Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Every end of year I look back at what I have done for the previous 365.25 days. And every year I am a little disappointed. I look at the million of ghost projects I started that will never see the light. Like every year I believe this time it will be different, I will complete my projects and make my millions of dollars. Looking at it in this angle it is a complete failure. But that's OK. I once heard that it is the little things that matter.
There are a lot of tools I built throughout the years and it was very hard to watch them die (or get neglected). I once posted a new project on reddit and received a lot of good feedback. The comments that gave me most hope were the ones that said: If you add X and Y features I will definitely pay for it.
WordPress is the most popular blog engine. It is very easy to install and require almost no configuration changes to work on most servers. Shared hosting providers like GoDaddy even provide a One-click install to get it up and running. However unlike other frameworks, all of WordPress internal files are exposed. They are .php files so you can't see the content by accessing the URL path but there are situations where the file content can be exposed. Moving these files out of the root folder would be a good idea.
So Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine and gave it away for free. Today we patent the shit out of a rounded corner rectangle and those who infringe it, we fight them to death.
I dropped out of college but I still believe pursuing your education is important.The tradition of going to school, getting a degree then a job is slowly fading away. Because students are having a hard time finding jobs, they go back to school and further their education only to find that they still can't find jobs. If you are trying to be a doctor the career path is very clear. Even though it is very very expensive, a job in medicine may allow you to pay back your student loan. However, in this day and age, if you paid for your Philosophy or Music degree with a student loan, you might find a few problems ahead.
There are over 145 Billion emails sent everyday and among those 100 Billion are just SPAM. Spam is a solved problem. You rarely have to worry about important emails being marked as spam. On these rare occasions when you expect to receive an email and it doesn't seem to be showing up, you make the trip to the dreaded spam folder. This is what I did this morning. After sorting through the viagra, cialis, and Nigerian princes emails, I stumbled upon an interesting email.
I am lucky to have been exposed to many languages as a child. I lived in a city where almost everybody was from a different country. On the average day I would hear at least 4 languages being spoken. French and Fulani at home, English on TV, Arabic on the street and various other languages ranging from Bengali to Swahili from my peers. If you are at least bi-lingual then you know how jokes lose all their substance when translated. A language is more than just being grammatically correct. Words that make up a language not only come with connotation but there is a culture associated with it. With all the baggage it carries, the language makes you think in a certain way. Programming languages do not escape this rule. Each programming lingo comes with it's own set of rules, syntax, and culture.
A leader is the nut that starts a radical movement and won't shut up about it. He is ridiculed but it takes a lot more to stop him. Since ideas are cheap, if he finds no support, he will simply come up with another one. When everyone says you are a fool, true or not, you are a fool. All it takes is one person to join you in your craziness and the world will reconsider.
Experienced developers are expensive. In a world where cutting cost seems like the best option, companies try to maximize their profit by spending less and less on good talent. It is much cheaper to hire someone who just learned php a few weeks ago then a seasoned developer. But it becomes a very bad investment when the newbie introduces insecure code. The problem is, a lot of things learned from those LAMP CRUD application tutorial do not focus much on security. When this code is introduced to a commercial application, the damage can be very expensive. I like how stackoverflow users are fighting very hard to eradicate SQL injection, I am doing my part too but it seems like it is much easier to find insecure code on-line. That said, I will attempt to scare you off your feet so you know better what is the cost of SQL injection.
Parsing the browser User Agent is very unreliable. Not only users can easily manipulate it but the string can be very inconsistent. There were times where I needed to write specific code for Internet Explorer but I don't like writing in line JavaScript or loading a separate script just for that. I wish browser makers could agree on making unique GUID that can easily be looked up on a table to determine the browser. So Instead, I make use of IE conditional comments to set values that will only be present in Internet Explorer.
