I’ve finally decided that I’m going to take an active role in getting myself out of this almost year-long development-less funk that I’ve been in. I’ve been pouring over information and ideas, trying to come up with something that I could spend my time on and make a personal project of. I actually came up with a few. They’re all Omega Vortex projects from back when we were trying to bootstrap a software company by consulting. The projects never got enough attention because of the consulting and we started to enter the really nasty area of the recession, so the consulting projects also started drying up, leaving us without enough income to allow us to move forward …

Fast forward a couple months where we were wrapping up our last consulting gig as I was taking a job at Highwinds as a Systems Engineer. Presumably to Engineer some cool tools and systems to help make our collective jobs easier. If only I knew then what I was really getting myself into. Honestly, I’m glad I didn’t. I probably wouldn’t have been so eager to take the job. Not too long after I started, our more senior engineer and overall badass Systems Ninja (hi, Matt!) got an offer he couldn’t refuse and decided to move on to higher places. It was about that time that my world turned upside-down.

With almost zero previous experience as a Linux SysAdmin, I started a journey that would lead me to a great wealth of knowledge, a much greater understanding of how our systems worked and interacted with each other, as well as roughly no amount of time to spend on any of my development projects. We went through several ups and downs as I came up to speed, learning everything I could about running our Linux systems and how all of our software worked, the way the whole deal was architected, and everything I needed to know to keep it all running. It’s a constant learning experience and I’m still picking up stuff as I go along, but I feel like I’ve come a very long way in a short amount of time and I’m far more comfortable on the command line now than I ever was even back when Linux was my primary OS on personal machines.

Since then, we’ve hired quite a few Linux folks. Less pressure is square on my shoulders now that we have more very capable people to help distribute the load. We’re making progress to working smarter and not harder, spending less of our nights in contests to put out fires and more time with opportunities to relax. Things are becoming increasingly stable which is giving me more free time during off-work hours to do whatever I want. At first, I took this time to goof off and not do a whole lot, because I hadn’t had the opportunity to do so in so long. Now, I’ve decided to transition back to active development work in my free time.

I’m sure those of you who follow me on Twitter noticed that I said I’ve officially started working on ComicShout and OmegaFlash again. That’s not all, and I’ll have a lot to say about these and other projects in future posts. In the meantime, you can keep track of what I’m working on via GitHub and Ohloh.

The repositories on GitHub are very ugly at the moment. They’re essentially dumps of what was in the private Omega Vortex repositories as of last night. A lot of code that never got committed was lost on a few of these. Keep in mind that these projects didn’t get enough love, before. My plan is to fix that. My current focus for a while is going to be OmegaFlash, so don’t expect too much activity on the others for now. As I’m able, I’m going to start putting up more information on my vision and goals for each project at their respective GitHub wikis. Anyone who’s looking to contribute after I’ve put up more info, please fork away. I’ll be keeping an eye on forks and will quickly integrate good additions. Habitual good contributors can be given direct commit access to the repositories.

If I’ve got your interest, please keep an eye on the progress at GitHub and Ohloh. Also, keep an eye on this blog. I’m going to start putting up some high-level overviews of what I want to do with the projects. Until then, I’m interested to hear ideas and suggestions from all of you.

There are a handful of requirements that we need to meet with our class/object structure/architecture:

1. We need access to all of the Socket resources from the game loop in order to perform a Socket.Select() on them.
2. We need to be able to match a Socket resource to its Descriptor object.
3. We need to be able to quickly query for any available resource by some unique identifier (id number, guid, short unique name, etc).
4. Unless performance requires it, we should try to avoid the “reference” soup that came with the previous implementation. Every object had a property with a reference for each object that was related to it in any way.

Example: Room objects had properties with direct references to all of the characters in the room, the rooms exits, the area the room was apart of. And the exits had references to the rooms they led to and the rooms they were in. The characters had references to the room that they were in. There were a lot of circular references and it’s hard for most reference counting garbage collectors to properly free resources with these types of references.

5. Classes with Events and Event Handlers need to be public so that scripted pieces in IronPython will be able to see them properly.

Possible solutions:

#1 and #2: Keep a Dictionary<String, Descriptor> that has all of the Descriptors in it in a DescriptorCollection class which will have the lookup methods mentioned in #3. The String key would be the string representation of the Socket.RemoteEndPoint. Including the remote port. Not including the remote port would make it impossible for us to accept multiple connections from the same IP Address.

#3 and #4: The resources could all be kept in their own Collection classes with the resources mapped out as necessary in Lists or Dictionaries. Multiple Dictionaries using references can be created to facilitate multiple identifiers. We’ll tie the identifiers to the rest of the objects and use the lookup methods on the Collections when we need to get an object reference.

#5: Make sure classes are defined as public. They’re not completely public by default.

This entry is almost entirely copied verbatim from the current revision of an internal collaborative document. There were some minor edits for clarification.

Well, I was going to put a list of update sites that you need here, except I still haven’t found them all. I can’t seem to get all of them that you need and because the resources document is just flat-wrong, this process is pretty much just dead in the water, at this point. It is absolutely pointless to install Zend Studio as a standalone editor when I want to use Eclipse for other things besides PHP (sometimes two different languages at the same time).

I think I’m done with Zend Studio. The Eclipse move frustrates me to no end. Prior to now, I’ve absolutely hated Eclipse with a passion. I’ve tried to work with it, several times. I just don’t like the workflows, the memory hogging tendencies, the fact that it slows to an absolute crawl when trying to do anything in a project larger than a handful of files. It’s ridiculous.

I’ve been giving NetBeans a shot for the past couple of days and it’s pretty decent, but it’s missing something that I can’t really place my finger on. An IDE that doesn’t suck and has support for multiple languages would be a killer app. Aptana seems like they’re on the right track, but there’s that Eclipse dependency that irks me again. I’m not above giving Eclipse another shot and trying to make it work, if someone can come along and make an IDE worth using.

As much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft owns the land of development tools, hands down. I love Visual Studio 2008. If VS.PHP didn’t suck and there was good support for CPython (not IronPython!) available, I think I’d use it for everything. Maybe more language plugins for Visual Studio will start to appear. Even if they were commercial plugins, it would still be worth it, as long as they were solid language support that properly utilized Visual Studio’s features. Even just being half as awesome and intuitive as working in C# in VS would be leagues beyond pretty much any other IDE I’ve used, so far.

… it’s kind of sad, really.

PHP is suitable for “enterprise development”. The problem is, only 1% of everyone who knows PHP actually knows what “enterprise development” is supposed to mean.

Maybe this’ll all have a happy ending, but this has so far been pretty close to the top, if not the top, of my list of “Worst Birthdays Ever” …

I like Jeff Atwood. I enjoy reading his blog and I’m looking forward to stackoverflow. I’m just not used to seeing him quote painfully old articles when trying to make his points.

From my own experience, and the countless of online tutorials and blogs, many PHP developers are guilty of the same crap code VB developers were once renowned for. OO, N-Tier, exception handling, domain modeling, refactoring and unit testing are all foreign concepts in the PHP world.

Ever heard of PHP 5? PHPUnit? Zend Studio? The plethora of other tools that real, good development shops use? Sure, a lot of the junk you see in PHP was done by hobbyists or people without a good, firm understanding of how things work. There are quite a few professionals out there who develop and distribute quality PHP-based products.

I think Stas put it best, PHP isn’t the only language where really crappy code is produced. I read The Daily WTF quite a lot and notice a ton of other languages in there, so they must all suck too, right?

It’s certainly very possible to build really elegant solutions in PHP. It’s also possible to build maintainable solutions in PHP. As tools like Zend Framework, PHPUnit, Phing, phpUnderControl, xdebug, Eclipse with PDT, Omega Vortex’s own Omega Matrix, and many others start to become more widely used, I think it’s very possible that you’ll see a gradual increase in the overall quality of PHP code.

1. You write a list of 40 reasons someone is a lousy PHP programmer when over half the reasons don’t apply to every situation, much less a lot of real-world situations.

Honestly, I wanted to tear this one to pieces with a really long entry outlining why certain points on that list were just ridiculous. I won’t bother. If you’re even a mediocre PHP Programmer and understand certain concepts, you’ll be able to do it yourself.

Granted, there are some common sense points in there, but most of the valid points on his list are just that: common sense. There are a few noteworthy items that aren’t common sense, but I was so taken aback by some of the outlandish claims that I can hardly count those. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, if you feel your IQ drop while or after reading that list.

Disclaimer: I don’t really think this person is a lousy PHP Programmer, but I do think it was in poor taste that he BSed a list like this and included points that are completely unreasonable.

You saw my response to CIO’s piece of trash article about PHP. Now, have a look at Terry Chay’s.

Enjoy.

Case in point, I was reading Planet PHP this morning and a 2-year-old entry that outlined the ongoing childish attitudes some people within the PHP Community have resurfaced. If I hadn’t checked the dates on all of these particular blog entries, I would’ve thought this was new material. Since this entry served as a gateway to another blog entry that was a specific attack on Chris Shiflett, any random passer-by who thinks this is all new stuff is going to a) have negative thoughts about the “whiner” in question; or b) have negative thoughts about Chris over something that’s two freaking years old.

I implore you. If you’re the author of any blog software, stop doing this. Not only is it extremely annoying to get repeats of old crap in my RSS Feeds whenever someone edits something, it can lead to potentially hazardous things like this resurfacing and causing unnecessary damage to one or more people’s reputations.