

Burka asks, what is our preferred LEGO theme?

Does it show my age when I mention that pretty much the only theme available at the time was SPACE:

LEGO SPACE Model 442 (1978)

LEGO Space Shuttle (Model 442—1978)

Just so you know, the antenna in the back turns into a long range gauss gun. 😉

Look up the legos from your childhood on the LUGNET LEGO Set Database.

In 1977, there was a popular series of LEGO-like kits that allowed you to snap together models battleships, destroyers, and such. I don’t remember the name, but given the timing, they were the reason LEGO started to make themes. Here’s to that forgotten piece of toy history.

Posted on by tychay 4

Must…resist…urge…

I’ve been a big supporter of Zivity.

My PHP friends tease me about this because Zivity is built on Rails.

Well, I got an invite to Zivity Beta the other day, so I figured I should subscribe to their blog. Today, I just wanted to link this great article from Forbes when I ran across this…

Okay, when your blog is in Rails, you’ve gone too far…

Okay, when your blog is in Rails, you’ve gone too far…

(Here is the link that generated this error message.)

I mean it’s just a friggin’ blog! 😉

[Ruby stats after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 10

Being popular

After the merkley??? party, I went with some friends to Matt Mullenweg’s birthday party.

(Matt, for those of you who don’t know, wrote WordPress which over the years has become the premier blogging application on the internet. Matt also gets a lot of shit from me when I talk about programming)

My friends and I are chatting in line outside BigFoot, when this pretty girl, K—, who I’ve never met before, ahead of me in line, turns around and says, “Wait, is your name ‘Terry Chay?’”

“Oh noes!” Morgan says, “Terry, you’re internet famous!”

So this is what it feels like to be popular?, I thought. Is it wrong that I sort of like it?

[Internet Fame after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 18

Economic darwinism and bleeding hearts

Tomorrow, the stock market will crash. The fact of this crash is already written in the future’s market, but the depth and duration of the coming recession it may herald is the realm of the astrology and numerology that is part and parcel with macroeconomics.

Like Krugman, I’d like to mark this point in time with another one:

“The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”
—Bill Clinton, 1992

The “greed is good” of the 80’s has become resurgent in this decade under the banner of libertarianism. It has provided a rationalization for our irresponsibility with a wishful-thinking outlook via such self-deluding sloganeering as “socially liberal, fiscally conservative.”

And the cornerstone of this Economic Darwinism has been the myth of Reaganomics.

I can only hope that it is among the first casualties of coming recession.

[Bleeding hearts after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 10