I found this excellent illustration somewhere in my social networking streams. Â Don’t know who is the author, but this is absolute genius. Â Until now, I’ve been using a rather outdated example of “brand new Pentium IV computer to play solitaire“. Â This one is so much better though.
No matter how big or small you are, how much money you’ve invested into your infrastructure, how many levels of redundancy you have, or how many IT gods and gurus you’ve hired to watch over your website – the fact of life is that your website will go down, even if it’s for a brief moment. Â And you should be ready for that moment. Â Here is a good example that I came across recently – BannersBroker.com maintenance screen.
It looks simple and and straight-forward. Â But if you are even remotely familiar with web development and design, you can appreciate how much thinking actually went into this one. Â First of all, the mere fact that there is a maintenance screen, means that someone thought plenty about the website. Â Secondly, it’s very well composed. Â The big yellow helmet and large, bold “Under maintenance” letters both tell you exactly what’s going on. Â It’s not a user error. Â It’s not a crashed server. Â It’s not something to report to the webmaster. Â They are working on it. Â Thirdly, it tells you exactly when to come back – in 30 minutes. Â Fourthly, it still provides you with an emergency contact information – phone number and email. Â Fifthly, it gives you something to do for thirty minutes that the site is going to be down – explore the company’s YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter stream. Â Sixthly, it reinforces the company brand. Â Twice, in full color and full name, and in black-and-white small logo. Â Seventhly, it doesn’t have any useless junk. Â What else could you wish for?
To me, this is up there with Twitter fail whale and GitHub 404.
The European Parliament has approved the controversial data transfer agreement, the bilateral PNR (passenger name register), with the US which requires European airlines to pass on passenger information, including name, contact details, payment data, itinerary, email and phone numbers to the Department of Homeland Security. Under the new agreement, PNR data will be ‘depersonalized’ after six months and would be moved into a ‘dormant database’ after five years. However the information would still be held for a further 15 years before being fully ‘anonymized.’
I’m so glad that I managed to visit the USA before it became a paranoid concentration camp. Â The way things go, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to visit it again, without being worried for an arrest and endless detention.
P.S.: And some people still talk about privacy. Â What privacy?
Apologies for a somewhat misleading title. Â I just thought it was funny and appropriate. Â This post is nothing but a link to yet another blog post discussing all things broken in PHP. Â Or is it?
Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of PHP gripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia.
I’ve been there, done that. Â I’ve posted a few times on this blog and elsewhere my “appreciation” towards PHP. Â I am one of those who doesn’t like the language. Â Yet, I am one of those who programs pretty much entirely in PHP to the extent of completely forgetting all the other languages I once knew and used (hi, perl!).
Indeed, PHP has a number of shortcomings – it is inconsistent, unpredictable, unstable, and probably even insecure. Â That’s all well known. Â It’s a pain to use and even with that, it’s pretty much a de facto standard for web development these days.
As a working programmer I often hate and despise it.  Yet, as a technology guy and a big fan of the web, I love it.  With all its cons and ugly side effects, it did accomplish something.  It brought a lot of people into web development.  And those people have created a whole lot of cool things, which they otherwise couldn’t.  This feeling of remote appreciation is similar to my feeling of appreciation for Microsoft Windows and a bunch of related programs.  As “broken” as they were, they helped to bring a lot of people into computers.  Some of those people learned better ways.  Some brought the money that the industry always needs to grow and push the limits.  Some just provided an inspiration for others to solve certain problems.
Regardless, of whether you like PHP or not, if you are using it, you should know the downsides. Â And for that the article above is a really good source.
Cyprus Mail reports a fascinating story of two girls being switched at the hospital right after birth. Â The mistake was eventually discovered by one of the girls. Â That later led to a reunion of children and parents. Â Read the full story, it’s well worth it.
The tests, reportedly carried out at the Institute of Neurology and Genetics (CING) showed conclusively that Maria was not biologically related to her parents. By digging around and asking the right people, Maria managed to get the details on her counterpart, and repeatedly tried to become her friend on Facebook, the online social site.