7. August, 2003 - booze, blogs and software

• Fire at Ky. Whiskey Warehouse Rages On. 800,000 gallons of whiskey, up in flames. That’s almost two weeks worth of sales of Jim Beam. Sad.
• For Wines, the Paradox of Global Warming is that in most areas, warmer climate makes it easier to make good wine. But in some areas, it’s too much of a good thing, requiring vintners to change the way they make wine to accomodate the riper grapes that come from having a warmer climate.
• I read the TidBITS Talk Mailsmith 2.0 Comments thread with interest for a few reasons. The first is that I use (and my company has contributed code to) Mailsmith. But the criticisms of it in the thread are all valid, and I found myself thinking about what I’d want in a dream email package. I’m getting to the point that I think I’d really like to be able to use IMAP so I can store the mail on a server, and use different computers to read it without having to transfer my archives around. One of the reasons I went with Mailsmith was that it was one of the few programs that would let me convert my Claris Emailer archives, but now that they’re converted, I could move to something else. I’d also like to be able to deal with international text better—I don’t get a lot of email in languages that require it, but I do once in a while (mostly when corresponding with German or Polish people, where I’ll need to see a ß or a ł (that’s an sz-ligature and a slashed-l if your browser can’t display them) and I just want it to show up correctly in the email). I also want better email threading so I can follow long threads more easily.
• Here are A Few Tips for Writing Useful Libraries in PHP. I hadn’t thought about it before, but the article pointed out one of the things that’s bugged me about PHP. There aren’t good libraries out there. I mean there’s phplib, and that’s about it. But especiallly when you’re starting development, it’s helpful to have smaller snippets where you can see what’s going on, and incorporate it into your code, rather than just getting complete applications. Is it a matter of most of the people who are developing in PHP not having much experience in software engineering, or is there some larger flaw in the language that makes writing libraries so darned difficult?
• Politicians Go Online–They can run, but can they blog? Blogging, in short, thrives on sarcasm. Politics doesn’t.
• It’s summer, and some of the people who write blogs that I read are on vacation. And there’s a guest blogger filling in. But I don’t need to rant about it because SteveO (no, not the Jackass guy) already has: It’s a blog, not a $*@#’ing talk show. [steveo]

Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek. Last updated on Thu, 07 Aug 2003 08:56:14.