RasterWeb!

I feel sorry for people who have to deal with the sad and pathetic tag soup that makes up much of the web. Really, those old sites, or heck, even these new sites, that are built using the methods of yesteryear: single pixel gifs, tables for layout (nested who knows how many deep) and code that would only validate if there was an HTML 4.0 TotalMess DOCTYPE.

On top of that, I feel sorry for people who day after day of using their tools of the trade (computer, OS, editors, browsers) are not extremely proficient at using them. It hurts me to see people stumble through simple tasks like find & replace, or have no idea what a “regular expression” is.

Sigh… don’t even get me started on file formats…

If you were wondering if you could put an IMS Twin Turbo 128 PCI video card from a desktop beige G3 into a PowerMac G4 Quicksilver and use it for a second monitor, say an NEC XV14 running at 800×600, yes you can. (Oh, put it in the top slot if possible.)

I offer this advice to the next person trying to confirm this by searching the web and finding no useful information in that regard.

You know, if you store a record in a SQL database, it’s fairly easy to store the date and time, as sort of a timestamp, if you will. Perhaps you’d want to store the time a record was created, and maybe even the time it was modified…

These are all just suggestions of course. You don’t have to do any of these things.

But keep in mind this…

If you ever create an application that stores data where the date and/or time might be important in some way, and at some point someone else has to maintain the thing after you’re out of the picture, they just might curse your existence to the ends of the earth, and wish great bodily harm to come to you…

I’m just saying… Knowing when something happened might prove useful in the future. I think they even have a word for that, they call it ‘history’ I do believe…

I’m looking for a good Apple Tech in Chicago. Obviously, in New York, Damien is the guy, but what about the Windy City, does anyone have recommendations? Please let me know…

I find that lately I’ve been much more meticulous in my code formatting, making sure that programs have some sort of docs within them, making sure all whitespace is properly aligned with code, having a consistent number of blank lines between pieces of code… Things that would probably be normal (if not required) were I writing large scale apps in Python, but being that I’m sort of the lone Perl hacker around here, I will attribute it to one of two things, either my compulsive personality, of the realization that even though much of what I do is write one off things, on the chance that something I write isn’t a one off thing, or has pieces that I can reuse, it makes sense to make them more readable when I do have to go back to them.

And it just feels good to make the code look good, even if it doesn’t run that good. On second hand, maybe it’s all due to my compulsive personality…