William Reardon’s Blog

1) The person who literally has to sign your document isn’t going to actually read it.

2) The person who the person who literally has to sign your document will ask if it’s okay to sign your document isn’t actually going to read it.

I’ve never been able to spell. Never. In fact, my goal isn’t often to spell the word correctly — I know that will never happen in some cases — but rather, get it close enough that the spellchecker can figure out what I’m trying to spell. And sadly, sometimes I can’t even do that.

Case in point, I can’t even tell you that I find spellcheckers a huge conveanance. In the online world, they’re my saving grace. The problem is when you don’t have access to spellchecker. I.e. when you’re in the Real World, writing something on a white board. In the Real World, you have to pull some half-ass Porky Pig like maneuver starting to write down one word and after flailing, switch to an easier word to spell.

Hence the need to actually learn how to spell. Sure, you can study wordlists, etc., but the ideal wordlist would be just the words I can’t spell. And who knows what words I can’t spell? The spellchecker. A better spellchecker would keep track of the word I mispell frequently, removing things like one-offs from typos, and either show me a list of them or drill me on them. Then, someday, I might one day be able to spell convenience on my own.

It’s not Java The Language that I hate; it’s “Java People” that I hate.

Note that this is not necessarily everyone who knows Java.

Just most.

WTF?

It’s really not that hard to make a movie called S.W.A.T.. Gun, explosions — the established Die Hard recipe for success. Throw in some cool actors, like Samuel Jackson, and you see your target audience walk out pretty pleased. Your movie is named after a police force — we know not expect Shakespeare.

Under no circumstances should you attempt to develop a lame-ass story that drags on and on and on. Look, we want to see people run around and shoot at each other. It’s an action movie. That means action, not idoitic dialogue. This is hands down on of the worst movies of the summer, and this summer, that says a lot.

After always being forever annoyed at the difficulty in taking with Amazon wishlist with me to the store and 15 minutes of Perl hacking, the Amazon Wishlist Printer is born. Makes it much easier to print out your (or someone else’s) wishlist & take it with you.

(Here’s mine both ways: Amazon - Wishlist Printer.)

My first exposure to PHP was almost a year ago. I volunteered to help my place of employment put together a 9/11 tribute site.

I ran into… well, some squirrelly parts of PHP. However, it was a project that demanded very little sleep for several days, not to mention a lot of things seem just wierd when you first learn a language. So I dismeed those concerns.

I’m now on a project that may result in my using PHP for an extend period of time. The more I learn about PHP, the more concerned I get about that extended period of time. Using PHP 4 feels like I’m using Perl 4. Okay, there are multi-dimensional arrays, but a lot of it still comes across as undeveloped and, in some cases, just wrong.

For example, symbolic references are re-invented. Not only are they re-invented they are given a very stupid name: variable variables. If your defending PHP by saying “But Perl has those too!”, fair enough. But note that it’s generally regarded as a Bad Idea to use them, and that “use strict” turns them off.

$php–;

According to Slashdot article, O’Reilly is going to be publishing a Linux Annoyances book, I’m guessing similar to their other annoyances books.

I read the first one, Windows 98 Annoyances, and coming from a Mac/Unix background, found it really helpful (it for only TweakUI alone). However, I just don’t see how you could make a Linux annoyances book, or at least make one that’s any good. Do you target a particular Linux distro, or try to target the most popular half dozen or so? Who’s your target? The newbie (who needs the book the most, but who’s going to find almost everything annoying), or expert (who probably has the interesting annoyances, but probably has the wherewithall to fix them.)