Author: Leon

Categories
PHP

PHP Became Mainstream A Long Time Ago

Tim O’Reilly blogged PHP Becoming Mainstream today. It must have shown up thanks to Scoble’s Google Reader link stream. Scoble’s links are as good as the links that come out of digg. They’re different, so I read both.

Anyway, O’Reilly argues that since sales of “For Dummies” books have risen to the top of the PHP book charts that PHP has now become mainstream. How about another metric? How about the metric of clients saying “Sure!” instead “Huh?” when you suggest using PHP instead of Perl or Java? That happened about seven years ago. PHP went mainstream a long time ago.

I think that if Tim were to look at the history of books about PHP, they would find that Core PHP Programming, the first PHP book in English, was aimed at programming novices. It sold really well. Furthermore, the most popular PHP book of all time is PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson.

Categories
News

Scripting News is 10

Dave Winer noted that today is the 10th anniversary of his blog. Despite his recent rhetoric about joining a mob, I will risk joining in an sending congratulations his way. 😉

Was 1997 a crazy good year? As I mentioned last week, I was married ten years ago. A week after that (yes, immediately after my honeymoon), I started working at Clear Ink. When I started, everyone who did HTML had the title “Programmer”, but I was the only one with a Computer Science degree (Steve Nelson has one, but he was a founder and didn’t have that title). I worked my way into being the Chief Technologist.

Categories
Personal

Yosemite and 10 Years of Heaven

yosemite fallsMy family and I just returned from a short vacation to Yosemite in celebration of Vicky and I being married for 10 years. John Muir, a saint of Martinez, wrote that one should climb the mountains and get their glad tidings. That line bounced around my head as we were walking around the valley. When we’d planned the trip months ago, we expected snow in the valley to play in, but it was warm–at least 70F every day–just perfect. This being so early in the season, the waterfalls were full and roaring. Some waterfalls that don’t flow every year were flowing. It was great!

Vicky and Henry in the snowWe did get to play in the snow by taking the bus up to Badger Pass. They rent innertubes to ride down a little hill. Tre and I took several rides with one big spill. I forgot how rough ice can be, and Tre scraped up his arm pretty good. I was so proud of him not ending the fun there, continuing on with more rides down the hill.

Leon and Tre tubing in the snowWe stayed at Yosemite Lodge, which offers small motel rooms, a cafeteria and a little store. The TV had one channel that played a promotional film for Delaware Northern Company, the company that has the contract to provide services in the valley. I noticed that all the people we interacted with were exceptionally nice. Maybe they are happy to be working in Yosemite, or maybe it’s part of DNC’s ISO 9000 certification.

Another channel on the TV constantly played a single episode of Huell Howser’s California Gold, the one about the Yosemite firefall. Howser has had this PBS show about California for at least 10 years because when Vicky and I were first getting to know each other, we found the episode about the Golden Gate Bridge particularly funny. He has this way of stating the obvious with genuine amazement: “so, now we are over the bridge” as he flies over in a helicopter. Anyway, this show the the property of being a vlog before anyone thought of the term.

It really was a wonderful trip. For a place that can be insanely crowded, it was virtually empty, but the weather was perfect. I always like to spend time with my best friend, and I like spending time getting to know my two little sons.

Categories
Politics

The Great Global Warming Swindle

I recommend checking out a BBC 4 program that aired recently called The Great Global Warming Swindle. I don’t think you can get a copy from the BBC yet, but it’s all over the various Internet sources for video such as Google Video, You Tube, and Pirate Bay. The thesis of this documentary is that global warming is an anti-human political movement. It shows how while the climate is getting warmer, this is a natural cycle Earth has undergone for millions of years. And all scientific evidence points to activity of the Sun causing carbon dioxide levels to rise.

There’s a great refutation of Al Gore’s proposition that rising CO2 levels cause warming–it shows that while the two are correlated, it’s warming that drives CO2 out of the oceans. This is a demonstration of the common error of equating correlation to causation. In this case, the data make it very obvious because CO2 levels actually lag rising temperatures.

I suppose I’m revealing myself as a heretic against the church of the warming globe (as Robert Trancinski puts it), but I do hope this documentary gets broadcast in the U.S. soon. I can’t figure out if it’s more or less dangerous than admitting I’m an atheist.
It does seem like our politicians have leveraged this “cause” into a tool to rival the medieval church. After all, this new church does its best to silence heretics. It carries out inquisitions against “sinners”. It even offers a free exchange of money for forgiveness in the form of carbon offsets.

The title of the program invokes the Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock-n-Roll Swindle and something that Johnny Rotten said at their final concert, “Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” I hope that anyone who’s bought into the notion that we’re all guilty of cooking the planet asks themselves the same question.

Categories
Personal

I Am Not Scary

Leon as devil

My friend Paula told me she met someone who thought about asking me for an interview (I’m trying to hire another couple Technologists at Clear Ink). But that person decided that I was too scary. Me? I’m not scary.