• Those pesky post & comment disappearance problems are now banished.
• In the next 5 days we’ll be moving to some brand new servers.
• In the next month we’ll be moving to a new platform!
• In five months we can all have a laugh at Gnomedex!

More info as it comes in. Stick with us, it’s gonna be great.

[tags]servers, administration[/tags]

Global Dimming is a situation created by pollution - not greenhouse gases. The water molecules in clouds tend to build around elements in the air such as pollen, but when polluted air is involved, there are 10x as many particles for those water molecules to build around, making the clouds much denser. As a result, they reflect more sunlight back into space. Studies found that sunlight hitting various countries around the world had dropped from 5 - 30% between the 1950’s and the 90’s. As you can imagine, these findings were mostly dismissed, but then further corroborative evidence was found, water evaporation rates in Australia had dropped a significant amount during the same period.

We are now starting to feel the effects of lower Global Dimming, as pollutant levels decrease from our own efforts to ‘clean up’, but without removing the real source of the danger, carbon dioxide. As a result, temperatures rise faster, and now some scientists claim we may see temperatures rise 10 degrees in the next 100 years, a major difference from previous models which didn’t factor in the effects of Global Dimming.

Of course, I’m not a scientist, but this still concerns me, and I hope it concerns you. Is it all a load of codswallop? I only have to look at recent extreme weather events to know things are changing fast: Hurricane Katrina, massive snowfall in NY State, record-breaking temperatures in Europe in 2003. The list goes on.

I’m now laughingly waiting for comments claiming left or right wing tactics - the climate does not give a damn if you’re democrat or republican, change is afoot and we must sort something out, not banter politically.

[tags]global warming, global dimming, weather, climate[/tags]

I’ll give you an example of what can happen without some *-Fu: here’s some PHP code I wrote in January of 2005. It’s purpose is to keep a timing log of events, simply call DebugLog(”Some action occured”) and it’ll add your event to the list, plus the time since the last event, and the total time up to that point. There are other functions to handle output of the log, but this is the meat of it:

function DebugLog($t = "Unknown Marker Point") /* $t = Marker Text */
{
   global $dg, $DEBUG_MODE, $DEBUG_PFX; /* $dg['p'] = Log Iteration */
   if (!$DEBUG_MODE) return; /* Clause to exit early */
   list($a, $b) = explode(" ", (($n = microtime()) ? $n : "0 0")); /* $n = Now */
   list($c, $d) = explode(" ", (($l = $dg['l'][(isset($dg['p']) ? $dg['p']++ : ($dg['p'] = 0))]) ? $l : $n)); /* $l = Last Time */
   list($e, $f) = explode(" ", (($s = $dg['l'][0]) ? $s : $n)); /* $s = First Time */
   $dg['o'][(($dg['l'][$dg['p']] = $n) ? $n : 0)] = (!empty($DEBUG_PFX) ? "{$DEBUG_PFX}: " : "") . ($t != FALSE ? ("{$t} (<b>" . (($q = sprintf("%0.
4f",($b-$d+$a-$c))) ? $q : 0). "s</b> / " . ((($r = sprintf("%0.4f",($b-$f+$a-$e))) ? $r : 0) != $q ? "{$r}s" : "Init") . ")") : "");
}

… yuck, so compressed I have trouble breaking it down to it’s component parts - and I wrote it. It’s handy to show off for a ‘l00k at my skillz’ angle (if you love ternary conditional operators), but from a maintenance standpoint it’s nasty. Imagine if you wrote 1,000 lines of code for a client in this way, then got “hit by a bus” (as my boss terms it), where would your successor begin?

So, heres what you can do:

• Follow a simple set of coding guidelines. When I began writing Drupal modules, I noticed both the core and third-party code followed particular standards. I still follow them now.
• Comment, comment, comment. It doesn’t slow parsers down, they ignore them. Your intentions in code are not always clear, by adding a few words it becomes much more obvious to others, and to yourself; if you leave and return to it months later.
• Optimize your code, but not to the point of obfuscation. Again, parsers don’t really care if you name your variable $a or $inventoryContents.
• Encourage peer review of your code when possible, theres always the chance that they’ll see a better way to do something, or learn a new method in the process (and vice versa). In these modern times web scripting languages can change significantly in a short time span, keeping up to date through RTFM’ing and talking to fellow coders is a good combo.

May your code be good and your returns high. :)

[tags]programming,code,guidelines,fu[/tags]