All these years, since the day I first turned on a linux distribution, I've ignored vi/vim. Sure, there are swarms of geeks covering you with saliva as they spew fact after fact about how superior vim is to everything else, but to me it's always been "that editor that is on every system that I eventually replace with pico anyway."

Not anymore. Starting a few years back, I've done all of my development in Eclipse. It has wonderful plugins for PHP, C++, Javascript, etc. The past week or so I've been weening myself off of it and diving into vim. What actually got me started is I bought a Droid 2 off ebay for various hacking projects (I'm planning on reviewing it soon). Well, it was really easy to get vim working in it (sorry, lost the link already). I thought, well, shit, I've got vim, what the hell can I do with it? First things first, let's get a plugin for syntax coloring/indentation for a few of my favorite languages. What?! It has all of them already.

Ok, now I'm interested. I installed vim for Windows (gvim), which was followed by a slow-but-steady growing period of "well, how do I do this" and "HA...I bet vim can't do THI...oh, it can." There are "marks" for saving your place in code, you can open the same file in multiple views (aka "windows"), you can bind just about any key combination to run any command or set of commands, etc. I even discovered tonight there's a "windows" mode for vim that mimics how any normal editor works. I hate to admit it, but I'll be using that a lot. One feature that blew my mind is the undo tree. Not stack, tree. Make a change, undo, make a new change, and the first change you did before your undo is still accessible (:undolist)!

The nice thing about vim is that it saves none of its settings. Every change you make to it while inside the editor is lost after a restart. This sounds aggravating, but it actually makes playing with the editor really fun and easy. If I open 30 windows and don't know how to close them, just restart the editor. There are literally hundreds of trillions of instances when I was like "oh, shit" *restart*.

Once you have a good idea of what you want your environment to be like, you put all your startup commands in .vimrc (_vimrc on Windows) and vim runs it before it loads. Your settings file uses the same syntax as the commands you run inline in the editor, which is awesome and makes it easy to remember how to actually use vim.

So far I'm extremely impressed. The makers of vim have literally thought of everything you could possibly want to do when coding. And if they haven't thought of it, someone else has and has written a plugin you can drop into your plugins directory and it "just works." Speaking of plugins, vim.org's plugin list seems neverending. I was half expecting to see most plugins have a final mod date of 2002 or something, but a good portion have newer version released within the past two weeks. It seems the ones that are from 2002 never get updated because they're mostly perfect. Excellent.

I do miss a few things though. First off, the project file list most editors have on the left side. I installed NERDTree to alleviate that pain, but honestly it's not the same as having my right click menus and pretty icons. I'm slowly getting used to it though. The nice thing about a text-only file tree is that in those instances where you only have shell access and need to do some coding, there isn't a dependency on a GUI.

Tabs are another thing I miss. Gvim has tabs, but they aren't one tab == one file (aka "buffer") like most editors. You can hack it to do this, sort of, but it works really jenky. Instead I'm using MiniBufExplorer, which takes away some of the pain. I actually hacked it a bit because I didn't like the way it displays the tabs, which gave me a chance to look at some real vim script. It's mostly readable to someone who's never touched it before.

That about does it for my rant. Vim is fast, free, customizable, extendable, scriptable, portable, wonderful, etc...and I've barely scratched the surface.

After being a customer for the Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso) for quite some time, I'm happy to say that my business and anyone who listens to our advice will never be using this hosting service, ever again.

Rackspace is an amazing company. They are know for having great servers, great support, great everything. You can't beat them. Mosso was a side project that was swallowed up by them which aims to run websites in a real, actual cloud. This is a valiant cause. To be able to upload a site to one server and have it scale infinitely over however many servers their datacenter has without ever having to touch it...that's a miracle. It's a great idea, that unfortunately just doesn't work.

Mosso has repeatedly let us down, again and again. Their service is always going down. It's hard to find a month where one of our sites hosted on the "cloud" hasn't seen at least an hour of down time. I'd expect this from a shoddy "HOST 100 SITES FOR $2.99/mo!!" host, but not from someone charging a base rate of $100/mo. Here's what it boils down to: you're paying Mosso a lot of money for the privilege of beta testing their cloud architecture. Great business model.

And while Rackspace is known for fanatical support, the Rackspace Cloud is known by us for support that is fanatical about ignoring or avoiding the issues plaguing them on a week-to-week basis. Questions go unanswered, support requests ignored, etc etc.

So all in all, it's been a terrible experience. And yes, we have been using them for more than a month...a little over a year now. Yes, we stuck it out and payed outlandish hosting rates for horrible service. Why? Because I really do wish it worked. I wish I could put a site on it and have it be up 100% of the time. That's the point of a cloud, no? To have >= 99.999% uptime? I really wish I could put a site on there and let it scale with demand as it grew without ever having to touch it - and I can do this - but the price is my site goes down for long periods of time at short intervals (oh, plus the $100/mo). We tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, and tried to believe them every time they told us that this was the last downtime they'd be having (yes, we heard it a lot). I just can't lie to myself any more though. Mosso sucks.

So please save yourself some time and realize that it's too good to be true. The Rackspace Cloud is the most real and cool cloud hosting you'll ever see, but as far as I'm concerned they are still alpha-testing it, and your site WILL go down. Want hosting that scales automatically, is zero customer maintenance, always up, and has amazing support? You won't find it anywhere.

Mosso comes close, but they just can't get it right. Save your money and learn how to scale on a good VPS provider.

Having taken my programming roots in QBASIC (shut up), C, C++, and a very healthy self-administered dose of x86 assembly, I can say that for the most part I have a good sense of what programming is. All of what I've learned up until now has helped me develop my sense for good code, and helped me to write programs and applications that I can sit back and be proud of. I've been working with PHP for over 4 years now, and I have to say it's the most ugly language I've ever used.

Let me explain. PHP itself is wonderfully loosely-typed, C-like syntactically, and all around easy to write code for. The syntax is familiar because of my background. The integration with web is apparent down to its core, and it's a hell of a lot easier than assembly to write. When perusing through a project filled to the brim with C source code, I'm usually left thinking about how it works, why the developer did what they did, and why that makes sense for that particular application. I'm usually able to figure out these questions and there's one main reason: the code isn't shit. With PHP, I'm usually left wondering what the developer was thinking, the 100s of ways I could have done it more efficiently, and why this person is actually making money doing this.

With roughly 90% of open-source PHP projects, everything works great. I love it, clients love it, everyone kisses eachother's ass. But then one day you get that inevitable change request...I want it to do THIS. A quick look at the source code reveals that, omg, it's been written by a team of highly trained ape-like creatures! It surprises me that Wordpress plugins that get 100s of downloads a day throw errors (unless you disable error output, which I never do on my dev machines). Whole architectures are written with random indentation, or indentation with spaces (sorry Rubyers, but space-indentation is an evil scourge on humanity). No effort is put into separating pieces of code that could so easily be modularized if only they were given a second thought.

Do I hate PHP? No, I love PHP. I think it's a well-written, high-level web development language. It's fast, portable, and scalable. It allows me to focus on the problems I face, not the syntax of what I'm trying to do. Paired with an excellent editor like Eclipse (w/ PHPeclipse) I'm unstoppable. But why can't any other PHP developers share my love of well-written code? It's the #1 critique of PHP, and rightly so. I'm pretty sure that all programming languages, save Python, allow you to write awful, unreadable code...but PHP's culture seems to be built around shitty code, amateurish hacks, and lack of elegance. PHP isn't the problem, it's the people writing it who suck!

So I do love the language, but hate most of the implementations. I have to say though, nothing is worse than Coldfusion.

</p>

We've all heard of howtobepunk.com, the world's best guide on the punk subculture. Weighing in at over 15-billion page views per day, it's one of those sites people just expect to see up...and every person on earth checks it on average 2.3 times per day. The domain recently expired, and oddly enough, I wasn't warned.

I'm not too bent out of shape about that, it's happened before (and many times it has been my fault). What really chaps my caboose is the transfer process. See, I hate GoDaddy with a passion. Always have. Since NFS.net started doing domain registration, I've been pretty gung-ho about using them. I decided to transfer HTBP.com to Nearly Free Speech.

GoDaddy, to the full extent the ICANN let's them, makes this the most difficult and tedious process you can possibly imagine. Every guide you find on their site about transfer domains assumes that you want to transfer the domain TO them. Why would anyone, after all, want to transfer a domain away from the best registrar/host/whatever else the fuck they do in the world? You'd have to be crazy.

Call me a fruitcake. Anyway, I finally got through the whole process, activated the transfer, blah blah. GoDaddy sends me an email saying it's all successful. Great, I can sit back now.

NO!!!!! I can't. There's some sort of domain transfer "pending" system that holds on to the domain for a week (or until you approve it AGAIN). GoDaddy decided to hide this at the bottom of the email they sent telling me everything is fine.

Anyway, dealing with those guys is a nightmare. Only one domain left on there, and once it comes up for renewal I'll never host another domain on GoDaddy again. Their system itself works fine, but even a highly skilled web developer has trouble using their shitty interface. I can't imagine how some average douche who wants to register mydogsparkyiscool.com would make heads or tails of it.

</rant>

Smarty is everyone's favorite templating language for PHP. It's great in many ways, one of the main features being that it can display things on a website. It also promotes separation of display code and logic, which many PHP programmers seem to have trouble with: oscommerce, PHPList, etc etc.

So why do I hate it?

</em> There's no fucking point! All bad programmers write bad code. Why create a language within a language just to force bad programmers to do one thing right? I realize that Smarty does enforce separation of logic from display very well. I've used it in several projects. But if its capabilities are so strikingly similar to PHP that for most things there is a 1-1 reference, why bother? Why not just use PHP code?</p>

Also, the plugins (and {php} tag) allow you to make logical decisions, run mysql queries, send rockets to the moon...there's nothing you can do in PHP that you cannot do in Smarty...which makes Smarty completely worthless for what it's trying to do.