Ölbaum’s Delirium

Jens Alfke — whose blog I discovered today after he'd been Microsofted — doesn't like PHP anymore and I share some of his reasons. My pet peeves with PHP are:

1. Crappy Unicode support (none in PHP 4, remember?);
2. Needs to be recompiled every time a new extension is needed;
3. Poor set of default extensions (see 2);
4. Overlapping but not identical feature sets in different extensions (see 2 and 3);
5. Nasty installation-dependent differences in behaviour (as Jens says so well).

Jens is looking at Ruby On Rails. So should I.

Update: Jens removed both posts. So much for permalinks.

# Posted by Ölbaum, late at night | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsofted, PHP, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Unicode

Must keep an eye on this upcoming CMS.

→ Visit site

# Posted by Ölbaum, late at night | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alahup, CMS

The problem with shuffled playlists in iTunes is that if I quit iTunes at the end of the day, relaunch it the next day and want to resume playing the same playlist where I left it, iTunes will shuffle it again, meaning I'm likely to hear songs I already heard the day before. On the other hand, if I turn shuffle off, it will sort the songs in the order I put them when I created the playlist, which is likely to be in Artist/Album order since this is how I browse my library when making a playlist.

The solution is simple but not well documented, if at all. After making the playlist, turn shuffle on. Then Control-click in the song list and choose "Copy To Play Order." It will change the 'natural' order of the playlist to the current sequence. Then turn shuffle back off and the order will be retained.

# Posted by Ölbaum, late at night | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple, Mac, Mac OS X, iTunes

→ Visit site

# Posted by Ölbaum, evening time | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Star Wars, Store Wars

I pity the companies that have to come up with advertisement campaigns for Microsoft products:

• They can’t make an ad about security and be taken seriously;
• They can’t make an ad about stability and be taken seriously;
• They can’t make an ad about ease of use and be taken seriously;
• They can’t make an ad about innovation and be taken seriously.

That must be depressing. Then again, nobody forced them to work for Microsoft.

# Posted by Ölbaum, early afternoon | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Advertisment, Microsoft, Security, Windows

I just updated Movable Type to 3.17 and noticed that I don’t need one of my hacks anymore. I had modified dirify in Util.pm to convert two-byte UTF-8 characters to their unaccented equivalent. It allowed nicer URLs to entries with accented characters in their title like, for this one, ‘geant.html’ instead of ‘gant.html’.

Movable Type 3.17 implements this very similarly to how I did it. Moreover, it examines the PublishCharset configuration variable to determine how dirify should behave (which I didn’t, it was a hack). The only catch is that it’s case sensitive. PublishCharset must be set to utf-8 (and not UTF-8) for it to work, so check your mt.cfg.

# Posted by Ölbaum, the wee hours | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Movable Type, Unicode