I spent a good hour or so yesterday battling a particularly nasty bug. Well, it wasn’t really a bug, just a curiosity that took me on a wild goose chase through several hundred lines of source code. I found a comment in my source from a couple months ago that said “trivial” and nothing more, between an if block and an else block. I thought it meant that the following code (the else block) was trivial, and seriously wondered why, since the code in the else block was actually not trivial at all.

Well, it finally dawned on me–I put “trivial” in the source code to force subversion to recognize a new version of the file I was working on. Trivial meant that the commit was trivial, not the code. Very very frustrating.

Also yesterday (at RUM) I saw a demo of weather.meteostar.com which was extremely fascinating–the developers who build it call it “weather porn” and as a weather enthusiast, I know exactly what they mean. Good stuff. I’m waiting for my complimentary account to come through now.

I got to see Pete’s feathers ruffle a bit. I mentioned to him that I’ve heard a bit of buzz that Twitter might make a good application messaging platform, and he thought that was positively stupid. I must say, I agree. Besides, wouldn’t it be highly insecure to allow people to watch your applications communicate? Anyways, I prefer a callback or observer pattern to a message queue in most cases. That brings to mind a story about a document management system using email for communication.

And finally, I suppose many people have already seen the article about why cdbaby.com switched back to PHP from Ruby on Rails. I read it after a glorious weekend of Python programming and turned up my nose a bit, but thinking about it, it’s not about PHP being better overall, just better for the job. And to those of you who think I’m a PHP diehard, I’m really not. I like Ruby better and Python best. But PHP is easiest–easiest for me to continue to do, and easiest for others to learn, implement, and deploy. But anyways, I’m starting to see the “best tool for the job” light, but I’m still entirely unconvinced that there’s a job for which ColdFusion would be the best tool. More later on this topic.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 10:39 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.