Monthly Archives: April 2009

Why Downloadable Documentation Is Critical

PHP is a kludged-together, ugly mess of a language. But its documentation is quite superlative: practically every function has documentation written in a more-or-less standardized format, plus whatever comments users have added. In addition, they have something near and dear to my heart:
Downloadable documentation.
This means that if I’m developing on an airplane at 30,000 feet, [...]

Making a Field Required Doesn’t Make It Truthful

Today’s lesson for people who make fields “required” on their web forms:

You can make it “required”, but you can’t force people to tell you the truth.

I recently filled out a form for a service that will eventually ship a book to me. I understand why they needed my street address, my credit card information, and [...]

Back to My Usual Server

After a couple of months of temporary hosting with A2 Hosting, I finally have my real server back online, at a colo space in San José. Not that I have any complaints against A2 (heck, I even just gave them a little more Google-juice); they were perfectly servicable. But I’ve really gotten used to having [...]