I have a tiny following on Twitter. I’m comfortable with that). In fact I’d much rather have nobody listening than have a list of people following me who are also “following” 162,458 other people! You’d have thought Twitter would take a dim view of such blatant spam, but apparently not.
To that end my tiny following just got tinier with the deletion of anyone following more than 10,000 people. That seems more than fair to me.
I’ve decided there’s probably enough material out there to start running “Things that Piss Me Off” as a regular feature. I’m going to retcon Friday’s PHP niggle as “Things that Piss Me Off 1″, so today’s entry is number 2.
A quick google has revealed that I’m not alone in being pissed off by this. There is even a blog dedicated to “tracking abuse of the word ‘literally’” (apparently it happens even in works by respected authors, I mean come on!)
“It is bad enough to exaggerate but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.”
Ambrose Bierce, discussing the example sentence “His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet.” in Write it right: A little blacklist of literary faults
I was reminded of this yesterday when one of those shitty “reality” TV shows was on. OK, it was shipwrecked (it was Sunday, my other half was watching it and I was immobile due to recovering from some gentle exercise). The latest bint rejected from the island was being carried off in a boat, supposedly on her way home. When she began to suspect she wasn’t being taken home but to another island she claimed that, if her suspicions were confirmed, she “would literally die”.
As appealing as that prospect sounded my fear that she was just the latest in a long line of people abusing the word literally was confirmed when after a full week she had failed to live up to her promise. Qu’elle surprise!
I need a quick bitch.
I love PHP. It’s everywhere. All my sites are written in it. My CMS is written in it. My blog engines, Wordpress and b2evolution, are written in it. It’s free. It runs on any platform. Hosts all support it. With PHP 5 they’ve even done a lot of work on PHP4’s main downfall - lack of OOP support.
One thing really pisses me off though - it’s totally inconsistent. Consider these two functions:
Take a close look. See the signatures?
string strstr ( string $haystack , mixed $needle [, bool $before_needle ] )
bool in_array ( mixed $needle , array $haystack [, bool $strict ] )
In in_array the first parameter is what you’re looking for and the second is what you’re looking in (more or less consistent with preg_match). In strstr (and its derivatives) this order is reversed. Who on Earth let that slip through? I’m yet to find a free text editor that will tell you which parameters a given function expects (Dreamweaver does a decent job but it’s bloody expensive for a text editor!) the way Visual Studio does for C#, which I use a lot in work. Given that situation, you’d expect consistency in this sort of thing. Apparently not so. Instead, every time I want to use one of these functions I have to do a quick Google to bring me to the PHP manual page to tell me which order the parameters come in.
Of course they can’t even fix that without breaking backwards compatibility either, so we’re probably stuck with it. Bloody marvellous!
Well I thought it was interesting so here’s the top 10 posts on nerd. by number of views (based on the last 500 page hits courtesy of Statcounter.com).
Yes, shameless promotion I know, but I recently purchased a 3 year old Astra so my beloved Escort is up for grabs. It’s in good working order and has only 73k miles on the clock (fuck all for a 1996 car). I think £595 is a very good price for this motor.
Feel free to make any enquiries through this blog or give me a call (numbers on the LoadzaCars page).
Why are people am I so angry? Something happened not half an hour ago that should probably scare me. I heard a noise outside the window of the room where I was trying in vain to do a bit of my dissertation (now due in 4 weeks; shite!) and went out to see what it was. I could see a dark figure walking away from my door with my wheelie bin, which had been parked beside it.
