A Pilgrim's Journal

In the hopes that record company executives are reading my blog, I'll post some free advice which I hope they take to heart.

A few months ago, I was driving home from work when I heard a really cool song. This was not just any ordinary song. It was one of those impulse buy songs, and I don't buy CDs very often (I already have plenty).

So while still in the car, I drove straight to nearest music store, and start searching for the CD. I asked the checkout girl about it, and she searched in vain in the computer system. Then the answer appeared.

The CD was to be released in about a month.

Dear record executives: the song playing on the radio is your best advertisement (if it is a good song). Don't waste that momentum by separating the radio release from the CD release.

By now, my impulse to buy is long past, and while the CD is surely in the stores by now, I don't hear it on the radio anymore.

C++

About a week ago, I was tinkering with C++ iostreams, and managed to get a working streambuf for network sockets. I posted the sample code and within about 6 hours, Google had already picked it up and I started getting hits the next day. There hasn't been a day when someone hasn't requested it since, so network streambufs must be a common C++ problem. I hope it helps some folks.

The more I learn about web programming, the less I like it.

At least that appears to be the trend so far, and I have a continual hope that as I learn more in depth topics, it will all magically become more elegant.

I was working on a website today, when I suddenly laughed out loud at what I was doing. I was writing PHP inside a PHP variable, which generated HTML.

This was what I was doing back as a kid when I was learning BASIC. I used to write BASIC code to generate more BASIC code because it was too hard to type it all manually.

Of course, I was kid back then, and hadn't really discovered subroutines, but today's popularity of "LAMP" (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) makes me wonder if the world hasn't been caught doing the same thing I was as a kid. We have PHP encapsulating PHP, encapsulating SQL, encapsulating HTML, encapsulating..... argh.

And PHP and MySQL's popularity has happened over recent years where there is no concept of stored procedures, so I have to conclude with my limited web programming knowledge to date, that somewhere there is a lot of embedded SQL code stuck in PHP wrapping.

The whole idea of inserting your data into an SQL statement when you're trying to insert binary data into your database still rubs me the wrong way, but this is how it is done in MySQL.

If I'm missing something glaringly obvious, my inbox is open as usual.

Projects:

I haven't had much of a chance to tinker with FreeDCE these days, as paid work is keeping me occupied. I do plan to get back to it shortly.

I've also been sidetracked by a secondary project I've been working on to organize my "To Read" list. I run across many websites and various PDF or PS papers that I intend to read, and they get lost as links or stored in my inbox as I email myself. This was not helping, so I decided to write a small web project to organize a queue of reading material, as well as mirror it on my local hard disk in the event that the link dies before I get time to read it.

If anyone is interested in tinkering with it, version 0.2, pre-pre-pre-alpha is on my software site. Sorry, no pre-installed sandbox for the public to play in yet, although that would be cool.