I just read through the manual on the much anticipated Zend Framework and for the most part, I really like the implementation. It is a collection of a number of classes I already use from around the net, which is fine by me. True, PHP is in dire need of a good framework that everyone can standardize on. Right? Yeah, well, I think so, but I’m not really sure… Isn’t that what Pear is? (as a friend reminded me this morning).

My major problem is their stupid coding standards; I honestly hardly agree with a single one of them… it actually makes me angry. Here are a few that I read through until I got so mad I just closed the damn manual website and did something else (wrote this angry blog post).

B.2.2. Indentation
Use an indent of 4 spaces, with no tabs.

I despise spaces in code… why hit the space bar 4 times when you could hit tab 1 time? So what, you have different editors with different default tab stops… who cares, it’s a preference. I refuse to use spaces.

B.2.3. Maximum Line Length
The target line length is 80 characters, i.e. developers should aim keep code as close to the 80-column boundary as is practical. However, longer lines are acceptable. The maximum length of any line of PHP code is 120 characters.

No way, not in a million years. I like long lines… sure, I may have to scroll horizontally to see some code, but it is a hell of a lot simpler to read if you’re looking at the whole file or a large chunk of code.

B.3.3. Filenames
Files that are containers for single classes are derived from the class names (see above) in the format “ZClassName.php”.

Whatever… this is silly. Have they ever used an FTP client before? Some clients by default change filenames to lowercase when the upload files… like they should be. As far as I’m concerned filenames on the net should be a-z 0-9 – _ . period. If everything is in lowercase you never have to worry about case-sensitive operating systems.

B.3.5. Variables
Variable names may only contain alphanumeric characters. Underscores are not permitted. Numbers are permitted in variable names but are discouraged.

Whatever… again, I use $variable_name and refuse to use $variableName… If you have the words “some string” does it make more sense to say someString or does it look more accurate to say some_string. My opinion is the later. camelCaps is ugly in PHP code. I agree with their definition of Constants, but it leads to the question of… if underscores are permitted in constants, why not in variable names? If the answer is to clearly separate the two, then why shouldn’t variable names be all lowercase and constants be all upper case.

B.4.2.4. String Concatenation
Strings may be concatenated using the “.” operator. A space must always be added before and after the “.” operator to improve readability.

$whatever = “that is “.$tupid;

I just give up… I refuse to conform to that less-efficient “standard”. My own personal “standard” is almost the exact opposite of this Zend outline and in my opinion it is much nicer to read through and work from. I’m actually a Graphic Designer turned developer… my whole education and philosophy revolve around making things look good and stay functional… I personally think I’m qualified enough to say those standards stink.

Today was the straw the broke the camel’s back on the topic of e-mail. As a server administrator I deal with e-mail servers regularly and as any e-mail administrator knows, spammers are evil. Their tactics are such a pain, causing nothing but problems and stress on servers around the world. It’s also no secret that I’ve often wished “SpamAssassin” was actually an elite Ninja squad who specialized in removing the extremities of selfish good-for-nothing spammers.

That said, spam was not the issue today… it was actually a “legitimate message” that tipped the scale of sanity. The e-mail in question was several pages long and consisted of several people replying to messages, replying to CC’s and talking about something that some how I am involved with (because I was CC’d). Since I was CC’d on only the last few messages it’s now up to me to sort through the disgusting mess of in-line responses since the beginning and find out what the hell this has to do with me.

After about an hour of reading to figure out who-is-who and who-is-saying-what I find that right in the middle of the mess is my name as a contact (used as an incorrect reference to a project I had little to do with). So now I’ve just spent an hour of my life figuring out this whole twisted problem to find out I really don’t have anything to do with it.

The more I deal with e-mail, the less efficient I believe it is becoming. Not because of the technology itself of course, but because of how it’s being used and abused. HTML messages with colours and picutures, long correspondence, complex issues and the lack of security behind SMTP are all contributing factors to my continuing hatred of my e-mail account.

At present I do not know a solution to the problem… it seems to me like going back to usenet for business correspondence may be a solution worth investigating. What’s old is new again, isn’t that right? Perhaps with all the new social Internet concepts someone will develop something that becomes more useful and business oriented… who knows.

Until then… if you e-mail me and require any sort of response, your best bet is to keep it to the point and text-only. If you have a secret about how to efficiently handle 100 or so messages per day, for love of grey, tell me, I’m all ears.

I love Macs. I use one at work, I use one at home and I use one on the go (laptop). I also work with a lot of people and teach a lot of students who also use Macs… One of the most consistently annoying things for me about working in an Apple environment has historically been people using Internet Explorer for Mac. It’s one of those things that irks me.

“Normal” people may not understand why it bothers me and probably think I just have vendetta against Microsoft or something (which I may, but that’s besides the point), even though I try to clearly explain that Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac, is not the same as Internet Explorer for PC. IE for Mac is ancient, under developed and in my opinion, irresponsibly available to Mac users who don’t know any better.
Continue Reading…

Being a techie person I haven’t often been writing about techie sorts of things, so here’s one for you. I stumbled across a very nifty little application today called gDisk that uses Google gMail’s 2.5GB of storage as a portable hard drive by allowing any Mac user to connect to and store data in their gMail account. These aren’t stored as e-mails or anything, the data is just stored in your account. It’s a very neat system, I recommend checking it out.

This got me thinking, Google is missing a couple of things:

1) They should allow you to connect by WebDAV to “Google Disk” or “Google Central” or something like that. This service should be a central storage engine for all your Google data (Base, gMail, etc).

2) I really wish they offered IMAP to connect to gMail vs. just POP3. I’ve grown to really hate POP3. Just a thought anyways.

Either way, check out that gDisk application if you’re on a Mac.

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

The mere thought of PHP6 scares the living bejesus out of me. I haven’t yet upgraded to PHP5 because of a slower then desired adoption rate and because I have to support legacy applications for some clients. That will all change when PHP 5.1 is released in the near future. I plan on upgrading shortly after it’s released. So for the past year and a half I’ve been thinking about how to implement PHP5 then all of a sudden at this years PHP|Works conference in Toronto, Rasmus Lerdorf shows us a PHP function written in Chinese and said PHP6 is being planned and it will completely support Unicode.

That shook me up a bit, I can’t imagine the day when I open an open source PHP script and find that I can’t read the code in it. Well, I guess some current coding is so bad I can’t read it in plain English anyways, but that’s another story. Here are some excerpts from a recent article discussing a recent meeting in Paris between core developers (Zeev, Dmitri, Andrei, Jani, Wez, Marcus, Rasmus and Derick Rethans)… Continue Reading…

The first part of this is a little boring, but trust me, it does get interesting.
I hope you enjoy my story!

—– Original Message —–
From: “Joe Blow” [email protected]
To: “Matt Simpson” [email protected]
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 10:17 PM
Subject: Re: webmail NOT WORKING again

> At 10:15 PM 11/01/02 -0500, you wrote:
> >Hey Joe,
> > When the hell did this start happening…
> > this is crazy. It can’t have been today.
> > Something is messed up with the web-mail,
> > it’s confirmed, I’ve been testing it all
> > night. This is crazy. Grrr… I’m working
> > on it now… This apparently hasn’t been
> > the best week for me.
> > Continue Reading…