A few pictures I took last weekend of the fantastic spectacle that was the Edogawa fireworks.

Over at Stack Overflow I see many a question popping up recently regarding high-level frameworks like .NET or Ruby on Rails and Javascript that show a profound misunderstanding of web technologies. The questions are all along the lines of this:

Why can’t I [trigger framework function X / increase server-side variable Y] in an onclick event like this?

<a onclick="Serverside.Framework.function.x()">

This leads me to believe that it’s fundamentally wrong to start your programming career learning a high-level framework, when you’ve never dealt with the nitty-gritty details of web programming before. While I won’t go quite as far as Joel Spolsky, who is consistently advocating that everybody learn C, I believe you need to have completed a few projects in a bare-metal fashion in your programming language of choice before even considering using a framework. That can be quite challenging the more your language of choice is coupled with a framework of course (I’m looking at you, .NET).

If you’ve never made and debugged an XMLHttpRequest by hand, go write some PHP and Javascript, will you? And don’t cheat with jQuery & Co.

A nice piece by Brent Simmons about something I’m trying to convey to the Powers That Be every so often: Technically very little is really hard, getting it right is always hard.

I was looking for ways to integrate Boxee into my Windows Media Center. Starting my search on Boxees forums I quickly found a link that looked promising. Turned out to be a Download Squad article about a method somebody had found. This linked to an article at eHomeUpgrade, about a method somebody had found. Which finally linked to the original method.

Okay folks, while I understand and respect that the web is all about sources and attribution, this is just plain ridiculous. And this is one of the more harmless cases, there are times when I had to give up because there were no more links to follow.

That’s exactly the reason why I’m linking my posts the way I do below.

This is getting pretty ridiculous. First Microsoft threatened to ship Windows 7 without any browser at all, now they’re proposing to put up a setup screen that will let the user choose a browser.

As much as I’m in favour of more browser diversity, how is this supposed to work in the end? Will they burn an installer for each browser on the Windows 7 disks that will be outdated by next week? Will they download the latest installer on-the-fly, relying on 3rd parties and/or a list that needs constant maintenance and updating? Which browsers will be included? What is grandma going to think when faced with the choice between “Internet Explorer”, “Opera”, “Firefox”, “Safari” and “Chrome”? Will the rest of the world adopt the same procedure? If not, will this prompt more anti-trust investigations and lawsuits?

This whole debacle is creating more questions than it answers, and the consumer will be the confused one in the end. I’m curious to see how this will shake out.

Also note that it is your responsibility to die() if necessary.

From the PHP manual entry on set_error_handler.

How do I know, incontrovertibly, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the world is full of incompetent programmers? Because I’m one of them!

A good article over at Jeff’s that I can wholly relate to.

Nary a day goes by that I don’t look at some piece of code I wrote a while ago and get the feeling that I’m the most incompetent schmuck who’s ever wrote software. If someone were to ask me about my competence level I’d answer “the bare minimum of what is acceptable for an entry-level noob”.

What’s always shocking to me is to find out that there are “programmers” which are orders of magnitude worse, without noticing it. I am still in the process of cleaning up the mess left by one of those once, and this experience has made me doubly paranoid about code quality. It’s actually quite sad that I wasn’t this alert before.

But then again, I’m an incompetent schmuck.

A leaked presentation has exposed Microsoft’s tentative plans for its retail stores — and the high degree to which they’ll imitate Apple stores, down to their layouts and even the presence of a dedicated “Guru Bar” for help.

They better make that bar thrice as long as the Apple version and make sure to hand out free drinks for those in the waiting line.

And bullet-proof the Gurus’ uniforms.

Instead of being professional and courteous, the technician should have known that the client was upset before taking the call so that he could have answered the phone in a funny squeaky voice and punctuated the conversation with circus sound effects.

I am all for answering the phone in a funny squeaky voice, think of how much more fun the world would be. Though usually interesting, the Daily WTF is finally hitting the funny bone again with this one.