Discount Competence

I hung up the phone from a conversation with a friend on Saturday and noticed that, once again, my phone had lost all of its saved email and sent/received calls. I had been trying to talk myself out of buying an iPhone since they had gone on sale about 24 hours prior, but this was the last straw. I was getting an iPhone. I drove to the mall, parked, walked inside, and had an 8GB iPhone within about 15 minutes. I was psyched. I quickly drove home, opened the package and began to drool over my new toy. I carefully removed it from its packaging, connected the USB cable, and after a quick upgrade to the newest iTunes, I was minutes away from euphoria — or so I thought.

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I know I haven’t posted in a long time and I know this won’t make up for it, but it seems that Google is testing out a new design. I don’t know anyone else who’s seen this yet, so here it is, for your viewing pleasure:

Google Pic

I’m introducing a new section today in which I will discuss one of my favorite things in the world: Beer. I’ll start off my postings in this section by doing one of my other favorite things: Complaining.

I went out to dinner with my family on Sunday for Easter (their tradition, not mine). We went to a place called “The River Palm Terrace,” there are currently three locations, all in northern New Jersey and the restaurant touts it’s Zagat’s rating as “… New Jersey’s top steak house and one of America’s top restaurants” proudly. The restaurant boasts a very long wine list which “… has won a Wine Spectator Award” and offers “…U.S.D.A. prime beef, the genuine article, [aged] for 28 days.” It sounds delicious.

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I added my blog to technorati.com. For some reason, I have to add this link, so here it is: Technorati Profile

I’ve never quite understood why no one writes PHP libraries in C. The platform completely supports it. In JSP, when you need a tag that doesn’t exist and none of the 10,000,000 Java classes that you’ve installed with your latest and most buzzword-compliant framework supply it, you write it — in Java. You compile it and install it on the machine. At this point, new functionality exists for all of your JSP pages and you can write-in that cute little tag that you created that converts strings to lowercase.

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I’ve spent the last 2 days trying to debug a problem with a drupal module that is installed on one of the sites at work. The problem was with a module called img_assist. Basically it allows for a user-friendly way to add images to drupal nodes by creating the image as a node itself.

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed a tremendous increase in the amount of spam that I’ve been receiving lately. For years I’ve employed a system of identifying the sources of my spam, but it has not been as successful as I would have hoped. I own quite a few domain names, and I’ve had one in particular for a very long time. Every time I sign up for any sort of online account that requires an email address, I would use that site’s url @ my domain as the address. What this allowed me to do, at the very least, was to identify those companies that sold my email address to people who spammed me later on. One of the biggest problems with this was that it meant that I had to set up a catch-all for my domain, pointing to my main account.

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The release of Drupal 5 creates a wondrous plethora of feelings inside me. They range from a curious awe to a less curious nausea. It also leads me to a long list of questions. Questions such as “Did they fix the API?”, “Did they fix any of the scalability and performance issues?”, and “Does it still rely so heavily on the database?”. I’m currently working on a blog project for a very large company that I won’t name. Despite the many problems that this company has had with Drupal implementations in the past, they chose to use it again, on this project. I don’t intend for this post to be fair or objective. I’m not writing a review and I’m sorry if the title confused you. I filed this post under rant, and that’s exactly what it’s going to be.

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I Went to San Francisco over the christmas to New Years week. View my photos at Flickr and if you can, tell me what the hell that line is.

I’ve finally decided on a name for the project I’ve been calling “Script”. I’ve named it “The Next Programming Language” or ‘NextPL’ for short. I’ve registered nextpl.org and nextpl.com and registered the project wth Sourceforge.net — I haven’t been approved yet, but I see no reason why I wouldn’t be. Anyway, I’ve laid out a basic tree and created some sample code for the apache module. The next step will be to implement a stripped-down NextPL interpreter which will eventually evolve into the full pre-compiler and execution environment for NextPL.