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Has it really been almost six months since my last weblog entry? I’d better do something about that.

I’ve decided that one of the first steps in my rehabilitation as a blogger will be to get a MacBook so I can write even when I’m away from home. I’ve been wanting to get a Mac ever since the advent of OS X, but for various reasons just never got around to getting one. Now is the time to change that. I’ve already picked out the model and the specs, so the only thing left at this point is to shop around for the best price. By this time Wednesday I should be playing around with my very own Mac.

PHP Hacks by Jack D. Herrington
December 2005, O’Reilly Media, Inc.
468 pages, $29.95, paperback
Amazon.com | Amazon.co.jp

From generating Flash movies on the fly to adding interactive maps to your Web site, the number of interesting things that can be done with PHP is limited primarily by one’s imagination. To provide some stimulation on that end, Herrington has picked 100 nifty things you can do with PHP and brought them together in PHP Hacks from O’Reilly.

Like the other titles in the Hacks series, this book contains a smattering of just about everything, but treats the reader to just enough information about each topic to serve as a springboard for further exploration on your own. Although the code samples are quite generous (in many cases, they could be adapted to your own projects with minor alterations), they are clearly intended as a staring point, not as finished, production-ready scripts. In many cases, Herrington also provides well prepared UML diagrams to go along with the code samples, which provide an intuitive visual complement to the code itself.

Although there is certainly a lot of good information and inspirational value in the book’s first four chapters (Installation and Basics, Web Design, DHTML,and Graphics), in my view the really good material is in the last six chapters (Databases and XML, Application Design, Patterns, Testing, Alternative UIs, and Fun Stuff). The material in the chapter on design patterns, in particular, was excellent and would very likely challenge the skills of all but the most experienced PHP developers.

In some cases, though, the content of this book may be a little bit too close to the bleeding edge of what is possible with PHP. I could not help but notice that many of the hacks required PHP5 or the latest versions of Microsoft Office applications, whereas in many production environments (including this server, in fact), PHP4 is still widely used, and many office environments have more or less standardized on the features that were available in Office 2000.

Another thing that may surprise some readers is that, contrary to the regular “copy this code to your server and then load that page in your browser” technique used in many PHP books, many of the hacks in this book are actually designed to run from the command line, which some might find unusual for PHP, which is often thought of as simply an “HTML scripting language.” When shown the command line hacks—and the one for creating desktop applications in PHP—I think most readers will quickly realize that there is more to PHP than just Web pages.

Recommended for anyone who is interested in PHP, but needs a bit of a creative nudge to get started on some truly interesting projects.

In the past month or so, I’ve been having more hardware-related problems than I’ve ever had at any other point in my lifetime.

First the CD drive on our laptop stopped working, then the same thing mysteriously happened on the desktop I was using at the time (which is strange, because we rarely ever used those drives), then the desktop machine stopped booting from the DVD drive (which recently prevented me from cleaning up the hard disk before giving the machine back to UltraBob, from whom it was on long-term loan), and then the machine just stopped booting altogether.

At around the same time, a USB hard disk that I had just started using with our new computer stopped working.

And finally, to top it all off, we’ve just had a massive and spectacular blowout of the hard drive on our brand-new desktop PC, which is just slightly more than a month old. Any attempts to boot this new machine are met with cryptic messages about seek errors and read sector failures.

Six significant hardware problems in just over a month, all unrelated, all with hardware from different manufacturers. I’m not sure why all of this is happening just now (I normally don’t have problems like this at all), but one thing seems to be clear: Hardware hates me.

Although technology plays a very important role in my life, the feeling is quickly becoming mutual.

Update: As if to add insult to injury, my cell phone broke shortly after this entry was written. On top of that, my wife reminded me that our refridgerator is on the fritz. Why are all these things happening to me right now? A friend at work summed it up neatly: “Clearly you have angered the gods,” he said.

Right. So how does one go about appeasing hardware gods? Offerings of upgrades?

We’ve been thinking about getting a new computer recently (to replace my Linux desktop and my wife’s Windows laptop), but I’ve been having a hard time making up my mind about whether to go with a typical, run-of-the-mill PC or one of the new Intel Core Duo iMacs. On one hand, the new iMacs look great (Luis would no doubt enthusiastically approve), but I’m a bit wary about being a beta-tester for new hardware. Also, one of my goals for this year is to deepen my knowledge of VBA for an Access-based project at work, which I wouldn’t be able to bone up on at home if we had a Mac (yes, I know I’m ignoring the talk of dual-booting OS X and Windows XP).

Anyway, if anyone out there wants to attempt to pursuade me one way or the other, now is the time to do so. 

I’m somewhat frustrated with Dell Japan’s refusal to support Firefox. Whenever I attempt to order something from the Dell Japan site, I am greeted with the following Access Denied screen.

Yeah, sure, it was easy enough to install the User Agent Switcher for Firefox and pretend to be using Internet Explorer on Windows XP instead of Firefox on Linux, but the point is that I shouldn’t have to do all that just to order a computer.

The ironic thing about all this, of course, is that rumor has it that Dell will start pre-installing Firefox in some markets in 2006. Somebody should let Dell Japan know that its own customers may be unable to use its Web site with the browser it may soon be providing.