http://codefork.com/blog branching out Mon, 12 May 2008 17:23:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Last week, Java 1.6 went out of Developer Preview and became an "official" release for Mac OS 10.5.2. (You still can't get 1.6 for 10.5.1, sadly.) I've been fiddling with 1.6 and Eclipse, trying to get them to play well together, and here's what I've found so far. Eclipse itself needs ... http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/09/eclipse-and-jdk-160_05-on-mac-os/ After about 5 months, I've decided that it's time to move on to another gig. I've learned a few things, and I'm posting them here in the hopes that the lessons might be helpful to other programmers and techies-at-large. Working in a small business as the sole do-it-all technology person has ... http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/17/lessons-learned/ Small businesses can be challenging places to work. You often have to make do with few resources, play several roles at once, and be flexible enough to deal with loose/nonexistent company organization. If everything magically clicks, as it sometimes does, it can be a beautiful thing. But more often than ... http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/10/the-small-business-subconscious/ This blog post, "The Worst Thing You Can Say About Software Is That It Works," written by one Kenny Tilton, is pretty hilarious. This is the most beautiful thing I've read in a while: if a pile of code does not work it is not software, we'll talk about its merit ... http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/23/it-works/ For some potential upcoming work, I've been catching up on the changes made to Java over the last few years, and exploring the popular frameworks and libraries now in use. Folks on reddit.com harshly criticize the bloat, unnecessary complexity, and huge runtime requirements for Java. They have their points. But I ... http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/23/a-quick-observation/ It's pretty much all in the title. In a nutshell, EAcceleratorCacheFunction is a "memoizing" cache class for PHP that uses shared memory for storage. It is mostly compatible with Cache_Lite and Cache_Lite_Function. Just like Cache_Lite_Function, it supports per-cache-object lifetime values, instead of specifying the lifetime of an item at the time ... http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/04/eacceleratorcachefunction-cache_lite_function-eaccelerator/ Since the beginnings of the commercial web, people learned quickly that "content is king." Appealing and unique content is a guarantee of raw traffic, and that hasn't changed with Web 2.0. What HAS changed is that traffic from content won't necessarily result in return visitors and loyalty. Syndication feeds have made ... http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/02/21/from-content-to-community/ http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/02/21/its-funny-cuz-its-true/ Since the recent slashdotting of our website (we held up okay, but there's always room for improvement), I've been investigating the possibility of moving from Cache_Lite (actually, Cache_Lite_Function) to memcached in our PHP code. Much discussion comparing these solutions focuses on raw performance in benchmarks. In the real world, though, ... http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/02/07/two-styles-of-caching-cache_lite-vs-memcached/ During a meeting at work today, someone remarked, "No one I know seems happy with their content management system." Somehow, that's unsurprising. The problem, I think, is that there's really no such thing as a content management system. Think about how absurd that term is. It's a system (it's organized and ... http://codefork.com/blog/index.php/2008/02/04/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-content-management-system/