There’s something strangely satisfying about switching gears from a well
structured language like Ruby all the way back to the days of
actionscript 2. It brings me back a little. Actionscript 2 has a lot of
intricacies and subtle nuances that you wouldn’t expect and that’s one
thing that makes it fun. It’s fun because it doesn’t normally work as
expected. You have to delve deep into the minds of the poor people who
were forced to create it and outsmart them. It’s fun because when you
finally get something to work, you can look at your code and say,
“there’s no way that should work!” After a few hours of working with the
language you begin to anticipate the worst possible scenario. You would
think this for instance: If I want to create an array object called bar
with 3 elements, I’d do it like this:
var bar:Array = new Array('a', 'b', 'c');
but if I wanted only one element in the array, I’d do it like this:
var bar:Array = new Array(['a']);
Of course! It’s so obvious. The square brackets are obvious because
actionscript 2 wants to make doubly sure that bar will actually be an
array and not just a string, whereas the commas give it away in the
first example so adding square brackets there would just create an array
containing an array.
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I was investigating some web site slowness for a
friend the other day. His company uses SugarCRM over https. He had been
complaining about slowness for over a year and I finally decided to give
it a thorough look. Since the sugar application makes heavy use of its
database backend, I decided to start there. Unfortunately mySQL’s slow
query log turned up nothing, except that the database was running about
as fast as you could possibly expect with the whole database buffered in
memory. I honestly didn’t think to check the web server itself because
I’ve never really had a measurable problem with that before, default web
server settings have always suited me fine in the past. Apparently all
bets are off when running under SSL…
On a whim, I downloaded YSlow, a
firefox plugin developed by Yahoo! which I had heard about from a fellow
developer a few months ago. It gives your site a letter grade based on a
number of factors that contribute to site slowness. I had two major
improvements I could easily make, plus a number of small ones that I’d
like to do, but I’m not about to dive into sugar and restructure it.
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I ran across this note from Ray Steele, publisher of the Fresno Bee sent
this morning:
Because of continuing economic challenges, we are implementing an
across-the-board wage freeze.
This is an important part of our effort to manage through an economic
downturn that is having an unprecedented negative effect on revenues,
and, therefore, our financial health. While we have taken many steps
to reorganize and streamline operations to respond to these economic
challenges and change our business model, we need to do more to
control expenses.
This is definitely a major discouragement, especially at a time when
most of us newspaper employees are already discouraged. Its not the end
of the world, but it certainly seems to be just one bad thing after
another. Most of us could feel this coming a long way off, but seeing it
in your inbox makes it much more real.
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I sometimes wonder about people who dedicate all their knowledge
resources to only a few development platforms. That’s why I was taken
aback recently when I heard some developers that I respect start bashing
on PHP. They raised all kinds of invalid arguments (some of which had
been valid years ago) to support their position that Perl is better than
PHP, or Ruby on Rails is better than PHP, or Python is better than PHP.
Now their positions were far deeper than a simple superiority (whatever
that means), some of these developers genuinely hate PHP.
For inexperienced developers, I would say this type of attitude is only
that, inexperience. But these were seasoned developers. For more
experienced developers, maybe its just a bad experience, or myopia or a
sad superiority complex. In my view, each platform is a tool and each
tool has its purpose. One tool may be generally better than another, but
if you only know how to use one or two tools, then you’re probably
working too hard. Do yourself a favor and learn to use more tools!
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I’m going to use this post to talk a little bit about myself. I work for
the Fresno Bee, a leading newspaper in Central California. I started
working here a few years ago as a summer intern during a site redesign.
The Fresno Bee eventually hired me on as a part-time employee in the
newsroom while I was still in school and eventually as a regular
full-time newsroom employee.
Most other blogs that I’ve found are written by people who’ve had enough
of the newspaper business and have decided to leave and pursue other
opportunities. This blog will be a place for me to muse about the
industry from my perspective as a web developer who’s not quitting.
Though I’d be lying if I said I haven’t looked at job listings from time
to time and taken some contract work on the side. Many of my musings
will probably be critical, but my goal outside of this blog is to help
my company put its best (webbed) foot forward and I’ll talk here about
any progress I feel like I’ve made (or lost).
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