Paolo Donadeo — LifeLOG

Questa sera ho visto il film Vals Im Bashir, bellissimo film d’animazione che tratta il difficile tema della guerra tra Israele e Libano nel 1982.

Il film, a tratti molto crudo, è un percorso della memoria personale del protagonista, diciottenne al tempo dei fatti narrati, che non ricorda nulla della guerra e ripercorre a ritroso le vicessitudini che lo hanno visto coinvolto. Ed è un viaggio della memoria collettiva, che riporta indietro l’orologio della storia alla seconda guerra mondiale, quando nei campi di sterminio nazisti l’umanità si è macchiata di delitti atroci, di cui continua a macchiarsi.

Vi consiglio di vederlo: è un film toccante e ben realizzato.

Just subscribed, but it’s not for me. I don’t have time to make frequent updates, and the scanning of my Gmail contacts revealed that only a few of my friends and colleagues use Twitter.

In any case I strongly appreciate the possibility to delete an accounts. The “delete” link is not hidden the innermost depths of the site and the deleting procedure clearly states that every updates will be deleted from Twitter’s servers, forever. That’s good.

Paul Graham has a very popular blog about his activity of venture capitalist, and sometimes about his beloved Lisp.

The last article, however, focuses attention on the battle between Internet and TV. The opinion of Graham is that TV has lost the battle, and this is my very same opinion, since at least a couple of years.

If you, like me, you hate TV and the stupidity of most TV shows, read the post of Graham, it contains a lucid analisys of the current situation and some very penetrating considerations about the near future.

The world of information technology is made by men and, like any other activity in which human beings are involved in, mistakes happens. Sometimes huge mistakes. And huge mistakes turn out into disgraces. One of these disgraces has a name: PHP.

Here is the story: some days ago wordpress.org released the latest version and I decided to upgrade. No db changes, everything seems ok. But, wait a moment… the sidebar is broken! To be honest, the page itself seems to be broken. I did nothing strange. Ok, let’s rationalize this: ssh on the server, cd to the wordpress directory and issue:

$ php index.php
Segmentation fault

What the frack?!? I had no time to investigate more, and I decided to install the most recent working backup (I use GIT to track everything, including db backups) and forgot it for some days. Tonight I decided to solve the problem. I installed everything on my PC and, by hacking the DB, I was able to remove all the sidebar widgets, among which I suspected the guilty should be. Than, from Wordpress admin I added exactly the same widgets, in the very same order and with the same configuration.

Result? No more segfault.

Now, how can a so popular application be so fragile? Are Wordpress guys stupid, or what? No, this time the problem is with the technology. One word suffices: PHP.

Yes, I know, I perfectly know I shouldn’t focus myself on this or that technology, I now Facebook is made with PHP, I know everything, but… as an engineer I simply can’t ignore how poor this language is!

Hey, if I considered the language choice unimportant I should work in the marketing

End of this rant: I started my own blog, I’ll write it in a real programming languages, Objective Caml, I’ll never be rich but at least I’ll never ever spend 3 hours of my life debugging a PHP buggy blog.