Some time ago a friend invited to Goodreads, another one of these social networking sites where you open an account, add your friends, blah blah blah. As the name implies, this site targets a pretty strictly defined audience: bibliophiles. It’s a tool for book lovers to share their passion with their bookwormy peers — you can rate and review books and read through your friends rants or recommendations.

At the time, I wasn’t interested in adding yet another social networking site to my repertoire. Now that Facebook has a Goodreads app, I’m coming around. The app’s actions within Facebook are somewhat limited (Facebook directs you back to the Goodreads site to do anything more than rating a book), but it keeps my virtual bookshelves handy, and I secretly hope it guilts my friends into joining it too.

Current known competitors: Shelfari (I’ve heard the navigation isn’t up to snuff), Revish (which looks to be more text and less visuals), and LibraryThing (still in beta but doesn’t look bad).

I’m planning on using it to stay in touch with book group members while we’re all off reading the book of the month.

“There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” - Bertrand Russell

(Note to Austin — I think any one who reads Ulysses reads it for the latter reason…am I wrong? )

So you’ve bought the iPhone. Now you have to inform everyone your number has changed.

Or do you?

Not if you have a Grand Central phone number. The new web-based service will allow you to sign up for one number that you keep for life. It’s a pretty sweet service and as of this writing, it’s free, unless you have a gajillion phone numbers to unite. (more…)

One of my biggest complaints about PHP5 is that you can’t do genuine object overloading, you can only fake it using the __call() method and its brethren. The crappy part about __call() is that if you want to do anything complex, you end up reinventing the wheel in a big if, elseif… else block, or maybe a switch statement. It’s not well suited for real overloading, Java style. We’re better off just using func_get_args() at the top of a method and choosing different paths based on what we find in the function arguments. But that too can get overwhelming. I thought of a solution which I find interesting. I’m not saying it’s right, or even a good idea, but it comes as close to real overloading as anything, is quick enough to use, and demands strict variable typing. (more…)

Cursed with a little bit of free time this weekend, a need for a break from coding, and no desire to go out, I went to Borders on Saturday night to buy a book on Java (the incomparable Thinking in Java), since I discovered after a few hours of coding it on Friday that I’ve gotten a bit rusty (more on that later). Somehow, I ended up with all four “Revenge of the Nerds” movies, bundled to sell at $19.99. The original is a favorite of mine, but I hadn’t seen the other three, so I figured, why not? Then I watched them all in a row. (more…)