[A] good example of a PHP “quirk” is the way PHP handles constants. It was one of the major factors affecting performance. Just removing all the constants allowed us to improve the performance by almost 2x[.]
This is a problem I have a hard time figuring out how to react to. To paraphrase DHH: It’s more important to save developer brain cycles than CPU cycles
. (I really couldn’t find the original source.)
While substituting variables with constants is easy, it seems wrong, and things that seem wrong are often illogical, and a bad idea to have in a computer program.
(For the record, I’m not saying PHP is a language that’s any good at saving developer brain cycles, but, as Marco says, you can write bad software in any language. PHP just makes it easy to write web software, period. Thus, much bad software is written in PHP.)
Ah, man. I don’t know; why make a video about a browser so… weird? It’ll be exciting to see what the next ones bring.
(Via the Official Google Blog.)
Oliver Reichenstein reaching the conclusion that blog comments don’t work.
The problem is, I have a hard time seeing exactly how using Twitter is going to fix this. I have eased on my earlier stance on Twitter, and I now actually use it rather passionately; still, however, I do not think brevity of the comment is going to solve it — as I said, I think not getting a proper environment to answer in is the real problem. Hence, trackback is in my opinion the real solution.
For the sake of completion, the A List Apart (which Pilgrim mockingly puts in air quotes) article that spurred Mark Pilgrim’s outrage.
Man, this rapid linking to related resources sees me turning into Gruber slowly…
Seems like a potentially useful resource for when font embedding really takes off.
(Via aforementioned article by Mark Pilgrim.)
Great article — though a bit more rant-y than is his usual style — from the inimitable Mark on what’s the problem with font embedding, and what we can do to get around the issue. (The article is titled ‘Fuck the Foundries’, so you take a wild guess as to what his suggestion is.)
It’s nice to see that even Comic Sans’ creator doesn’t like the font. This, however, is great:
“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”
(Via Khoi Vinh.)
I just spent [[80 DKK]] on buying April March‘s Chick Habit album, although I could have purchased the songs one by one, and only having had to pay [[56 DKK]], because I already have the Chick Habit song.
But then, the real stupid in this is obviously me, because I didn’t look properly into this. But still. (It’s a great album, though.)
Decent, although very basic, guide on how to set your website up respecting common typographic guidelines by Antonio Carusone.
Thoughtful — and very long, as is his style — essay from Steve Yegge on the subject of legalising marihuana.
Steve makes a very good argument for his cause — ‘it’s hard’ — but I find it a little odd, and he seems to say there’s something unique about marihuana in this sense; which is obviously ridiculous. Making any kind of law is hard, and saying it only applies to marihuana is a little weird.
But it might be useful in the future for people who believe it’s be possible to legalise (or indeed, prohibit), and be over with it. That’s just not how it works.
