Good bye PHP. You have been a good bread and butter language for me. Sorry to say the dumbosity of the design decisions being made about you are too much to live with. It’s time I moved on to bigger and better things with a better sense of direction.

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PHP has long been a bread and butter language for me when it came to web-based projects. It’s what got me started in the whole web development business and essentially kick-started my whole career as a systems developer. But alas, recent developments in PHP land come as an unwelcome surprise. I’m talking about the much anticipated (for me anyway) namespace support. I have documented my basic gripes about PHP elsewhere. So I won’t go rambling about them again. I was excited to hear about namespaces finally getting implemented in PHP6 and backported to PHP5. But then when you read about bullshit like this you can’t help but wonder if the language’s direction has been taken over by a pack of neurotic, crack-smoking monkeys. Namespaces are a very important feature if one were to write large amounts of code without having to worry about symbol name clashes.

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105,000 Euros. You can buy yourself a lot of cool stuff with that amount of cash on you. You can blow it all away at a baccarat table in Morocco. You can build 2 police stations with it too. But why would you do all of those things with 105,000 Euros when you can travel from Russia, to Poland, on to Germany and finally to Zurich (border-less travel ROCKS!) where you can open a number Swiss Account where you can stash more loot later on?

Too bad for Gen. Eliseo de Lapaz that he got caught and now he is stuck playing a game of political hot potato with his bosses. Be a man Gen. de Lapaz, you’re going down anyway so just take those shitheads down with you!

I decided to buy a new laptop last month and after poring through reviews I decided to get an Acer Aspire 4920G. I got the submodel(?) 811g16mn which came with 1GB memory (4GB max) and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT. I bumped up the memory to the maximum 4GB to since I plan to run VMWare on Linux. The thing came with Vista Home Premium and after a bit of shoehorning to get a proper dual-boot setup to work, I started to fiddle around with Vista. In spite of all the negative press I have read about Vista, it’s not actually as bad as everyone says. I think I’m keeping Vista on this laptop, I paid for it after all.

There are a some things on this laptop that really irked me. For one, there’s the design. When the thing is closed, it looks like this black gem on your desk. While it’s not as good looking as a Macbook Pro, it’s not half bad either as long as you keep it closed. Opening it is another story, “ceramic” is just a fancy term for “all you get is a boring gray plastic finish”.

Another thing is that the keyboard has that “cheap plastic” feel to it. As a programmer, I spend inordinate amounts of time typing and a good keyboard is a must. There are times when the left Ctrl or Shift key would get stuck and it would pop out making a scary “click” sound. When I first heard that sound, I thought something had just overheated and popped.

But these are minor annoyances compared to the biggest annoyance of all.

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