Bradezone

I know what you have all been thinking: “Brade, we just can’t get enough of your blog. Give us more of your writings, or prepare for some consequences.” Well, I’ve heard your pleas/threats, and I’m here to reveal not one, not two, not four, but three other blogs featuring the outpourings of my brain.

1. BigBlueHat — This is the two-man shop where I work. Ben and I blog pretty regularly about everything from CakePHP to donuts, so you will surely not want to miss out on the latest developments in these and other critical areas.
2. Chuck Norris Hiking — Some friends and I set up this blog for our California hiking and sightseeing excursion during the summer of ‘07, but since we have the domain, I am sure we will blog during future exotic vacations as well. Tentative plans call for a sweep through Seattle and Vancouver this summer, so stay tuned.
3. Lousy Movie Night — This is the latest and greatest of my collaborative blogs, established in honor of what has become a Friday night ritual: the viewing and denigration of the dumbest films in cinema history. A large group of us has been assembled to provide this public service to you free of charge. Remember, friends don’t let friends watch lousy movies alone.

First things first: I should like to apologize to Mozilla and my literally dozen(s) of readers for lambasting Firefox, the browser we have come to know and love for its speed and reliability. It turns out Firefox is actually just as capable as alleged, but my previous system configuration was apparently not up to the task. I use the term “previous” because with the recent release of the superlative Ubuntu 7.10, I have decided to expunge Microsoft Windows entirely from my system. And not only that, I chose to create a new installation of Ubuntu rather than just upgrading the prior version. During this process, which required the creation of four DVDs with my backed-up files, I must have thought it would be hilarious not to copy onto one of these discs the folder entitled LINUX_STUFF, which contained the entirety of my Ubuntu-specific personal files, such as Firefox bookmarks and add-ons, as well as every line of code I have written since becoming an employee at BigBlueHat. (Cue dramatic music indicating irrevocable tragedy.)

Oh, did I mention we back up all of our code via Subversion, and therefore I didn’t really “lose” anything? I suppose that’s an important detail, although it severely hampers the dramatic impact of my anecdote. And I really did lose my Firefox particulars. But this ended up being a blessing in disguise, as once I had my current system up and running I was forced to commence the bookmarking/adding-on process anew, and uncovered some possible reasons for my aforementioned browser troubles—namely, another session manager extension competing with Firefox’s built-in one, and having Firebug and HTML Validator enabled for all websites and not just localhost. My current Firefox experience is alarmingly fast and stable—after a couple of tweaks, natch—and once again all is right with the world of open source software.

Another significant change—and one that affects you, the steadfast visitor—is my decision to host this site with my employer and dump the deplorable Dreamhost, who should seriously consider changing their name to Nightmarehost after perpetrating an extended era of ineptitude on their customers, myself included. I certainly notice a dramatic increase in the speed of Bradezone, and hopefully you can too.

It has major problems resulting in frequent crashes and hangs. And it is making me cranky.

UPDATE: My anger was misguided.

The difference between my line of work—software development—and others is the fact that the consequences of imperfections are far more drastic though they are just as inevitable. Just about any other occupation affords one the opportunity to recover from mild screw-ups: a dentist can mistakenly scrape your gums, an actor can stumble over a line, or a dump truck driver can blow a tire. But with a little improvisation and ingenuity, these folks can amply recover and still accomplish the task at hand.

The experience of the software developer is a bit more vexatious. The hope is that we (or our IDE) will notice a mistyped letter or slightly flawed logic before we unleash imperfect software on the masses, but unfortunately “bugs” are a fact of life. Witness the number of major companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft that release software tagged with the word “beta”—a term that in the world of software programming I would describe as politically correct. It absolves the software provider of responsibility and is roughly an open admission that things might not work as intended.

With computers, everything is black and white, ones and zeroes, pure logic. This fact actually appeals to most programmers and provides us with a constant challenge as we write software. But without shades of grey, we are bound to continue producing otherwise exceptional products that are ever so slightly tainted by the stain of human error. The average citizen has used enough software at this point that they almost expect problems to occur, and as a result software developers are often viewed with some degree of suspicion. What can we do about this problem of error-prone software, and how do we improve? Certainly testing mechanisms are already in place on development platforms, but even then we are limited by our inability to foresee all the possible scenarios that might result in errors. Testing techniques have improved, but so too has the complexity of software skyrocketed, leaving us in roughly the same position.

The harsh reality is that this problem will never disappear completely. I anticipate that significant strides will be made via new automated testing methods, new programming languages, and simply better documentation and training. But as a software developer I know all too well that my mistakes, however scarce, will always be prone to unveiling themselves in a most garish fashion and to my enduring chagrin.

So you may have heard that Amazon created this weird new website called Askville, wherein users ask questions that will hopefully be answered by fellow users knowledgeable of that topic. Feeling wacky, I posted a question of my own and promptly forgot about it. A week or so later I receive an email informing me that I got some replies, and indeed I did—along with a forum discussion that has apparently become one of the more popular ones on the site.

It’s nice to see there are other people who are willing to have a bit of cheeky fun with these random web startups.

Upon getting myself up to date on the semantic web, which will supposedly revolutionize web browsing as we know it, I harbored a few misgivings that the concept is too idealized to work quite as planned. Web manufacturers like myself are the ones who will shoulder most of the burden of creating metadata about our websites’ individual URLs, and frankly it’s not a task I look forward to, given the current lack of tools to simplify the process. I found a hilarious article by Cory Doctorow (who since this article’s publication has become an accomplished novelist) that expresses my doubts almost perfectly and even manages to employ the term “poo-gas” to optimum effect.

I used to be an organization freak who would willingly subscribe to the rigid structure of this semantic web, but over the years my concerns have become far more practical: what can a website do for me today? I don’t care if other (possibly non-existent) applications can “understand” the content on my web page. The amount of work required to make that happen doesn’t match up to the supposed advantages of making it happen. In the end and as usual, the mob and the intelligentsia will have to settle on a compromise—neither a perfectly categorized semantic web nor a hideously broken myspace-esque web are feasible. The solution? I nominate microformats. They are a cinch to incorporate into existing code and once standardized they can be recognized by a bevy of applications. Their website says it best: rather than trying to reinvent the web, they merely “pave the cow paths.”

Spurred to action by my web host’s recent spate of problems, I have attempted several measures recently to speed up my website. Upgrading from PHP 4.4 to PHP 5.1 and adding FastCGI support seems to have helped. (I am running PHP as CGI instead of an Apache module to facilitate one-click web-based installs of WordPress and the like.) I also made sure my third party software is up to date. I do appreciate Dreamhost’s honesty about and detailed explanation of the hellish debacle they faced during July, but I expect it not to happen again. Methinks a discount on next year’s hosting might be an appropriate conciliatory measure towards their customers as well.

But I still want you to check mine periodically.