MetaFilter

Well I was fairly nervous about being in this but here's my interview on Down To The Wire about the campaign we ran against a really horrible copyright law.

After traveling through Europe my wife and I set up the Creative Freedom Foundation and we ran a successful lobbying campaign last year called The Internet Blackout against some "draconian" laws (to quote John Key). The law was scrapped and we worked with many lawyers to help draft a replacement law. The government are adopting an approach that's very similar to our proposed approach, hurrah!

Baby Stella and her awesome mum are doing great too.

Well everything's coming up roses lately. Standards NZ voted no on OOXML, my work on Docvert has made me a finalist in the NZOSAs, and Bron is the sweetest thing ever.

Been away a while (personal stuff, a lovely girl and a wedding)

Docvert 2.0 released a few weeks ago. Working hard on Docvert 2.1 now with support for:

- DocBook 5.0 (mostly for namespace and popularity)
- document assertions and unit tests... eg, at a stage in the pipeline assert that a document has a title, headings, alt text in images, etc.
- wmf2svg, wmf2gif 2png 2jpeg
- gif2jpeg 2png 2gif
- other stuff
- more stuff

This is all working and implemented I just need to test some more before I'm happy releasing.

It's my girlfriend's birthday tonight so I got her a cake. The cake reads:

DOES NOT CONTAIN AIDS*
*may contain traces of AIDS

Getting AIDs... geez, it's going to be the worst birthday ever.

ps. Reason #234 Why Metafilter should use Phpilfer: Because it's based on time-tested architectures like Apache Cocoon but it's optimised for speed and extensibility.

Reason #235 Why Metafilter should use Phpilfer: It provides a coherent mapping between URLs and plugins, and even frees you to design the url as parameters to your function calls. It's pretty sweet.

Reason #236: There's no future in Coldfusion. Bite the bullet and plan to get out.

METAFILTER SHOULD STILL USE PHPILFER
ps. free p_g

Working hard into the night on Phpilfer for onesquared.

Hopefully this thread on sleep will make up for my previous post which was kinda crummy. That previous post was about obesity encouragement and I wrote a followup on iEatTapes.com. It was posted at the time on IEatTapes but I didn't want to derail the mefi thread because there were some pretty great posts turning up there.

I've pretty much decided to ditch PHP. I don't like Zend's management (keeping opcode caches out of the default because of business reasons), how the language still has unicode problems, how it doesn't have experimental libraries that I want to use (like STX for example), and how its' not a server that listens on a port, but something that's set up and torn down on every page load which is unnecessary and makes some optimisations difficult. You can put items in memcached like Wikipedia do, and you can opcode cache it, but beyond that it's difficult to optimise without writing Apache modules and then PHP itself isn't helping anymore.

There's also some convincing arguments on teambarry.com about why PHP sucks. He left PHP to go to Perl.

Where to? I've been doing C# for four years I'll probably start writing an engine in Mono/MS.Net. Using IKVM, Java classes can be compiled for .Net so I get STX. I've done ASP.Net before but I don't like the hierarchy of objects model and I won't be using the ASP.Net part of .Net. What I'll make is memcached (or something like it), XML-based using STX and SAX-based XSLT, and be yet another REST architecture based around URL design.

Hey mathowie read the post below! EDIT 22nd Nov, Phpilfer is about as fast as it's going to get under PHP. It's well tested and easy to follow the code, much faster than Coldfusion wrapped around JSP. but mostly due to its liberal use of memcached (like Wikipedia)

Hey Mathowie! Phpilfer is ready for Metafilter if you want it

Setup pilfer.metafilter.com with php 5 and postgres, send me ftp details, I'll work on it until it's ready

KTHXBYE

Working at OneSquared. Kickass! (and they use phpilfer for onesquared.net like METAFILTER SHOULD)

Another day another dollar, yo