Code || Theory

A Conversation We Just Had In IRC

jmullan: chris: who is this dude?
ckdake: some guy

The third speaker is actually pretty interesting in that he is talking about Iron Ruby and has a charismatic and energetic delivery. Oh, it's John Lam. I figured it out because he referenced an article by Jon Udell.

Ooh, Boo! John just laid out a list of languages and Boo was one of them. It even has a cute ghost logo.

This weekend Mr. Lam installed Leopard (or whatever) and now his wireless connection is way hosed up. It is possible that the Apple drivers detected that he is on the Microsoft campus and decided to Rickroll him.

What is Phalanger?

Phalanger is a .NET PHP compiler. Another page: here.

I've been mostly tuning out, but I kept hearing him say "monkey pouching." Monkey pouching. Monkey pouching. Monkey pouching. It sounds weird when you say it a few times. Of course, he was actually saying "monkey patching," which is a different matter entirely.

Scott Guthrie is telling us about IIS. Not to be a wiseacre, but snooooooze.

There is a tangential mention of an actually interesting thing, the MS SQL Server driver for PHP. We will get a whole session about that tomorrow.

"Free visual web developer express edition"

Strange that got mentioned, when it is "An ideal environment for new Web developers" according to the Microsoft web site.

Silverlight! This actually relates to work, except that we would probably never use it because we're so anti-Microsoft. With good reason, of course, because wmv files gum up the works on the Whole site: they are kind of a dead end, format-wise.

They have a Silverlight demo:

This is my first real conference, and yet it isn't a regular conference by any means. For one thing there are only about 25 developers here (and a handful of Microsoft evangelists. Of the developers, most seem pretty much like rockstars, which makes my involvement seem perhaps a little dubious.

We started with a dinner and open bar last night. I did my best to be charming and do a bit of Gallery evangelism -- not "you should use Gallery" (because quite a few attendees already do) but rather "you should contribute to Gallery" because most of them don't.

First off, let me introduce the blogs of attendees. These are the people whose blogs got posted before the event, so there may be some people whom I am missing.

• Sean Coates

• Joshua Eichorn

• Paul M Jones

• Chris Kelly

• Ben Ramsey

• Travis Swicegood

• John VanDyk

• Jesse Mullan

• Francois Planque

• Drew Robbins

• Elizabeth M Smith

Sitting across the aisle from me is Dave Fetterman of facebook. He wrote the facebook development platform. That's right, all of those terrible "a zombie just bit you" notifications are his fault. Then again, so are things like the flickr and last.fm apps.

The first speaker is Sam Ramji. He is attempting to not only talk about Microsoft's "commitment to open source," but also ask us how Microsoft can support our needs as open source developers. He's definitely selling the idea, but I don't know how the other attendees are buying it. I'd say that two thirds of attendees have Apple laptops sitting in front of them, and there's already been a pointed question about Microsoft's use of the term "open source." Sam answered by explaining some differences between "open source" and "free software," and went on to show a handful of slides reviewing things like Microsoft's relatively new open source licenses: Ms-pl Ms-rl.

Now he is explaining why Vista didn't intentionally burn Mozilla by shutting out Windows Media Player by deleting the old Media Player dlls. Apparently they helped build a new plugin that updated Mozilla to use the new Vista dlls. That seems like a no brainer, but at a company like Microsoft it takes a certain amount of approval and momentum to support something that directly competes with their product.

Microsoft's shiny open source page

Finally, he's talking about how Microsoft makes money from open source. Basically, his expectation is that open source projects would tie into salable products like MSSQL or Active Directory.

For this blog I decided to try out Habari because that's what h0bbel is using and I wanted to use something that uses PHP5. After a week or so of fighting to get it to actually install and an hour fixing every E_STRICT complaint that PHP made, I was pretty happy. It looks all right and works. Then I noticed that there was an unapproved comment, and even after approving it, there still seemed to be one unapproved comment. I figured out that it was merely a bug brought upon by misusing an unordered list to display tabular data.

Observe:

<ul>
<li><span class="right">1</span>Total Approved Comments</li>
<li class="even"><span class="right">0</span>Total Unapproved Comments</li>
<li><span class="right">0</span>Total Spam Comments</li>
</ul>

Unstyled, that looks like the following, which is icky. Imagine what will happen when read out loud by a screen reader.

If ever there were tabular data, it was this: three items with one label and one piece of data each.

<table>
<tr><th>Total Approved Comments</th><td>1</td></tr>
<tr><th>Total Unapproved Comments</th><td>0</td></tr>
<tr><th>Total Spam Comments</th><td>0</td></tr>
</table>

That looks like one would expect.

I suppose that since it is a two column table, we could also use our old friend, the definition list.

<dl>
<dt>Total Approved Comments</dt><dd>1</dd>
<dt>Total Unapproved Comments</dt><dd>0</dd>
<dt>Total Spam Comments</dt><dd>0</dd>
</dl>

I leave it up to you (and your friend, css) to determine how to style the following display.

In conclusion, that's why you shouldn't fear tables for tabular data. Just because you shouldn't use them for positional layout any more doesn't mean that you shouldn't use them at all.

My regular blog is certainly not a secret, but some people find it too personal (or vulgar) to read on a regular basis. Plus, most of my friends probably don't want to see code samples or Big O analysis of algorithms, so it makes to spin off a slice of my nerdity.

I'm attending a web development summit at Microsoft in Seattle next week, and they asked for a bio to share.

Here's what I told them:

Hello, I'm Jesse Mullan, a developer from the Gallery open source
project. I work for the marketing department of the University of
Minnesota Student Unions and Activities office as a web developer. I
get paid to spend my days editing php in emacs and occasionally making
zombie videos to promote our retail services.

http://www.sua.umn.edu/luuuuuuuuuunch

I almost sent them the following, but chickened out.

I've been hacking on PHP since 1999 or so when I hooked up a spare box to my then new DSL service. At that point I think that I was still using shell scripts to wrap my status updates in html and give me some sort of log of what I had changed on my website. I parlayed that savvy into a glamorous "htmlsetting" job at a company whose initials were shared with a certain gastrointestinal disorder (they have since added a couple of words to their name). After the tech bubble burst and television advertising hit a major slump, I found myself temping at a major mortgage company running reports on layoffs in Access and pasting the results into Excel to email to various management types. To avoid the soul crushing monotony and horror of that job, I automated the process using VBA while rewriting any many of the queries into native MSSQL. Through my secretive efforts, I transformed the monthly reports from a nightmarish four day process of weeping blood into a mere four hours of distracted web surfing. However, that year or so of work convinced me to return to school in 2004.

I've been involved in the Gallery project since 2001, when I mostly provided entertainment for the project leader, Bharat. At some point I wrote a handful of nice enhancements to the version 1 product and was invited to officially join the team. I then wrote the migration module to import version one data into version two, which meant unserializing the data from the first product and . Additionally I acted as a sounding board for ideas and as a generator for crazy new ideas like a UTF-8 mandate. Last summer I officially declared myself on sabbatical from Gallery to focus on grinding out my undergraduate degree.

I finished the computer science parts of my degree last spring right as my job created a position to hire me on full time, so now I'm just mired in the liberal arts requirements. My favorite classes were the graduate level algorithms and complexity theory courses. When I can sneak in CS classes again, I'm looking forward to the compilers and programming language theory classes. In the mean time, I have senioritis like you wouldn't believe.

I'm currently a full time web developer for the University of Minnesota's Student Unions and Activities. My job is to convert ancient cowboy pasta code into elegant and maintainable castles of wonder and beauty. I wrote a custom image and data management application for the music club in my building and I have been so deep in our custom calendaring application that the mole people who live inside made me their king. In the process I have gotten the chance to play with natural language processing, scratch built frameworks, elaborate error handling, and a bunch of other slices of computer science. I try to treat my PHP work seriously, despite the lack of respect that it gets in these academic surroundings.

I also wanted to say just this:

I made a "soup of the day" tool for a client, and they stopped serving soup a month later.