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’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’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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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’m personally not a fan of the GNU GPL or of the FSF for that matter. I do support them in in a theoretical sense, but the FSF is famous for the same if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us mentality that the US has become so unpopular for lately (and in the past). This is nothing new. Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens founded the OSI and coined the term “Open Source” as a way to disassociate themselves and the movement from the idealistic views of the FSF and the Free Software movement.

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