This file is indexed.

/usr/share/php/tests/Horde_Feed/Horde/Feed/fixtures/lexicon/http-laurat.blogs.com-random_ramblings-rss.xml is in php-horde-feed 2.0.1-4.

This file is owned by root:root, with mode 0o644.

The actual contents of the file can be viewed below.

  1
  2
  3
  4
  5
  6
  7
  8
  9
 10
 11
 12
 13
 14
 15
 16
 17
 18
 19
 20
 21
 22
 23
 24
 25
 26
 27
 28
 29
 30
 31
 32
 33
 34
 35
 36
 37
 38
 39
 40
 41
 42
 43
 44
 45
 46
 47
 48
 49
 50
 51
 52
 53
 54
 55
 56
 57
 58
 59
 60
 61
 62
 63
 64
 65
 66
 67
 68
 69
 70
 71
 72
 73
 74
 75
 76
 77
 78
 79
 80
 81
 82
 83
 84
 85
 86
 87
 88
 89
 90
 91
 92
 93
 94
 95
 96
 97
 98
 99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss
 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
 xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
 version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>tech ramblings</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/</link>
<description>laura thomson&#39;s random thoughts and rants about tech, FOSS, and education</description>
<language>en-AU</language>
<lastBuildDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:09:13 -0400</lastBuildDate>
<generator>http://www.typepad.com/</generator>
<atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="self" href="http://www.laurathomson.com/rss.xml" type="application/rss+xml" />
<docs>http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification</docs>
<item>
<title>This blog has moved.</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/04/this-blog-has-m.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/04/this-blog-has-m.html</guid>
<description>If you&#39;re seeing this, you should head on over to http://www.laurathomson.com.</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;If you&#39;re seeing this, you should head on over to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.laurathomson.com&quot;&gt;http://www.laurathomson.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>



<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:09:13 -0400</pubDate>

</item>
<item>
<title>Firefox 3 Beta 3 Add-ons Manager and Add-ons API</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/02/firefox-3-beta.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/02/firefox-3-beta.html</guid>
<description>Yesterday the beta 3 of Firefox 3 was released to the world. This beta contains the new Add-ons Manager, and people seem to be liking it so far - ArsTechnica says One of the most promising and impressive new features...</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;Yesterday the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html&quot;&gt;beta 3 of Firefox 3&lt;/a&gt; was released to the world.&amp;nbsp; This beta contains the new Add-ons Manager, and people seem to be liking it so far - &lt;a href=&quot;http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080212-first-look-firefox-3-beta-3.html&quot;&gt;ArsTechnica says&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the most promising and impressive new features in beta 3 is an
integrated add-on installer system that allows users to search for and
install add-ons from &lt;a href=&quot;http://addons.mozilla.org&quot;&gt;addons.mozilla.org&lt;/a&gt; directly through the Add-ons
Manager user interface. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;The new Add-ons Manager is the result of collaboration between a bunch of smart Mozilla people - &lt;a href=&quot;http://madhava.com/egotism/&quot;&gt;Madhava Enros&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxymoronical.com/&quot;&gt;Dave Townsend&lt;/a&gt; to name two - and a small contribution from yours truly.&amp;nbsp; &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The Add-ons Manager pulls data about Recommended addons and search results from the main addons.mozilla.org (AMO) website via the AMO API, which is my project.&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; When you ask for a recommendation, the Add-ons manager pulls a RESTian URL like&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://services.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/api/list/recommended/all/1&quot;&gt;https://services.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/api/list/recommended/all/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;checks for addons that you don&#39;t yet have installed from that list, and displays details of the remaining addons.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;

The API will be (is) available to the community as well, and promoted once testing is complete.&amp;nbsp; If you&#39;d like to experiment with the API then draft documentation is available at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora_API_Docs&quot;&gt;http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora_API_Docs&lt;/a&gt;
(This will move to the Mozilla Developer Center once it&#39;s more fleshed out.)&amp;nbsp; Please file any bugs you find. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;
I&#39;m still working on tweaks and bug fixes: I&#39;ve already fixed a bunch of character encoding issues in different languages, and applied some performance tweaks. (Some still to go into production.)&amp;nbsp; Right now, I&#39;m working on speeding up search.&amp;nbsp; Search is slow on the whole of AMO, and later this year I plan to implement a full text search.&amp;nbsp; Right now it&#39;s just tweaking - it&#39;s slow because when you search all the possible translations are searched (think many left joins), and the plan is to rejig the database to only search your local translation plus English (since many add-ons are only available in English, and we wouldn&#39;t want you to miss out). &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, it&#39;s been great fun working on this project so far, and it&#39;s incredibly rewarding to think that something I wrote is incorporated into my favorite browser.&amp;nbsp; &lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>


<category>Firefox</category>
<category>Mozilla</category>
<category>PHP</category>

<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:12:04 -0500</pubDate>

</item>
<item>
<title>Frameworks, Addons, Firefox, busy busy busy.</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/02/frameworks-addo.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/02/frameworks-addo.html</guid>
<description>I&#39;m about to leave for Orlando where I will speak at CakeFest One tomorrow on the subject of building the addons.mozilla.org API using CakePHP. The whole of the addons.mozilla.org website is built with Cake, and we believe it to be...</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m about to leave for Orlando where I will speak at &lt;a href=&quot;http://cakefest.org/&quot;&gt;CakeFest One&lt;/a&gt; tomorrow on the subject of building the &lt;a href=&quot;http://addons.mozilla.org&quot;&gt;addons.mozilla.org&lt;/a&gt; API using &lt;a href=&quot;http://cakephp.org/&quot;&gt;CakePHP&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;nbsp; The whole of the addons.mozilla.org website is built with Cake, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev&quot;&gt;we&lt;/a&gt; believe it to be the biggest installation (in terms of traffic) in the world.&amp;nbsp; I&#39;ll post slides after the presentation, and a bit more information about the numbers and so on.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Building the API has consumed my thoughts for the last few months.&amp;nbsp; It&#39;s used by the new Addons Manager in Firefox 3, which will be in beta 3.&amp;nbsp; (You can read &lt;a href=&quot;http://madhava.com/egotism/archive/005011.html&quot;&gt;Madhava Enros&#39; blog entry on the subject&lt;/a&gt; for a preview).&amp;nbsp; After beta 3 is out, I plan on blogging more about the API details.&amp;nbsp; I&#39;m still ironing out bugs and doing some peformance tuning.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In addition to my involvement with Cake these days, I have recently been associated with two new framework books.&amp;nbsp; I acted as a tech reviewer for Mike Naberezny and Derek DeVries&#39; &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ndphpr&quot;&gt;Rails for PHP Developers&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (Pragmatic, 2008) and wrote the foreword for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zfguide.com/&quot;&gt;Cal Evans&#39; &amp;quot;Guide to Programming with Zend Framework&amp;quot; &lt;/a&gt;(php|architect, 2008).&amp;nbsp; These books are now available, so please enjoy the fruits of the authors&#39; labor.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I can&#39;t help but find it amusing that something I&#39;m &lt;a href=&quot;http://devzone.zend.com/article/2384-OSCON-07-Wrapup&quot;&gt;(in)famous&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/07/do-all-framewor.html&quot;&gt;not being a fan of &lt;/a&gt;has dominated my professional life for the last six or so months.&amp;nbsp; I&#39;ll have to write more about my thoughts on these three frameworks soon...but right now I&#39;ve got too much work to do :) and a plane to catch, besides.&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>


<category>Conferences</category>
<category>Mozilla</category>
<category>PHP</category>

<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:04:05 -0500</pubDate>

</item>
<item>
<title>Microsoft buys Yahoo! (or would like to) - now what?</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/02/microsoft-buys.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/02/microsoft-buys.html</guid>
<description>Lots of stories this morning about Microsoft&#39;s $44.6 billion dollar bid for Yahoo! So on the Sun/MySQL theme, what are the implications? Huge, to me, absolutely huge, on so many fronts. The positive is that both Yahoo! and Microsoft are...</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style=&quot;text-decoration: underline;&quot;&gt;L&lt;/span&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206101782&quot;&gt;ots&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g8-DEMtAE9q4i4ySQ0eV_qZefmRQD8UHGV1O2&quot;&gt;of&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/01/microsoft_bids_for_yahoo/&quot;&gt;stories&lt;/a&gt; this morning about Microsoft&#39;s $44.6 billion dollar bid for Yahoo!&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So on the Sun/MySQL theme, what are the implications?&amp;nbsp; Huge, to me, absolutely huge, on so many fronts.&amp;nbsp; The positive is that both Yahoo! and Microsoft are big companies that like to innovate.&amp;nbsp; &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;From the point of view of a PHP developer, it&#39;s particularly interesting.&amp;nbsp; Microsoft has internally changed its view of Open Source a great deal over the last few years.&amp;nbsp; In the PHP world we&#39;ve seen this on a number of fronts, including the partnership with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zend.com/&quot;&gt;Zend&lt;/a&gt; to make PHP run well on Windows, the various Web Developer summits at Redmond (due to &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.msdn.com/sanjoy/default.aspx&quot;&gt;Sanjoy Sarkar&lt;/a&gt;, a common fixture at PHP events, and all around nice guy &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.msdn.com/bgold/&quot;&gt;Brian Goldfarb&lt;/a&gt;, who was the first MS employee to come to a PHP conference, back in 2002 I think).&amp;nbsp; This last week my friend &lt;a href=&quot;http://netevil.org/&quot;&gt;Wez Furlong&lt;/a&gt; (of PDO fame) was at Redmond with, as he put it, a &amp;quot;bunch of compiler geeks&amp;quot;, speaking at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.langnetsymposium.com/agenda.asp&quot;&gt;2008 Lang.NET Symposium&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;nbsp; &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Yahoo! is of course the home of a lot of really big PHP, and some famous PHP developers, in particular &lt;a href=&quot;http://lerdorf.com/bio.php&quot;&gt;Rasmus Lerdorf&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;the father of PHP&amp;quot;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.libssh2.org/&quot;&gt;Sara Golemon&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;nbsp; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gravitonic.com/&quot;&gt;Andrei Zmievski&lt;/a&gt; left last year to join &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.outspark.com/portal/&quot;&gt;Outspark&lt;/a&gt;.)&amp;nbsp; One assumes that the architectures within Yahoo! would continue to be LAMP based, at least in part because the cost to switch would be amazing.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These things come in bursts: I remember Sleepycat/InnoDB/etc in 2006.&amp;nbsp; Now we just have to wait and see who is next. &lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>


<category>PHP</category>

<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:13:19 -0500</pubDate>

</item>
<item>
<title>Tenth anniversary: OSCON CFP is open</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/01/tenth-anniversa.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/01/tenth-anniversa.html</guid>
<description>This year&#39;s OSCON will be held from July 21-25 2008 in sunny Portland, OR. This will be a very special OSCON as it&#39;s the tenth anniversary - we&#39;d like to make it double plus good, so please, please submit your...</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;This year&#39;s OSCON will be held from July 21-25 2008 in sunny Portland, OR.&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; This will be a very special OSCON as it&#39;s the tenth anniversary - we&#39;d like to make it double plus good, so please, please submit your best efforts, and we&#39;ll all party on down while opening our minds in July.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/cfp/13&quot;&gt;OSCON 2008 Call for Papers&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>


<category>Conferences</category>
<category>MySQL</category>
<category>PHP</category>

<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:55:34 -0500</pubDate>

</item>
<item>
<title>Sun buys MySQL - now what?</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/01/sun-buys-mysql.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2008/01/sun-buys-mysql.html</guid>
<description>Interesting news greets us this morning with Sun&#39;s acquisition of MySQL. (Congratulations are in order for both parties.) I think a lot of us are still at the &quot;oh wow&quot; stage. There are lots of implications. It seems like a...</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;Interesting news greets us this morning with Sun&#39;s acquisition of MySQL.&amp;nbsp; (Congratulations are in order for both parties.)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I think a lot of us are still at the &amp;quot;oh wow&amp;quot; stage.&amp;nbsp; There are lots of implications.&amp;nbsp; It seems like a good fit because of Sun&#39;s deep involvement in the Open Source community.&amp;nbsp; &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The partnership will certainly juxtapose some interesting personalities: now we have Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL) and Monty (MySQL) working for the same company.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;What will happen with licensing?&amp;nbsp; Will MySQL still be available under a
dual GPL/commercial license, or is it likely to end up under CDDL/SCSL or
similar?&amp;nbsp; Changing from one open source license to another can be an
extraordinarily difficult challenge both logistically and ecologically.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I note that I read in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/01/16/sun-acquires-mysql/&quot;&gt;Don MacAskill&#39;s blog&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;/p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Maybe MySQL will finally start fixing all the performance/concurrency
issues with InnoDB (basically, InnoDB’s threading and concurrency
aren’t working well with modern multi-core CPUs). &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/google-mysql-tools/&quot;&gt;Google’s had some fabulous patches&lt;/a&gt; for awhile, and the brilliant &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Yasufumi+Kinoshita%22+site%3Abugs.mysql.com&quot;&gt;Yasufumi Kinoshita&lt;/a&gt; does as well, but they don’t seem to be making their way into MySQL anytime soon.&amp;quot;&amp;nbsp; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not going to happen as far as I know, because the patches were contributed under the GPL, and can&#39;t be incorporated into the commercially licensed version.&amp;nbsp; In addition, Innobase Oy is owned by Oracle.&amp;nbsp; I think we&#39;re more likely to see those performance and concurrency issues solved by using Falcon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s also interesting from a Java perspective: traditionally Oracle has been the Database-of-Choice for Java devs, and MySQL for PHP devs.&amp;nbsp; With Sun producing MySQL we can expect to see better support within the Java community, although the press releases all note that support for the PHP/Rails/etc communities will continue.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s going to be another interesting year in Open Source.&amp;nbsp; I&#39;m looking forward to it.&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>


<category>MySQL</category>

<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:25:30 -0500</pubDate>

</item>
<item>
<title>Abysmal customer service</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/12/abysmal-custome.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/12/abysmal-custome.html</guid>
<description>Recently I have been the recipient of a number of incidents of abysmal customer service and I really need to vent. The worst of all is Bank of America. They are as extraordinarily polite as they are incompetent. On a...</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;Recently I have been the recipient of a number of incidents of abysmal customer service and I really need to vent.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The worst of all is Bank of America.&amp;nbsp; They are as extraordinarily polite as they are incompetent.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On a number of occasions they have stopped my card.&amp;nbsp; Reasons for this have included: &lt;br /&gt;&amp;nbsp; - You were spending a lot of money (it was Christmas Eve)&lt;br /&gt;&amp;nbsp; - Someone used your card in another state (I live in Maryland, 20 minutes drive from Virginia malls).&lt;br /&gt;&amp;nbsp; - You spent money in another country.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The last seems reasonable in some sense, so I have now taken to calling them before travel and advising of travel.&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;I have also on several occasions asked them to cease this practice as I travel a lot.&amp;nbsp; They always agree that this is fine and that they have made a note on my record, but it has never had any noticeable effect.&amp;nbsp; On my last trip home to Australia in September they stopped my card again.&amp;nbsp; After calling them - at least half an hour on the phone, at international rates - they assured me it had been unblocked.&amp;nbsp; I went out shopping and found it still blocked.&amp;nbsp; I repeated this process AGAIN and it was still blocked.&amp;nbsp; It was not until the third call that I managed to get the card unblocked.&amp;nbsp; On each occasion they assured me the problem was solved.&amp;nbsp; Overall I spent about three hours on the phone at international rates.&amp;nbsp; &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I wrote an email to complain and was told they would send a physical letter to explain what had happened.&amp;nbsp; Such a letter never arrived.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Last Monday, 11/26, while en route to California, I misplaced my card.&amp;nbsp; Believing I had lost it in the airport, I rang to report it lost.&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;I spent 25 minutes on the phone and spoke to three different individuals.&amp;nbsp; The final one told me she could not suspend the card for some reason that she didn&#39;t mention and that I would have to call back some other time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I did not call back, hoping the card would turn up.&amp;nbsp; It did, on Friday 11/30, and then they promptly suspended it.&amp;nbsp; I emailed them to ask if it could be unsuspended, and was told that a new card had been issued and that I would receive it by mail 12/3.&amp;nbsp; Today 12/5 it had still not turned up, so I emailed again and they told me it was *mailed* 12/3.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On some level it is my own fault for continuing to bank with them, a problem which I will shortly remedy.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;However, I am particularly grumpy with customer service assistants this week.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Number 2 was the gate agent at United in SJC on Friday afternoon.&amp;nbsp; After she twice stopped serving me to help someone else - and gave us each the wrong boarding passes - I politely asked if she could finish serving me before moving on.&amp;nbsp; She threw the boarding pass at me and it hit me in the face.&amp;nbsp; Charming.&amp;nbsp; I said nothing but took my pass and walked away.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Number 3, today I was on the phone to a doctor&#39;s secretary.&amp;nbsp; She could not find me in the computer and then gave me a lecture on the fact that I was mispronouncing my own name.&amp;nbsp; If I would only pronounce it the way she did, instead of the way my entire family does, then people would be better able to assist me!&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Vent over.&amp;nbsp; Will resume normal programming shortly.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>


<category>Personal</category>
<category>Ranting</category>

<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:53:51 -0500</pubDate>

</item>
<item>
<title>Losing my religion</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/11/losing-my-relig.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/11/losing-my-relig.html</guid>
<description>You&#39;re over at a friend&#39;s house – let&#39;s call him Bob - and after opening a beer he invites you out to the garage to see something. On the wall hangs a reciprocating saw. You notice that there are no...</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;You&#39;re over at a friend&#39;s house – let&#39;s call him Bob - and after opening a beer he invites you out to the garage to see something.&amp;nbsp; On the wall hangs a reciprocating saw.&amp;nbsp; You notice that there are no other tools visible, which seems kind of weird.&amp;nbsp; Bob says “You like it?&amp;nbsp; That reciprocating saw is the best tool ever.&amp;nbsp; When I got it, I really liked it, and I joined the local reciprocating saw users&#39; group.&amp;nbsp; They showed me all the cool things I could do with it, and I realized I didn&#39;t need any other cutting tools.&amp;nbsp; I even use it to slice my cheese!”&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;What&#39;s wrong with us?&amp;nbsp; &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am frequently irritated with the mindset that there&#39;s One True Way of solving any kind of software problem, be it web platform, database choice, operating system, or methodological approach.&amp;nbsp; It&#39;s been irritating me since I was an academic and I would present two different algorithms (let&#39;s call them A and B) to solve problem X.&amp;nbsp; There would always be a student who wanted to know &amp;quot;which is better?&amp;quot;&amp;nbsp; Typically I would respond &amp;quot;In a situation such as [...] A is better, but if you are looking at something more like [...] B is better.&amp;quot;&amp;nbsp; Most people would be happy with that but there are always people who insist that one must just be The Best Way.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, reasons for choosing, or sticking with, a particular technology/methodology/whatever:&lt;br /&gt;- It solves the problem you need to solve.&lt;br /&gt;- You have a lot invested in it and there is not a sufficient business case to switch.&lt;br /&gt;- It&#39;s easier to hire people with the appropriate skills / your staff have this set of skills and you can&#39;t just fire them all&lt;br /&gt;- It matches your mindset, or, to go back to the hardware analogy, it fits your hand.&lt;br /&gt;- It has good community / support .&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There are very very few absolutes in choosing tools, save that whatever tool you choose should be of basically decent quality.&amp;nbsp; I have my biases like everybody else, but it&#39;s important to realize when you have a bias and acknowledge the effect that has on your decision making. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt; In particular, telling another engineer that all their problems would be solved if they would just switch from technology A to technology B is often the worst kind of cultish thinking.&amp;nbsp; I&#39;m talking about the kind of discussion you see on mailing lists, on IRC, or from some people in person where you say &amp;quot;I have this problem.&amp;nbsp; I&#39;m using technology A and...&amp;quot; at which point someone butts in and says &amp;quot;Switch to B.&amp;quot; when they know nothing about your problem.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;(Having said this of course, there are some exceptions, in particular to do with upgrading versions and using basically dead technologies.&amp;nbsp; So sue me ;) )&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>


<category>Ranting</category>

<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:07:10 -0500</pubDate>

</item>
<item>
<title>ApacheCon slides: PHP Best Practices</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/11/apachecon-slide.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/11/apachecon-slide.html</guid>
<description>You can now download the slides for my talk at ApacheCon US 2007 on PHP Best Practices.</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;You can now download the slides for my talk at&amp;nbsp; ApacheCon US 2007 on &lt;a href=&quot;http://laurat.blogs.com/talks/best_practices_apachecon.pdf&quot;&gt;PHP Best Practices&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>


<category>Conferences</category>
<category>PHP</category>

<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:08:51 -0500</pubDate>

</item>
<item>
<title>Slides for DCPHP Conference 2007</title>
<link>http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/11/slides-for-dcph.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/11/slides-for-dcph.html</guid>
<description>The slides for Write Beautiful Code are now online. (As I said before, basically the same as the Premium PHP slides, but I like this title better.) The DC PHP conference is bigger than last year and I really like...</description>
<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;The slides for &lt;a href=&quot;http://laurat.blogs.com/talks/write_beautiful_code.pdf&quot;&gt;Write Beautiful Code&lt;/a&gt; are now online.&amp;nbsp; (As I said before, basically the same as the Premium PHP slides, but I like this title better.)&amp;nbsp; The &lt;a href=&quot;http://dcphpconference.com/&quot;&gt;DC PHP conference&lt;/a&gt; is bigger than last year and I really like the venue.&amp;nbsp; I&#39;m currently sitting in &lt;a href=&quot;http://eliw.com/&quot;&gt;Eli White&lt;/a&gt;&#39;s talk &amp;quot;Help!&amp;nbsp; My website has been hacked!&amp;nbsp; Now What?&amp;quot; which based on a great set of anecdotes about attacks on Digg.&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>


<category>Conferences</category>
<category>PHP</category>

<dc:creator>Laura Thomson</dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:02:02 -0500</pubDate>

</item>

</channel>
</rss>
<!-- ph=1 -->
<!-- nhm:dynamic-ssi -->