Totally Hosed My Dev Environment

So I have been trying to play with the Zend Framework, which by all accounts is pretty cool, and trying to get it set up on the dev environment that I have here on my cute little macbook. Sadly, for some reason the version of os X 10.5 that ships with it doesn’t have pdo_mysql support installed (though it has pdo_mysqllite ?? I mean, come on, seriously?) So it’s off to the recompile mines. Sadly, once you recompile PHP you need to recompile Apache, which wouldn’t be a big deal at all other than my not knowing about it and it not giving me anything like a coherent error message regarding this. Fine, whatever….

Next, I discover that I can’t user the PEAR auto-installer, because it can’t find the damn modules directory, and neither can I. I have even tried making new ones in every likely place. What’s worse, I seem to have also lost traditional MySQL support as well.

I’m getting pretty annoyed with OSX here, It’s a damn nice client OS, but it’s driving me nuts on the server side. (Still better than Windows, it’s just a bit like the The Twilight Zone, things are close enough to where they should be to make you think that you know what’s going on, but when you try to actually do something….)

I guess I’ll try MAMP now. I have been meaning to look at that anyway.

Does releasing code to the public inspire extra effort?

About 2 years ago, I created a javascript image/photo gallery to embed gallery functionality into a web site using only client-side processing. Although I created it for a specific purpose, it was generic enough that I decided to make it available for other people to use on their sites.

Imagine my surprise when people took me up on that offer.

Continue reading Does releasing code to the public inspire extra effort?

Object Overhead in ColdFusion

I have been trying to improve the speed of a ColdFusion application. It was written by a part-timer, a Java developer who was new to ColdFusion. He wrote the code almost entirely in cfscript, and he used CFC objects extensively. In fact, it seems that he overused CFC objects—to the point where the server slows to a crawl.

Continue reading Object Overhead in ColdFusion

Clever ways to save bandwidth

When I worked for MLive.com, one of our practices was to leave out quotes around attribute values (except for alt attributes). This was to save on bandwidth costs. In spite of the fact that the page was no longer valid HTML (technically), all target browsers rendered the pages properly.

That might seem like nitpicking, but with over a million pageviews a day, all that ASCII can add up. Personally, I would prefer valid HTML, but I bet the financial side of that decision was pretty interesting. Continue reading Clever ways to save bandwidth

Version Control

As an alternative to a formal version control system, our development and even our production environments are littered with files like index12112006.html or index12202006.html. This is terrible.

Although we have had a CVS server set up since at least 2005 (it was there when I started), it is used inconsistently at best. Continue reading Version Control