The domain name will not change. I’ve had it for a long time and have grown rather attached to it. Also, it is short (and my email address/openid). But I would like to come up with a meaning. Or just a name for the site that at least vaguely fits the domain.

Any suggestions?

PHP has long been considered something of a standard in modern web development.  Comparatively, Java and .Net have their respective camps, but I’m not sure they match the market-penetration, if you will, that PHP has enjoyed.  And yet, PHP feels like an unintutive language.

To me, PHP has been the C++ of the web world.  Yeah, it’s powerful and can do pretty much anything, but it doesn’t exactly feel good to code with it.

This seems to me to be a fair statement. The article goes on to explain how Ruby on Rails is a much more elegant language and based on my extremely limited experience with RoR, I probably agree. But my argument against that is this:

Rails is a framework. Ruby is the language. PHP is just a language. A lot of effort has been put into Rails to make it easy to use and that effort has paid off for them. Well enough so that people tend to forget that Ruby on Rails is not a language in and of itself.

There are many frameworks that have been written for PHP. Perhaps the most popular at the moment is the Zend Framework. I have used bits and pieces of this in projects for Cornell and it has done well. Another good one is CakePHP which I have started (though never finished) a couple of projects with.

Working with both of these frameworks is much easier (in some cases) than working with the core of PHP. But at the same time, it is extremely easy for me to put together a quick site using the core of PHP and deploy it on just about any host available. A Rails project (as best as I can tell) requires much more effort to create a deploy.

New components (Upgraded From):

• AMD Phenom 9850 Quad-Core (AMD Athlon X2 3800)
• AMD 4850 Radeon (Nvidia 7900 GT)
• 4 GB GSkill DDR2 1066 (2.5 GB DDR 400)
• ASUS M3A78 PRO (ASUS A8N-SLI)

Having 4 GB of RAM means that Vista can suck up about as much as it wants and I still have plenty to play TF2 or any of the other games of the moment.

Blogging is like that, but with blogs, entries are expected to be longer and more thought out. It is more for a detailed analysis of things that have already happened or to tell of things that will come. Live blogging is a bit closer to what Twitter does, but even that still has a different feel.

Twitter forces you to be concise. That may be what draws me to it. I’ve never really been one to use more words than necessary and Twitter caters towards that really well.

But for all of the damage, the general mood of people is pretty good. People are working to rebuild and reopen. The owners of the float houses have a salvage crew working to recover what can be recovered. I don’t know the full extent of what is going on, but overall it seems pretty positive.

• New Forecast: 32 Feet
• Current Level: 29.62 Feet
• Water Restrictions in effect
  • Drinking only
  • Cedar Rapids water treatment currently at 25%
  • Water bottles have been filled
• Mandatory evacuation may or may not be in effect here
  • Basically everyone within 1 block of current water level is ordered to evacuate…we may be there, but we are stuck in the area and don’t have anywhere to evacuate to.
  • We’re really high here. Thus, evacuation need is pretty low

Carly and I went out at about 6:45 this morning to check it out. It was raining something fierce and we were driving through the regular road puddles that build up when that is the case. When we turned on to O Ave. it looked like just another one of those, but I rapidly discovered that I was drowning my car. The only reason I didn’t get stuck in the water and damage my car is because I turned around and drove on the sidewalk to get back.

We still have all of our utilities functioning normally for now, though we have been warned that we may lose electricity and gas service as decided by the Cedar Rapids Police Department. We spent some time yesterday getting non-perishable food stuffs and extra gas for the grill, so we should be fine overall.

I’m pretty sure that the water level guage on the Cedar River @ Cedar Rapids is not currently functional as it hasn’t been updated since 8:40 PM yesterday. At that time the river was at 22.38 feet and rising. With the rain we received this morning I expect it is now at about 23.5 feet, though that is purely an estimate. I am uploading yesterday’s pictures now and if we can, we’ll try and take some more pictures later today.

This kind of flooding is unprecedented for Cedar Rapids. The previous major flood was in 1993 and we have already passed that level. Roads are closing, parts of the town are being evacuated (some voluntary, some mandatory). Sandbagging is happening. And people are coming out to watch. Lots of people. It’s actually pretty neat.

I’ve never really seen flooding before moving out here. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, there really wasn’t anything that could flood. We didn’t have any large rivers. Sometimes the creek would get high, but that was nothing in comparison.

Earlier this year, as the winter snows melted, the river rose to just under 18 feet. Roads closed, but there was no other major impact. I thought that was neat though. I had never seen a river overflow its banks like that. This is completely different. Still very exciting, but definitely a good reminder of the amount of control we really have over things. Mother nature is not a force to get on the bad side of.

Over the past summer, I was able to update the Cornell College webservers to PHP 5 (from PHP 4.2.3). While this did cause a few problems with some of our older scripts, overall, it has given us significantly more versatility in creating and maintaining usable code. All applications that I develop, both for Cornell and for my own enjoyment, have been written for PHP 5.

Now take out Garfield.