Category: PHP

Stuff about PHP (Personal Home Page or PHP Hypertext Processor), an open-source language for developing websites and web applications. And one of the few things out there with more market share than a Microsoft product.

Sinking a Fleet of Fail (PHP and Enterprise Scalability Part 3/5)

Why Enterprise Web Scalability is Science Fiction:

  1. You Use PHP to Troll WHOM?!. 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. <——THIS POST 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.

Onto the second part of the article, where the author shows why PHP, the language used for the busiest sites on the internet, apparently can’t scale it’s way out of a paper bag:

Oh c’mon and get serious. At least read up on a subject before posting an article about so full of holes it could sink the Titanic three times over and have enough left to take out the Japanese whaling fleet.
—Pádraic Brady commenting on the article

Failboat

All aboard the Failboat

[Destroying the myths of thread safety, performance, security, and scalability after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 8

Even the Pros are Cons (PHP and Enterprise Scalability Part 2/5)

Why Enterprise Web Scalability is Science Fiction:

  1. You Use PHP to Troll WHOM?!. The wherefore of this article and an introduction.
  2. Even the Pros are Cons. <——THIS POST 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.

Looking at the “compliments” served to PHP by the article as “advantages”…

[Takedown Part 1 after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 6

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

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

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

OOps! I (recycled my talk) again!

PHP is a hacky piece of shit that gets the job done that somehow that suits me just fine.

I honestly don’t know why I support SF PHP Meetup.

Quite frankly, I find the whole “Meetup” website strangely-segmented, overly-restrictive, and a closed-off and archaic anachronism. I am counting the days until Facebook or Ning finally gets their s—t together and wipes it off the face of the earth. But there it is, and I still show up these meetups despite opening my mouth and subsequently drinking a whole Cup ’O Instant Regret.

The only valid conclusion is I have a huge ego and just like hearing myself talk. So when Touge invited me to turn the next SF PHP meetup into a “Terry Show,” I felt strangely compelled to say yes.

And just so that you don’t have to navigate that horrible website, I, in a weird spate of generosity, decided to copy down the deets…

What: OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to Object-Oriented Design
When: Thursday, February 7, 2008 at 7PM
Where: CNET networks, 235 2nd street, San Francisco, CA
Why: Because someone has to provide the “asshole engineer” benchmark, it might as well be me.
RSVP: The great thing is you show up. Just don’t give security the queer eye…download iCalendar, spam Upcoming, and whore this on Facebook.

A small dilemma was, as an asshole engineer, I’m fundamentally lazy—that’s why I became a software architect in the first place: so I wouldn’t have to actually write anything and could just rip into other people’s code and claim credit for their hard work.

What to do?

How about recycle an old talk FTW? After all, George seemed to like it.

OOps at SF PHP Meetup

Think of this just like Britney’s comeback performance only a whole lot worse a trainwreck.

So you better go to this talk, because my ego isn’t big enough for the both of us and I’ll need you around to pop it. If you can’t make it, maybe I’ll install Profcast or someone will stream it so you can count my cuss words on #phpc again. Then again, maybe not. Because you obviously missed the memo wherein I revealed I’m a lazy sloth.

Perhaps I’ll actually delete the slides that are truly embarrassing, but probably not. Wouldn’t want to mess with my perfect record of regret at PHP meetups.

Posted on by tychay 6

FOX needs a senior PHP front-end developer

Hmm, it’s been a while since I posted some PHP jobs. (You know this is getting inconvenient. I think I need to just write a job tool for php.net.) Received this rec from a friend filling a position for FOX Interactive Media to work on the American Idol site. They can work in San Francisco, Los Angeles or even Seattle.

(Also, if you are the one flash/actionscript developer out there, contact Diana for positions at FOX sports, etc.)

Contact Diana Schwartz 310.590.4570 or dschwartz at this site.

[Senior Front End Web Developer job description after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 2