What is in a name?

Posted by on August 22, 2008 No comments

So…this site is 3dgo.net. You already know that as you’re here and that is the address. Long ago, that stood for 3 dumb guys online (the online part because 3dg was taken). It made sense at the time because there were three of us. Since then we have grown apart and there is currently just me. Therefore the site name no longer makes a whole lot of sense.

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 vs Ruby on Rails

Posted by on July 18, 2008 1 comment

Over the past many months, I have seen many articles explaining how PHP is a bad programming language for various reasons. This one is the only one I have read which gives a well thought out reason for it though.

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.

Vista…and other things

Posted by on July 12, 2008 No comments

I am now part of the wide world of people using Vista. This is not something I was particularly looking forward to, but I’m pretty sure it has progressed far enough that it will turn out all right. Also, I upgraded the core bits of my computer so I should have more than enough power for Vista to play with while leaving me plenty for all that oh so very important stuff that I do.

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.

Twitter

Posted by on June 30, 2008 No comments

TwitterTwitter is one of those ideas that I originally was unable to understand. And while I still don’t fully appreciate it, I have started to understand why it has become as popular as it is. It is interesting to get little glimpses into the thoughts of people.

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.

Flood Aftermath

Posted by on June 30, 2008 No comments

The water finished falling a while ago and the massive cleanup effort had started even before the river was back to normal. And it will indeed be a massive cleanup. Most of the float houses suffered some kind of damage with many of them floating away and being extremely damaged/destroyed. Driving down the streets of the Time Check neighborhood is a saddening experience. Along the sides of the road are piles of things that are too damaged to be of any use. Houses are battered and broken. Businesses are closed. Power still hasn’t been restored to some of these places.

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.