Links: June 1st

I’m going to break out of the usual cycle of posting my Links of the Week threads on Wednesday. Let’s try posting these on Monday since there’s a lot going on this week that is of importance. I’ll be keeping this post updated, particularly with the Air France airliner that went down.

Biology

  • The New York Times has an interesting book review on a work titled Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. I may have to get this one.

    I recall some years ago when I had heard that cooking helped break down heavier starches into more manageable types (including simpler sugars), and that cooking is at least partially responsible for us having the brain we do. (While our brain-to-body mass isn’t extraordinary, the amount of oxygen our brains consume compared to the rest of our body is.) Anyway, it looks like Michael Savage was right and the vegetarians–not surprisingly–were wrong.

English

  • The Economist has a somewhat amusing style guide on commonly misused words or words that are commonly used in a non-standard manner. Now, the reason I find this particular article humorous is because it reads more like a stupid nit-pick: there’s a significant number of words that they point out as misused when they’re widely accepted, defined, or colloquial use defines them as the speaker would expect. Granted, this is purportedly an internal style guide for their use, but I sometimes wonder if such things aren’t taken to unnecessary extremes. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
    • Demographics: no, the word is demography. Funny, but it looks like demographics isn’t a nonstandard, ungrammatical use…
    • Garner means store, not gather. Are they aware that garner can be used as a verb, meaning to gather?
    • Immolate means to sacrifice, not to burn. They have a strong case here. Though, there’s still that pesky colloquial usage thing…

    Honestly, I think they need to purchase a copy of Diana Hacker’s A Pocket Style Manual.

    Edit: I’m so used to reading British English that it dawned on me that this particular style guide is most likely limited almost exclusively to UK English. If this is the case, then perhaps it is a good exercise to observe differences between US English and British English.

Local News

Technology

  • I stumbled upon an interesting graph of benchmark data from the “Computer Language Benchmarks Game” (formerly “Language Shootout”). The results are rather surprising. For those of you who claim Java is painfully slow, it might be worth looking at the benchmarks. This is pretty close to tests I’ve seen myself. Tomcat (written in Java) serves up static content faster than Apache 2 (written in C). Although, whenever .htaccess support is disabled in Apache, performance is reasonably close–with Tomcat still ahead.
  • Speaking of Java, Gilad Bracha has a fascinating article on certain deficiencies in Java. Although Python is much slower in comparison, it does make me feel a little bit better about some of Guido’s language choices. Everything as an object has its use.

World News

  • Air France Flight 447
    • Update – Tuesday afternoon: Tim Vasquez of weathergraphics.com has a tremendously detailed write-up on the influence weather may have had on flight AF447. He is careful not to implicate weather as the cause but suggests it may have had an interesting impact. He also has a few plots related to where the aircraft’s position most likely was relative to the storms in the area.
    • Update – Late Monday, early Tuesday: According to WikiNews, passengers had sent text messages to family members before the plane disappeared.
    • On Monday, a French airliner went down in the Atlantic. AirDisaster.com has a lengthy article on this along with a picture from JetPhotos.Net of the exact aircraft involved.
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PHP: Things that Annoy Me

It seems that nearly everyone who has dabbled to one extreme or another in PHP has a few gripes related to the language’s ad hoc design. It isn’t a very elegant language, nor is it well-suited to much outside the world of web applications. What it does do it does reasonably well, and its bar of entry is low enough that even novices can have a working site up and running with some dynamic components here and there within a few days of playing with sample code. Unlike more complicated frameworks of the Java, Python, or Ruby worlds, PHP requires little–if any–knowledge of common design patterns and practices. For better or for worse it’s a language that grew out of a set of utilities and still retains much of this feel–and design.

The volume of “PHP annoys me” articles have blossomed tremendously over the years. I think this is partially the result that those of us who essentially “grew up” with the language are now discovering with increasing frustration that the very things which made the language easy to use are what cause it (or more appropriately us) so much grief.

I’d like to contribute a little to beating this particular dead horse. Maybe it’s not quite dead yet.

Ahh, how I could make a Monty Python reference out of that!

Update, June 21, 2009 If you like this article, you might be interested in this site. Read more…

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Read More Patch

Update May 31st

I have completed an early version of this plugin. Feel free to download it! The administrative page is fairly bare but it does the job. Read more…

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