Cubic

In the field of Internet development - ICANN and Network Solutions/Verisign are eyesores. There is a very unhealthy relationship between the two organizations and ICANN holds a monopoly on the Internet as a whole by holding the domain name infrastructure hostage. On July 1, 2010, a price hike for .COM and .NET domain names will take place (VeriSign is the sole registrar for those TLDs). That means it will cost more to purchase and maintain those type of domain names. The core problem is the Domain Name System (DNS) as a whole. It was designed in the dark ages of the Internet by a bunch of nerds to map a name to an IP address. It was wholly owned by InterNIC, now known as ICANN through various transactions - or at least that is the best I can explain it in a single sentence. The original Internet (ARPANET) was designed to supposedly be robust in the event of nuclear war and people like it for its supposed anonymity. Basically, the Internet was a United States Department of Defense...

Over the past year, I have, ever so slowly, been dropping off the radar of my usual stomping grounds. Basically, I've spent the past year positioning myself in the industry to stay relevant and gear up for the next decade of software development. Where is the software industry headed? Simply put, we are headed to a very mobile realm. What exactly that will look like is anyone's guess. What fascinates and intrigues me is always-on Internet in the palm of my hand. THAT, to me, is mobile. The problem we currently face in the mobile arena is that no one is making a device I want to program for. I willingly program in two languages: C/C++ and PHP. Since no one makes a multitouch device that I can write plain ol' C/C++ for (yet), I'm left with PHP. To that end, I've started down a rather interesting path: This past year, I wrote my own Content Management System (CMS). For the past few years I've experimented with all sorts of lame-brained product ideas (som...

IE6 will officially die six years from now (i.e. it will finally be completely dead in 2016). It is mathematically proven by this chart: ( Download Excel Spreadsheet ) The data comes from the W3C Schools browser statistics page. The "Months from 10.2% Overlap" is referring to the two points where browser usage of IE5 and IE6 were both at 10.2% (time-shifted so you can see how similar the data is). The W3C site appears to stop tracking browsers at 0.5% (I'm calling that dead). My goal with this chart is to show that the data is rather similar at this point in time. Six years is a pretty bleak outlook. I also had Excel fit a line to the chart and came up with "y = -0.0093x + 0.085" with a R^2 of 0.9854 (a slightly better fit with the available data nodes). With the line, IE6 is declared dead by the W3C Schools' standard of 0.5% in 8.5 months. So, the real answer is probably somewhere between 8.5 months and six years. I'm leaning more toward five y...

I've been on a kick lately with transparent PNGs. Due to recent discoveries involving PNG8, it is high time to revisit the world of PNGs and see what else there is out there. In my previous article on PNG8 , I discussed how to get nice-looking PNG8 images by using Photoshop and pngquant. Most articles on PNG8 only cover either Fireworks or straight-up pngquant/some other command-line tool. The results aren't that great looking. Today, I stumbled across this website and tried it out in IE6. Surprisingly, the first 24-bit transparent PNG "worked": Why is this interesting? Because a pink background shows up. We are all so used to that ugly gray background in IE6 that no one has stopped to think that maybe the background color can be altered. Instead, people have gone for various hacky solutions to get full transparency. Well, now there is an intermediate, no-hacks solution between the full transparency hacks and PNG8. Here is the image I will be working with: ...

IF you know what you are doing, PNG8 can be THE answer to IE6's broken support for transparent PNGs. Ironically, the web is discovering PNG8 just as we are finally phasing out IE6. If you develop for the web occasionally, you know what a pain IE6 is. I'm currently working on a very hush-hush project (hence no blog posts lately) and it is almost the last time I have to ever support IE6. After these projects, I will never, ever, EVER have to look back (woohoo!). Background If you do a lot of web development, you know about all of the hacks in IE6 to introduce PNG transparency. My current favorite full-blown solution to 24-bit alhpa transparent PNGs in IE6 is DD_BelatedPNG . However, even that has problems and is still a hacky workaround for a problem that shouldn't have even existed for more than two minutes. The moment it was discovered, it should have been fixed. I initially dismissed this Transparent PNG8 approach because I wasn't going to spend $300 on a piece...

Welcome to Time Waster article #1. Time Waster is going to be where I put weird little easter eggs as I find them. Either programming hiccups or weird software oddities that caused me to waste time. Today's Time Waster involves the PHP website itself. To participate, you will need Firefox with the Firebug plugin installed. Visit the PHP website in Firefox. Now, open up Firebug and you should see something like this: (Why, yes, I did notice.) A few other people have noticed this. Looking at the source code for their site doesn't have any explanation for its existence. Someone on the PHP developer team thinks they are cute .

I've decided that Windows Task Manager is ill-conceived, poorly designed, and extremely misleading. Especially the following: Most people have seen the "Performance" tab and that memory usage chart. Charts have a more powerful influence than a bunch of numbers and statistics. Take a good look at the chart and answer one question: What is the user going to think? Most users have no idea what a 'page file' is. But most can understand the terms 'memory' and 'CPU'. The chart is extremely misleading. The chart above this chart is 'CPU' usage. In terms of all the charts in Task Manager, that chart is the most useful. Think in terms of the average user trying to figure out why the computer is extremely slow. Now, based on this image, what can you tell about the current system? That is right - the average user cannot figure it out. This means Task Manager is poorly designed and is downright misleading. The user is mislead to believe that...

I just discovered that PHP 6 is officially deprecating short tags. I'm sorry, but short tags are incredibly useful. They should be turned on for every server. They simplify coding dynamic actions within HTML. Plus, you get the added bonus of using: <?=$x?> Which is short for: <?php echo $x; ?> Compare: 7 characters vs. 17 characters. The latter is over twice the length, quite unreadable, and, from personal experience with large code bases, unmaintainable! Typing 'php echo' in every time I want to execute/display data that is hosted within the PHP engine is ridiculous. This is a step backwards going in the wrong direction. The lame excuse for removing short tags is XML. PHP is for HTML, not XML. I write PHP code quite regularly. Prior to PHP 5, PHP stunk. PHP 5 really changed my view of scripting languages. PHP 6 is going to ruin that view as we will return, once again, to the dark ages of software development. What really gets me is that someone made a decent r...

Congratulations! You've encountered one of the more hair-brained stupid schemes of the past century. There is no way in ANSI C/C++ to say, "I want X bits of storage for this integer." Your initial thought might be, "Wait a minute, that can't be right...right?" Let us look at the various data types available to an ANSI C/C++ programmer: char int float double struct/class/template/union pointer A 'char' lets us declare a single byte. A byte is 8 bits...or is it? CHAR_BIT (in limits.h) is typically defined as 8 bits (and the Standard requires it to be defined as a _minimum_ of 8). However, it could be defined as 9 and there has been some hardware where it is defined as 32. Additionally, it is up to each compiler to decide whether just saying 'char' is signed or unsigned. Thankfully 'float' and 'double' use the IEEE floating point standard. Edit: Due to some response, I should clarify: Every compiler I have ever used (and I've...

I've ranted before about the poor quality of today's constructed components. I have another rant today that isn't really computer related but still interesting nonetheless. Back in the day when IBM reigned supreme, they came up with a piece of "big iron" that still runs much of the financial world. Most people will recognize the following instantly: AS/400. What crossed your mind when I said that? "Old" and "Ancient" come to the forefront of my mind. But are immediately followed by the words and phrases, "Reliable", "Solid", "Well-built", "Well-engineered". Now think about today's software and hardware. Do you think the same things about reliability, being solid, well-built, and well-engineered? Probably not. This is a plague in our world and it boils down one simple truth: People don't care deeply about their jobs today. And that lack of caring results in slipshod, poor quality design and constru...

I always enjoy a good video game. I don't get a whole lot of time to play them but when I do, I tend to enjoy playing them. My reason for playing video games is to relax and enjoy the game. Mostly to relax though. Relieve stress. That sort of thing. I'm going to simultaneously review three different games I've played over the past few months in regards to how they SHOULD have been developed. The three games are Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, and Crysis. There are LOTS of spoilers if you haven't played them. I tried to not ruin the final bosses though. Which brings me to my first point: If you are designing a video game and the person playing the game selects the "Easy" difficulty, it should be nearly impossible to die. Nothing is more frustrating than waiting for a game to reload the last saved game for the 10th time just because the character died again....on Easy. I'm not the greatest gamer in the world, but I'd like to think I am better ...

I was having a conversation yesterday with someone and we somehow managed to get onto the topic of LEDs and how there are too many of them. I wholeheartedly agreed because I've been getting annoyed lately at how bright everything is when the lights are turned off at night. This morning I walked around the place before I turned anything on. I could see my way clearly everywhere. Whatever happened to all the fun we used to have with being able to stub our toes on something in the dark? Light Emitting Diodes. Pff. Whatever. I counted them before turning anything on: 47 LEDs all either steadily on or going blinkety-blink in the dark. No one is looking at them. In terms of brightness at night, the bright blue and bright white LEDs are the worst (i.e. they output too much light). Green falls behind at a close second and red is last. I'm sure there are other colors and maybe different perceptions of how bright they actually are but all this light is wholly unnecessary. Esp...