The Life and Times of Michael Shadle

Officially in the 5.3.3RC1 distribution. Sweet! From the NEWS file:

17 Jun 2010, PHP 5.3.3 RC1
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- Added FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) SAPI. (Tony)
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and on an unrelated note:

- Added support for JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK option in json_encode() that converts numeric strings to integers. (Ilia)

Shouldn't this be called JSON_NUMERIC_CONVERT? or JSON_FORCE_INTEGER? It's not just a "check" - guess it's too late now? 🙂

WordPress 3.0...
WordPress 3.0 came out today. Tonight I'll probably upgrade this site and see how well it works. I'm going to check it in to Subversion first so I can roll back if needed.

Some key changes I wanted to talk about...

• One thing that was highlighted is the option to use custom header images - which can easily be done right now. I did it well over a year ago in a theme. With post meta you can always load metadata about a post and use it in the theme, so this update seems a bit specific to me, since themes were already customizable. Why build a feature that is so specific? Same with background images/colors...
• Custom menus/menu editor - this could get cool, the menu editor is the more exciting piece as it will allow a visual way to manage the taxonomy. Not sure how it will mix in with tags and categories though, guess that's "I'll see it when I upgrade."
• MU merge - finally, I can run multiple installs off the same WP install, hopefully, without wp-config.php hacks. How exactly it works I will have to find out.
• Custom post types - now all of a sudden you can make any sort of object with custom attributes, which opens the door to things such as the item below.
• WP e-Commerce says they're going to change from using all their extra tables to using core WP schema. That's awesome.

A couple bones to pick...

• It's not a rewrite. It's still a blogging tool that is being extended further to be a full-featured that can handle "anything" - however the tables are still named "posts" even though now you can create an arbitrary type of item. I'd like to see it renamed and normalized.
• All the plugins and themes and such are procedural code, but some inner workings such as the DB layer are OO. That seems amateur to me, and unnecessary.

I'd love to see WP get rewritten. It has a LOT of overhead and includes built in that need calling and a lot of other cruft that I stumble across. Go back to the drawing board with building a list of every feature it has, and look at it from a longer term perspective. It's great to see something keep growing, but when it comes down to it, it is still a fork of b2, which was made for blogging, not for anything and everything.

It's got the right idea with extensibility and such, but to me the core has a lot of code - and lots of code means more complicated execution paths, more "I'll just add this in instead of refactor this old code," more cruft. I'm quite sure I could get as much extensibility out of a fresh rewrite with less than half the code under the hood. Things like text styling for example should be moved to a plugin (I disable all the wptexturize filters for example... throw those in an include and make it enabled by default instead!)

Of course, WordPress does have millions of users so it has a proven track record. I can't complain that much, I do use it myself. For blogging, it's the best tool out there. For other things, it typically leverages plugins which may or may not have decent UIs or APIs to interact with. That's where it shows signs of weakness. It also isn't as strict as Drupal when it comes to code conventions either, which would greatly increase the usability of a lot of plugins.

Today AT&T reported a bunch of data plan changes, perfectly aligned with screwing over people when iPhone OS 4 comes out.

OS 4 will give us tethering ability with AT&T. Of course, that comes with an additional cost now. If you want to "officially" tether with AT&T, you'll have to switch to one of their two data plans, and THEN buy tethering on top of that. Instead of your $30 for unlimited, you'll be paying $45 for only two gigs of bandwidth, vs. $30 currently for unlimited. Or $35 for a measily 250 megs.

They claim that 98% of its users fall within those tiers. Sounds like they're giving 98% of us a way to save a few bucks, right? Wrong. What people are overlooking is the fact that those statistics don't include the fact that you will be TETHERING. As in, your computer will be transferring data, and you're already accustomed to a much heavier data consumption through that medium. Think of how those little widgets on your laptop grab information off the net every so often, or a single Youtube video could easily be 20+ megs. It does add up, and ultimately anyone who wants to tether with AT&T should use it sparsely - otherwise, they'll be paying $10/gig for your overages.

I'll give AT&T some credit - their marketing geniuses and social engineers are gaming this system well - using the upcoming iPhone and OS for service type changes, some of which require contracts, some don't - helping them limit the impact on their network in creative ways while making you think you're getting a better deal. I especially like the fact once you drop out of an unlimited contract you can't go back, and they're trying to sway you out of it by not changing your expiration date if you drop down, and "allowing" you to switch back and forth between the two plans. Oh, and new iPad users? If you don't have a plan by the time OS 4 launches, you'll be subject to these new limits.

Let's face it - AT&T's network can't handle the iPhone. It's a blame game that ultimately both could be doing better at. I'm sure the iPhone could change it's tower-hogging style behavior, and I'm sure AT&T could be deploying all these upgrades they keep telling us about faster.

For me, if I do decide to go with the next iPhone, I won't be buying it with a contract. I'm going to stay a free agent, and not get locked in to a new agreement, and not buy their joke for insurance (monthly fee and still the cost of buying a refurbished unit for the deductable?!) - and I am getting closer every day to switching over to maybe the Evo 4G on Sprint - a hybrid solution with a limited 4g network around the area. Sprint and Verizon seem to have a much more reliable network, and since this device is still primarily a phone, voice calls do count for something. Sprint's at least would afford me faster WiMAX when I could get it, and openly promote the device's ability to share the connection with up to 8? devices.

I haven't investigated the fees, but when I can't go a single day without a dropped call, and I try to find landlines to fall back on where I can instead of my phone, something has got to change.