Category Archives: Web Tech

Creator of PHP Language Hates Programming!

I’m listening to an IT Conversations podcast of Rasmus Lerdorf (the guy who created PHP) speaking about PHP, and I have to say I’m pretty surprised to hear him say “I hate programming with a passion — I created PHP to avoid programming.”

Rasmus says that he wrote PHP while building a web-based system for Toronto [...]

Mozilla Shortcut Keys and AWESOME Thunderbird Extension

Whoo yeah I’m excited!
About two months ago I got a new Apple Macbook Pro. I love it, it’s rad, I love using it etc. But something that’s been bugging me no end is that I don’t know the shortcut key to jump to the address bar (where you type http://…etc) in Firefox. In [...]

Security Breach Part II (aka Tracking Other People’s Search Habits Using TinyURL and Google)

As I discovered earlier today, if you accidentally leave your Google account signed in on another computer, anything that is searched for on that computer using Google will be recorded in your Google account’s Personalized Search Search History.
But what if you didn’t just leave your account signed in accidentally, but actually managed to remotely log [...]

Security Breach!

Here’s a good example of why the “if you’re not doing anything wrong, why worry?” argument against privacy invasion is useless and misguided. Just because you aren’t doing anything illegal, does that mean you want your family to be able to see what you’ve been searching for without you realising?  Of course not — [...]

whereis.com.au Gets AJAX!

Well, only just after that post it looks like I’ll have to challenge Daniel to use the new Whereis interface and tell me it’s not better, because it’s a LOT better thanks to some AJAX kinda stuff (and of course the new graphics that bring it well into 2002 :P). Clicking to re-centre the [...]

Google Reader, AJAX and User Interfaces

Daniel tonight told me that he hadn’t yet seen a good implementation of an ajax application, that they’re always too slow and the delay bugs him. I really don’t know what he’s talking about so maybe I should have clarified, although I think it’s possible that he’s used ajax on sites that aren’t so [...]

PORK?

Is PORK the next AJAX-style buzzword?

The Ruby Bandwagon

I really need to get on the Ruby (and more specifically, Rails) bandwagons. I mean, with quotes like these:
It takes about half or less code to put my stuff together in RoR than it did in PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, etc.
I use to worry about giving my client an estimate and then running over the [...]

Corporate Blogging - D’ya Geddit?

Over some tasty lasagne with some friends last week, the conversation somehow prompted me to bring up Telstra’s new corporate blogs by a few of their employees as part of their attempts at friendly openness on nowwearetalking.com.au.
My enthusiasm was dampened when the response was something like “what, so a bunch of employees [...]

Import Your RSS Feeds from Thunderbird into Google Reader

Google has released a web-based RSS reader and aggregator that is pretty nice. You can read all posts from all the feeds you subscribe to in a chronological order, or you can just read from a specific feed. It has lots of AJAX and a pretty smooth interface with shortcut keys that really [...]