The awesome life of an OSS web dev

Well, as we progress through the years of computing, the web as a platform has really taken off. Many people are using things such as Google Docs because of their simplicity and convenience, and also it makes it extremely easy to share documents. Also, adobe recently released their web-based photo editor, Photoshop Express, as well as AIR, which allows web developers to create desktop applications using javascript, flash, and html. A javascript implementation of openGL is in the works, and javascript in general has been a hot topic in the web world. Also, the gnome project has started working on an online desktop that is integrated with web services.

So what am I getting at? I feel that eventually the web as a platform will replace the desktop platform. Web applications are platform-independent, simple enough for most people to figure out, and usually make it easy to share things. The problem however is that we as javascript developers don't have the capabilities of writing an image or video editor without server-side scripting. Even then, it would not be scalable.
Also standards are a huge issue, the IE people just can't seem to get it through their thick heads that their browser is the worst when it comes to web standards. IE8 holds some promise, but I have my doubts.

We still need to be able to do more with javascript though. I doubt it's possible to write a video editor in pure javascript. We need to have more tools to do cool things. I think that the openGL implementation is definitely a step in the right direction, but it's still not enough. More intergration with the desktop is necessary. (but not too much :D)

This weekend I spent some time to sit down and start hacking around with Nexuiz. I decided I wanted to make a class-based style of play modifier. It wasn't very hard after the first day or so. It was a bit frustrating at times though, some things were tricky. I guess if I were to continue to work with it I'd pick up on these things. There was a lot less object orientation then I was hoping for. I'm not sure if that's really a feature of quakeC. Nonetheless, I learned a little bit about Nexuiz. I got it so that there's a limbo menu, and each class has it's own specific playermodel and weapons. It was fun, but I think I'll stick with working with javascript. Maybe it's the fact that I just like javascript more, maybe I just need more time with Nexuiz/quakeC. But for now I'm putting it down, I need to work on Psych Desktop. Maybe later on in the week I'll just work on some other little things in my mod, like giving medics medpacks, field ops ammo packs. I don't know if I'm going to send back a patch, but if I finish it soon enough I'll definitely send back a patch.

I just read an article that says microsoft is pushing an update that forces people to update to IE7! Web developers everywhere, rejoice! Mark your calendars, the update hits their servers February 12, 2008!

[link]

Edit: Oh noes :( http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-ie7-auto-rollout-fact-and-fiction

So now that I have an 8800 GT, Compiz has no excuse. Why did it look exactly the same as when I had a 7600 GS?

Here's what fixed my problem. In compizConfig, go to the "general options" page. Click on the "Display Settings" tab.

Make sure you uncheck 'detect refresh rate', move the 'refresh rate' slider to 60 (or more depending on your monitor), and enable the 'sync to vblank' option.

This got rid of my slow framerate. It also got rid of an issue where the windows looked distorted when they were moving. (it's hard to describe, almost as if half the window was shifted to one side by a pixel or two, so the edges looked jagged but the contents looked fine.)

There you have it. I hope this was helpful.

Ok, for Christmas I got some new computer parts. I'm loving my box now. Ok, so first off I got a new CPU cooler. It's a bit loud, but boy does it work. I also got to dabble with a new nVidia GeForce 8800 GT. It's made by EVGA, and I'm loving this thing. I downloaded the latest nVidia drivers, installed em from the CLI, and it worked. I'm getting some amazing results; nexuiz runs on ultimate settings at around 200 FPS. I'm very happy, now I don't have to fiddle with turning off compiz when I play a game. Lastly, I got a new mouse. It's a Diamondback 3G. Much more responsive then my old mouse, and I was able to map more compiz actions to the mouse buttons. I'm very happy on how that turned out. The last thing I got was a new hard drive. I copied my home partition from my existing disk to the new disk, edited fstab, and deleted the old partition. While doing that I found that I forgot to take the jumpers off; they were capping my drive at 1.5 Gb/s, now it's at 3.0 Gb/s, and I definitely notice the difference.

Unfortunately I could not get screenshots working in ET:QW (which looks amazing now, BTW), so here's a screenshot of nexuiz:

I do programming in both php and python when I program websites. I have tried to figure out why I'm attracted to python more then php, and here's what I think.

PHP (in my opinion) is not very well planned out. There are way too many core functions in the language, most of them are something like module_real_do_something. I don't even understand why those aren't in classes. It's very easy to slip up and have a security vulnerability in a script, and the solutions they provide just don't cut it. Things like magic quotes add another step when it doesn't help anyone except the idiot programmer who doesn't know about SQL injection. Differences between php 4 and 5 are a massive pain because the language is not planned out. It's not very flexible; you can't mix in new methods to a class, among other things. Classes are hard to use to begin with. I find that you have to do a lot of 'hacks' in order to get certain things working, usually copy and pasted from a comment on the php documentation site. In my honest opinion not very ergonomic. The only plus side of PHP that I can see is that it is installed on most web servers, and it uses (in most cases) less memory then python.

I got stacks working in AWN!

Why would anyone make a language with thousands of core functions that aren't organized into classes? It's near impossible to learn! It took me a month before I could remember the mysql_real_escape_string function! Maybe this is just me, but I find that it will act strange for no reason at all, and you'll spend hours upon hours trying to figure out what is wrong with your code. Sometimes I miss python, but I can't because most servers don't have python installed, and python is a bit trickier to setup since you need to set a content handler in either .htaccess or httpd.conf. But python is much nicer to work with, variables have methods like in JS, and I think it's much more organized. PHP seems to be a giant pool of functions. At least they have decent documentation for it though.