WordPress, Woo!
Monday, April 19th, 2004I have to admit, WordPress is cool. It’s a lot faster to post with than MovableType, (no need to recompile pages and indexes), and it sports a simple, easy-to-use administration area for quick, unhindered blogging. The thing can even accept blog entries by email. How cool is that?
I’ve just about given up the notion of building my own blogging system, mainly because each germination ends up getting forgotten and replaced by a new one, which supposedly will have a better architecture. So I now hearby admit defeat, for WordPress cannot be equalled in speed or features, though, after having a look at its code, it could certainly use some refactoring in some areas. (There’s barely any object-oriented code, only the database layer and Smarty.) This poses a question that I am almost afraid to ask: Is OOP (object-oriented programming) even worth it?
First of all, I barely understand the reasoning behind it. Supposedly, having pieces of code wrapped up in objects makes them easier to reuse and edit later. But the amount of time I spend just trying to get an object written and then visualize where it should go in the entire object framework is more than the amount of time I think I would save. I’m going to try out Umbrello, a Linux program that generates UML (unified/universal modelling language), a file type that can then be converted to empty PHP objects. This should allow me to generate a model of the entire object system before writing the objects themselves. Since I can generate empty PHP classes from UML, I can just fill in the blanks.
The second problem with OOP in my opinion is the fact that PHP is not a strictly object-oriented language. This is one of its perks: it makes the learning curve less steep than that of fully object-oriented languages like Java. Because PHP is not strictly OOP, it has some major flaws that make it hard to use OOP fully, such as not being able to have objects inherit from multiple parents, and so on.
The third problem is that OOP just seems so useless to me. After reading The PHP Anthology (both volumes) by Harry Fuecks, it seemed even more useless. One example in the book shows a factory setup, where one object generates others depending on the job it needs to do. This is all well and good, but the author suggests a system that seems like an utter waste of bytes, with several classes doing the work of one. It just doesn’t make sense.
I know that if anyone with a OOP background reads this they’ll melt into the ceiling, but it’s truly what I think. The problem is that there are no good tutorials for the intermediate OOP programmer; all those that I have found have been simple and easy or way over my head. I need something that gives examples and then gives justification for the techniques used, rather than just a listing of code.
It’s these very problems that have led me to consider starting some kind of PHP knowledge base, so that people can report to the world what they learn and comment on techniques posted by others. It’d be a forum of sorts, but probably something less complicated and scaled down for my needs. It would be very helpful for storing everything I’ve learned thus far for quick reference.
Anyway, that’s enough about programming for now, since only about two of my readers (myself included) will understand what was said in it. I’ve been going through my server stats lately (provided by Webalizer), and I’ve noticed that someone who has been viewing my blog has been going to…er, less than appropriate (you know what I mean) websites beforehand. (Servers can tell which site a user has just visited through the referrer header.) I think that they were searching for some kind of Paris Hilton video and came upon one of my entries that happened to mention her. I’m on to you, buddy.
As far as other statistics go, my monthly totals have been getting gradually higher, partially because I’ve added more entries, and those entries get indexed by search engines, gradually driving more traffic here. The most popular entry is still the infamous Incompatible Browser Detected entry about how Proffs.nu used to have up this incredibly infuriating page for Mozilla and Netscape and Opera users telling them how Internet Explorer was the supreme browser. Far from true. But you can read the entry if you want the full rant.
The second most visited post is the one where I commented on German toilets after reading about them on a site I found on Spoono. The top reader of this blog is me, mainly because I uploaded all those WordPress files not long ago and they each counted as hits. After than there are some other people, not Cox users, surprisingly. I can only wonder who they are.
As I read the long list of referrers, I find among them porn sites and several search engines. I guess that’s good, isn’t it? Four people searched for “german toilets” on a search engine and found Organon, and other interesting search terms were “world toilets”, “asus k8v layout diagram”, “incompatible browser firefox”, “mcafee privacy service hack” (good to see others are trying to get rid of it too), “movie hidalgo ftp server free download” (tsk, tsk), “my retainer blog 2004″ (?), “invisalign sucks”, and “oh brother where art thou odyssey worksheet” (a classmate?).
That’s about everything Webalizer gave me. Oh, and seven hits during the month of April came from Saudi Arabia. Good to know. But in January, I got hits from 18 different countries. Could someone have been trying to hack the server? Probably, but I like to think that I have an international following. 
Alright, that’s all the boring stuff. Now on to more about me, because I’m the only thing that matters. That sentence wasn’t arrogant at all. And that sentence wasn’t sarcastic at all. Yeah. I’m not really my normal humorous self today since I’ve had a long weekend and some problems have come up.
First of all, my parents have gotten on to this “let’s put the kids to bed really early” streak, and it’s starting to drive me crazy. I believe that responsible children (I’d like to think that I am one) should be able to decide to go to bed whenever they feel like it, within reason. Sensible people will learn from their mistakes and go to bed earlier if they find themselves tired in the morning. Up until about 7th grade, I went to be dutifully at 8:30 each night. Then came homework doom, so I got an extra hour because of that in 8th grade. This year, I usually go to bed around 10:00 or 10:30, which is actually pretty early in comparison to some kids I know.
And until just recently, my parents never had a problem with those times. Kids my age need a solid 8-9 hours of sleep to be healthy and functioning, and, if I go to bed at 10:00, that’s exactly the amount of sleep I get. I don’t need any more, because having more sleep ends up being more stressful than having less. Let me explain:
Normally, I get home from school at 3:00, check my email and all of my daily websites for new stuff, respond to that new stuff, and dink around a little bit with some new technology or programming technique. That takes about one or two hours, since I don’t always start right away, and sometimes I do something else at the same time. At 5:00 I might start on homework or I might work on various projects for the Trapanis or my family. Lately I’ve been advising Albertsons on their technology strategy as well (more on that later). Then I eat dinner at 6:30 or 7:00, and watch Whose Line is it Anyway on Fox Family (311) for an hour. At eight I begin my homework, which usually takes me anywhere from one to two hours, depending on how teachers are feeling that particular day. After I finish homework, I blog or read or play a video game or call a friend or something like that until about 10:00, when I go to bed.
But if I’m forced to go to bed at 8:30 or 9:00, which is what has happened lately, I don’t get that time to do things that need to be done for the next day, nor can I blog or read or do all my homework at the normal time. So everything has to be moved back and done faster. Some things don’t get done at all, and are pushed to the next day. Meaning that the next day, I have more things to do in the lessened amount of time. Not to mention the fact that my mom gets all b**chy when I try to resist. I don’t understand why it matters that much.
Sure, sleep is important for good health, but I think I’m old enough and responsible enough to decide when I need to go to bed. Because if I stay up late, I pay the consequences the next day when I’m feeling all drowsy and unhappy for the first two periods. I get the point my parents are trying to make, I just don’t think they need to enforce it.
With my school nights limited, I expected to have time this weekend to do things that hadn’t been done, such as my two major projects for world history and biology. But alas, it was not to be so. Friday night was spent cleaning the house, and then we went to Macaroni Grill at Desert Ridge. It was good food. The rest of the night I just played Empire Earth (like Age of Empires or Starcraft, but better). Saturday morning we discovered that my cat had some kind of urinary tract blockage, which caused him much pain and misery (but he’s better now, thankfully). Because he was trying to pee on almost every object we own, I was designated his “catsitter” and was forced to keep a close eye on him all day Saturday, except for a few hours from about 2:00-4:00 when we (my family and I) went to this orphanage called Embrace to play with the kids and see the improvements that had been made to the building. I played Lord of the Rings Risk with my brother and some other people, and I ended up with the strongest position by the end of the two hours (though we weren’t finished yet).
My parents and I went home after that and my brother spent the night, and Saturday evening I was feeling in a strategic mood so I played Risk for the computer for a while. Sunday came, and I got out of having to go to church because of the cat (he finally passed whatever was blocking his urine at about 10:00 this morning). I worked on my biology project a little bit and then left at 2:00 to go to Barro’s Pizza, where the CSHS Literary Magazine group was meeting to decide which entries would make it into the final magazine. We had a lot of fun, and we got through 67 entries in only two hours. I actually recoginzed a few entries as possible being those of my friends, but I can’t discuss them because of privacy reasons.
After the LitMag meeting had ended at 5:00, I came home and worked on my biology project until eight, when I finished it. After that I had to burn and test some Fedora Core 1 installation CDs, and then I took a shower and started writing this entry. There ya go, I was busy, contrary to popular belief, though I didn’t have any contact with any of my friends.
And that brings me to now. I’m probably going to get yelled at for even being up this late (10:13), but I no longer care. You see, my mom was even nagging at me to go to bed on weekend nights. That ticked me off even more, since I’ve never had a limitation on weekends before. I’m usually asleep by midnight, anyway, so what’s the big deal?
One might counter that my parents are only trying to look out for me, trying to make sure I get the sleep I need, but going to bed earlier isn’t helping. My internal clock is set to eight hours, and that’s all it’ll ever be. If I go to bed at eight, I wake up at four. If I go to bed at ten, I wake up at six. It’s as simple as that. And I don’t like waking up at the crack of dawn with nothing to do because my mom nagged and yelled at me to go to bed early. In the words of Pete, from Oh Brother Where Art Thou, “That don’t make no sense!”
There’s only one last thin I have to share, and it’s slightly funny. My mom learned on Tuesday that Albertsons was going to “upgrade” the PCs in her department to
Fettucine Alfredo.