August « 2008 « Reversing Entropy

Archive for August, 2008

A Damn Small Mind…

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

Finally, someone has stood up to Lynn Truss‘ bullying, psychopathic, arrogant, self-appointed, gramer natzee spawn:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2605213/Grammar-vandals-fined-for-altering-historic-Grand-Canyon-sign.html

Posted in Language | No Comments »

They drank our blood … but at least we have work.

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

“The owners are the ones who killed our people and drank our blood,” construction worker Hussain told me three years ago outside a mansion he was building. “But at least it is providing us with work.”

Taken from:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/16/drugstrade.afghanistan

Posted in Economics, Politics, Quotations | No Comments »

Quercus PHP

Monday, August 11th, 2008

I’ve no time to test this with Haddock CMS in the near future, but this seems interesting:

http://quercus.caucho.com/

There are some impressive performance benefits to be had:

http://www.wo…ements-drupal

Why PHP running on the JVM hasn’t gotten more attention has baffled me for a while. Python and Ruby (and gazillions of other languages) have been on the JVM (and .NET for that matter) for donkeys. Of course, there are similar projects:

http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=Phalanger

PHP is (IMHO) lovable because it’s such a mongrel mutt. It tries to take the best from lots of languages and is pretty easy to work with. The benefits of using bytecode on a virtual machine are attractive.

I’m not sure why this isn’t on offer everywhere. There are a billion web hosts selling the traditional LAMP package for $7 per month (or less) with ever increasing amounts of disk space and monthly transfer. I’m not aware of any of them that sell a PHP package on the JVM or .NET. I wonder what the complication is.

Posted in Haddock CMS, Programming, Web | No Comments »