To Virus Writers

July 28th, 2004 • Rants

For the love of God, you can attack Microsoft, you can attack evil cracking sites, heck you can attack the UN, but you do NOT attack Google!!!

Sadly, Google was attacked yesterday by a MyDoom variant, it was down for a while, and when Google’s down, the Internet’s down. Even to non-geeks, Google’s almost the ultimate search engine, not because it gives a lot of results, but because it’s results are relevant. Some people don’t even know what searching is, they know “googling”, slashdotters misspell Yahoo, they have a hard time grasping a foreign concept like “Other” search engines, some think if Google goes down, it’s the end of the world as we know it.

So please, just don’t mess around with sensitive stuff, Google’s not a game you play, next time it won’t be down, and you might be banned forever from searching for “DoS Attack HOWTO” tutorials.

PHP5 Released!

July 15th, 2004 • 1 comment PHP

Congratulations, finally PHP5 is released, grab yourself a fresh copy now.

Now all is left is to actually make use of it, for some weird reason I feel that PHP4 will stick around for a while. Still, expect pains and sleepless upgrade nights, you never know what your boss might say.

PseudoPOD for UltraEdit

July 14th, 2004 • General

After reading The Making of BSD Hacks, I started using PseudoPod. It’s great for writing documentation that can be read as plain text, and also be a source for many other formats, like HTML, PDF, PS, LaTeX, and even DockBook!

But this isn’t about PseudoPod’s advantages, this is a little tip for developers using Windows and my favorite editor for Windows; UltraEdit. Here’s a basic syntax highlighting mode for UltraEdit to make PseudoPod users happy. Only note that lines ending with a \ designate line wrapping, UltraEdit doesn’t like things on multiple lines.

Hope you like it.

/L10 "PseudoPod" Noquote Nocase HTML_LANG Block Comment On = =for \ 
Block Comment Off = =end Block Comment On Alt = <!-- Block Comment \
Off Alt = --> File Extensions = POD 

/Function String = "%=[a-zA-Z]*"

/C1 "Commands"
** =head
=begin =over =back =item =author =end =for

/C2 "Keywords"
author
editor editors epigraph
figure
graphic
html
listing literal
picture production
table

/C3 "Tables"
=headrow =bodyrows =row =cell
** <
<table> <table </table> <tbody> <tbody </tbody> <td <td> </td> <tfoot> \
<tfoot </tfoot> <th <th> </th> <thead> <thead </thead>  <tr <tr> </tr> \
<tt> </tt> <tt
>

Bashing Perl to Sell!

July 9th, 2004 • 1 comment Perl, Rants

Are you tired of waiting for page rebuilding, or twiddling your thumbs waiting for slow technologies like Perl and CGI? ExpressionEngine cures all that and more by providing a 100% dynamic experience that is virtually as fast and light-weight as static pages, yet infinitely more flexible and dynamic.

OK, I hear a lot of bold Perl bashing statements, but frankly, this one is the worst ever! I know that a lot of PHP programmers don’t like Perl very much, but come on, Perl isn’t even a technology to be compared with CGI, Perl’s performance comes closer to C, and almost always out-performs PHP’s, and I’m only talking about Perl5, don’t get me started on Parrot and Perl6, heck, Parrot runs PHP better than PHP itself!

I’m not trying to start a Perl vs. PHP debate, I love both, I use each wherever applicable, I understand each one’s advantages and limitations, but I hate it when marketing hype starts using myths to sell, when some company says “Our software runs better than their software because ours is rewritten in C++, theirs is Java.”, and it’s not even close to truth!.

Let’s get one thing straight here. PHP is a very domain-specific language, sure it can be used as a general-purpose one, but it rarely is. PHP’s performance is amazing when running as a Web server module, especially when combined with caching and opcode optimization, even better, PHP5’s ZendEngine2 gives a large boost to performance; but even that doesn’t make it faster than Perl, Yahoo! said so some time ago, they know Perl’s faster, but they also know it has a tough learning curve that might slow down development.

As for ExpressionEngine, it might be a fast piece of software, but please, when you want to market it, don’t just assert without backing your arguments. I might be tired of waiting for page rebuilding, but that has nothing to do with Perl being a “slow technology”, you can take my word for it. Anybody can write good PHP code that runs two times faster than bad Perl code, and vice versa. It’s really not the language that matters, it’s how you use it.

My take on TypeKey

July 3rd, 2004 • 1 comment MoveableType

We all heard about Microsoft’s evil plan to dominate the world, haven’t we? Yes, the passport! Basically, it’s a centralized authentication system that allows a user to login only once to all sites participating in Microsoft Passport service. But what does this have to do with SixApart’s TypeKey?

Well, TypeKey isn’t very different, at least not to me. It’s a service that stores user information and authenticates via a central server. Apparently, it’s mostly valuable when in blog comments, it’s supposed to get rid of (or reduce) comment spam, and verify that when you’re commenting you are who you claim you are, so blog owners can make sure that nobody comments unless logged in via TypeKey.

So far so good, but TypeKey isn’t exactly my favorite solution for this kind of problems. Centralization, in most cases, proved to be a failure, it’s prone to errors, it’s maintained by a single entity, and everything’s in one location, that’s just too risky.

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