Very looong picture after the break…
We tend to do some… strange things around the office on friday afternoons. For instance, today we hit around a plush Yoda doll with an old keyboard, baseball style. We hope you enjoy the photos.
Liv dropped by the office today with a guest - her sister’s newly minted French bulldog, Stitch. He’s a bundle of sausage-like, snortin’ energy. Lance, whose genus is in the same family tree, managed to communicate with the pig-bunny beast via a series of grunts and barks.
…If it worked.
Twitter’s concept is fun, easy to pitch, and easy to get addicted to. However, these people simply were not prepared for a ‘best case scenario’ - that is, its success. The thing is over capacity so much, it could quickly lose the interest of a fickle inter[net]ational audience. It is additionally humorous that it’s running on Rails. Here’s an interesting read from one of the developers.
I note this because it is interesting to contrast that quagmire against our team’s cool ideas and their implementations. However unlikely it is that a small group of developers (ha!) should hit it big on some software idea, we always start with the ‘what-ifs’ that reflect our optimism anyway. We have a few of these at the moment, and a couple of them, I would say, are very viable. Check in from time to time, and you will surely see if we opt to go down the path of Ruby on Rails for our viral Net phenomena! (lol)
As we continue to press the evolution of our SaaS projects we are coming across some age-old problems that amazingly are still alive & well in today’s dev environment. The part that makes it amazing is that I’ve seen this issue over and over in the past 20+ years of software development. While I’ve seen some unique “tricks” to get around some of the problems nothing earth-shatteringly different has come about.
The most recent issue, which I’m putting up for discussion here, is how to configure a web app so that the independent developer copies, the staging copy, and the live copy each have their own database. Yeah, a “just change the config file” trick would work; and sadly is the defacto standard for thousands of PHP apps scattered around web boxes these days. I’ve also seen some convoluted start up code that changes your DB configs based on your environment. I don’t like either solution, both of which I’ve posted below to outline the common technique.
That picture is pretty accurate, except as a Cyber Sprocket developer you could replace “giving up and using tables” with “being forced by Craig to give it another go, with gusto.” IE6 is a horrible browser, because it doesn’t acknowledge those so-called ‘web standards’ that people keep raving about. I’m sure Bill G. would agree. Don’t believe me? Read this.