Stefan Koopmanschap's RSS

I've tweeted about this on january 1st but now it's official! I will be speaking at PHP|Architect's PHP|Tek conference in may. I will be doing two presentations: My good old refactoring talk and a joint talk with Lorna on the community.

I'm very excited to be able to say that I was published in php|architect, in December's issue. I had the /etc column, where I wrote a bit about phpwomen.org and what we're up to these days. As I've wanted to write for them for ages, I was very chuffed to be asked and it was fun doing it :)

Already a few days ago I got tagged by Manuel Pichler and Gaylord Aulke. I could not post as I was really sick the last two weeks. Today is the first day where I see light at the end of the tunnel and I feel good enough to answer the questions.

So you really want to know seven things about me ? Well - you asked for it

1. I earned my first money by creating a blackmarket in secondary school for sexual explicit material, which I bought cheap and sold expensive. This was one of the reasons I had to leave this school.

2. My first love was named Commodore 64. I teached myself Assembler and started to rip off music from games, creating my own demos.

3. My holidays are usually spent in croatia as my beloved wife was born there.

4. I work with a bunch of developers in lithuania, and hey - these guys (and girls!) are really good.

5. Recently I donated my book collection of > 2500 science fiction and fantasy books to a shop where handicapped sell the books to life from that.

6. Although I was born in bavaria my limit are 3 litres of beer, after that I am really really drunk.

7. I can’t stand cold weather - I feel well at an average of 26+ degrees. Oh, do you remember 4. ? In .lt the winters are really really REALLY cold and I hate it.

So - now my turn. Not so easy. I think nearly everybody who I know was already tagged, therefore - sorry about that - I need to tag a bunch of german people who I think are not yet tagged by this meme.

Here we go:

1. Nils Langner for teaching PHP
2. Thorsten Rinne just to remember him that he still ows me a self cooked thai menu.
3. Xenjo because I am curious what he would write….
4. Ralf Eggert to support his upcoming Zend Framework book (in german only)
5. Christopher Kunz who runs partly my servers for swoodoo and takes care about themeven from holiday. Thanks Chris !
6. Tomas Liubinas one of the .lt developers I mentioned and actually he was part of the team who won in plat-forms contest.
7. Max Horvath for… hmm… I still wait for the pics

These are the rules apparently:

Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

We just released the 2008.2 release of the eZ Components yesterday. This stable release received 6 months of care by the core developers and many contributors. Thanks to all of you for the great work!My tasks for 2008.2 were dedicated to the Webdav component. This package allows you to easily integrate WebDAV access features into your applications. For the new release I implemented support for authentication and authorization, which allows easy integration into your existing environment. In addition, I added lock support, so the Webdav component now complies to WebDAV class 2 (and almost 3).

When I returned from vacation it looked to me like Planet-PHP blogs were all infected by some strange virus. Everyone seems to be keen on providing 7 things that many people don't know about him. Since I got "tagged" 2 times now (Kore and Sebastian), I'll jump on the bandwagon and also share some secrets with you.

Sometimes internet memes are something horrible. On PHP, right now, the whole idea is to share seven things about yourself (not things everyone knows about, it won’t be any fun), all of this because of Tony Bibbs (yes, it’s his fault, even if I don’t know him at all, he’s the one who started it all on the Who tagged who).

By the way I’ve been tagged by Mark Karpeles, myself. If you want to know why, you’ll have to read more.

For the people who don’t know me at all, I won’t eat you, you can come and try to talk to me. I started working on PHP’s WDDX extension (right now rewriting a part of it to use xmlreader instead of expat-like stuff) which was maintained by Andrei Zmievski (who wouldn’t have liked at all seeing the wddx functions assuming “everything is ISO-8859-1″, as he said before, “English is not the only language” and stuff like that).
Oh and now, I’m not using Coldfusion at all, I never touched Coldfusion, I use WDDX because it’s a nice serialization system, and because I got something to unserialize it on the other side.

• Like Paul Reinheimer, I also do some photography.
  I like being able to take still images out of things I see in my daily life, and that’s what cameras are made for. Since I had the chance to travel around, I got a few pictures from other countries, and a few months ago I bought  a second hand Nikon D70s which helps a lot taking nice pictures.
• I never finish anyth…
  In fact, sometimes, I happen to finish something, but “finishing something” is just too boring. I always do a new version at some point, so nothing is really “finished”. Just tag it with a version number and continue it (already got this thinkgeek tshirt).
• My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128k +2.
  My mother was writing little games for me in BASIC, and I started BASIC quite soon. I knew almost every instruction in BASIC (was just missing arrays with DIM) and already started touching the ASM part with POKE, PEEK and USR before I was 7. When I was 8, I got an Amiga 500, quickly followed by an Amiga 2000, another Amiga 2000. Today I own two Amiga 1200…
• During the Paris’ PHP Forum 2008, I showed Lukas Smith around (especially to find a nice place with better food than the forum’s sandwitches). That day I ate twice.
• I fully speak and understand spoken French, English and Japanese (which I’m unable to write, and sometimes unable to read). I’m able to utter some words in other languages (the tourist survival base) in Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Russian, Latin and some Chinese. I love travelling, and I even went to Tel Aviv (Israël) during my PHP training (hey, PHP3 is from there).
• I’m geek. And not half, as I even been featured in a documentary called “Suck my Geek“. While I’m mainly a computers geek, I also do common stuff like watching japanese animation (I learnt Japanese from there), replying to “seven things” extraweb memes, troll by using non-existant words, etc…
  Being geek also implies being curious. While I never finish anything, I started a lot of things, including an OS project, a xinetd-like program in PHP, a BitTorrent tracker in PHP using PHP/GTK, IRC bots with PHP (MatrIRX), an IRC daemon in C++, and even more useless things than that. Most of them aren’t documented (I’m not a documentation guy, it was hard to write, it must be hard to use… isn’t it?) but are working, and some of them are even actively developed (I recently got a guy who decided to work on some things for pinetd).
• I make apple pies.
  Not apple pies like the ones you’re used to eat. My apple pies are uniques. If you ever come to Paris, message me before so I can prepare one and let you take a bite. My apple pie follows a receipe I got from my mother, who got it from my grand-mother, etc

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Seven Things

- I've lived in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Bergen, and New York.
While I learned to love big cities in New York, I intend to raise a family in the 'burbs or some rural area, just as soon as that family thing
gets started.

• Photography, Running, and Cooking bring me surprising amounts of joy.
  Photography tends to be one of my few artistic outlets, it's great. The effort of running tends to center my mind, and work off some of this fat (I'm not fat mind you, simply drought and famine resistant). I love cooking, I want a garden.
  
• I've managed a retail store, selling such wondrous items as: the flowbee, set it and forget it, turbie twist, and ginsu knives (but this method doesn't work with a tomato).
  Not only did I work there, I also did demonstrations, or "showcasing", it was quite exciting. For a time I could solve strange golf ball in a snow globe puzzles while hanging upside down on an inversion table in under 30 seconds (in fact that feat was televised).
  
• I generally dislike ingesting warm liquid.
  Soups, coffee, etc. Not really a fan. I'll drink tea to be sociable.
  
• I completed the second year of a two year computer programming program at Sheridan College while I was in High School.
  Night classes for the win. I was quite the hot shot Visual Basic developer for a time.
  
• I own a 50" Television, but have no cable or satellite subscription.
  Cable company is stupid, I'm giving the money they were getting to World Vision instead.
  
• Wearing that Kiss costume was actually my idea. As was the make up.
  I'm sorry. In particular I'm sorry to Marco's children, who (if I understand this correctly) cried a little when they saw the pictures.
  

My 7 Tags:
The first 7 people who read this (who haven't been tagged already). Leave a comment with your name in the comments. I have server logs, and we have.. people. Don't not leave a comment and think you can get away with it. We will find you.


Victims/Tags:
Christine

Everyone likes an Interweb meme! I was tagged by Elizabeth Naramore (thanks! and my jokes are totally awesome!) with Seven Things, so I'm supposed to tell you seven things about me. So here we go!

• I still drive my first car: an awesome '92 Ford Crown Victoria, silver with stylish red vinyl on the inside. It caught on fire once but we put it out with a cup of coffee (the amazing part being convincing a Seattle native to surrender his coffee for any cause).
• I originally wanted to study math in college, but then I found a job at an Interwebs startup called ScreamingMedia, where I learned PHP (yay, .php3 files!). Eventually, I switched my major to computer science.
• I once worked at Amazon.com, on the Books/Music/Videos/DVD parts of the site where the QA department featured a real rocket scientist (she used to work for NASA).
• I know how to construct a trebuchet, use a blow torch and have built a small remote-controlled solar-powered car once.
• My first interaction with a computer was on a green screen, typing dir *.*
• I had a story published in The New York Times once (in the "Metropolitan Diary" column, but still!)
• I miss the tiled website backgrounds of the late 1990's.

I am hereby tagging these individuals:

• Matt Purdon for always staying on top of new technology and never settling for comfort when coding.


• Cal Evans for always starting his day with a cheerful Twitter message.


• Paul Reinheimer for bringing the meat from America's Hat.


• Ed Finkler for nicer web design than the rest of us combined!

These are the rules apparently:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.


• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some wierd.


• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.


• Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

As Johannes tagged me, here are my 7 things:

1. I leared PHP because I wanted to write a form mailer for a website.
2. When I was 13 years old, I spend a lot of time on a city network called RivalNet, causing a telephone bill of 600DM. There were no flatrates at that time.
3. I studied analytical philosophy for 6 months.
4. I make coffee the old-fashioned way by throwing hot-water through the coffee filter. My favorite sort is Jamaican Blue Mountain
5. I fear of dogs, seriously.
6. I started reading “Das Kapital” from Marx when I was 18, but still not finished it. Nevertheless, I still insist to call it a book that I’m currently reading.
7. My last name is spanish but I don’t speak castilian.

And here are the rules I’m supposed to pass on to the following bloggers:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

And as for chaining, in no particularly significant order:

• Pierre A. Joye for doing awesome PHP windows work
• Thorsten Rinne for the invitation to Augsburg
• Ulf Wendel
• Zoe Slattery for helping to improve PHP’s quality
• Wolfram Kriesing
• Jan Lehnardt for his inspiring criticism
• Stefan Esser

Due to the efforts of Brian Moon and Michelangelo van Dam, I've been sucked into a meme started by Tony Bibbs. My initial reaction to this unfortunate event was ... (envision Steven Colbert, hands raised...) "Noooooo!!!" But I got over it. Hey, it's the holiday season, I might as well be a good boy and fulfill the modern-day geek's equivalent of a chain letter.

So, without further ado, here is my list of seven things about me you probably could care less about and will skip over to see if you are on my list of tagged people. (Yeah, you know you will.)

• My real name is not Jay
• I have a twin brother, Andy, who lives in England with his wife, Vicky, and my nephew, Archie. (I'm originally British, and my brother moved back to the "motherland" around 10 years ago)
• My father worked for American Standard Plumbing Products for something like 30 years. Having a Dad working in the plumbing industry with a surname of Pipes has been, well, interesting.
• My wife, Julie, has a yoga studio in Columbus, Ohio, where we live. I have no interest whatsoever in Yoga. This works well, as my wife has zero interest in technology. We always say that the secret to our marriage is low expectations.
• My favourite shows on television are Mythbusters, Top Gear, and Big Ten Football (and, yes, I know the Big Ten sucks this year.)
• I love the texture of velour. There's just something about it. If not for social customs and expectations, I would likely dress entirely in velour.
• I find garden gnomes, clowns, and mimes incredibly creepy. Oooh, and magicians. They're creepy too.

Here are the folks I'd like to know a little more about:

• My brother Andy. Being in England, I don't get to see him as much as I'd like to, and especially since he's now a proud father, I'd like to know what's changed in his life and what he wants others to know about him.
• Jonathan Schwartz - yeah, he's the CEO of Sun, yeah, he's got a ponytail, but seriously, what makes him tick?
• Thomas Friedman - he's an author I really respect and admire. Be cool to know if Mr. Friedman ever gets sick of going on all those talking head shows...
• Jan Kneschke, the creator lighthttpd and MySQL proxy, and all-around interesting dude.
• Sergey Petrunia, another brilliant guy. He's on the MySQL optimizer team and hangs out on #drizzle, but I don't know too much about him personally!
• My co-author on Pro MySQL, Mike Kruckenberg, is an all-around fantastic guy, wonderful father, and great thinker. I'd like to learn a little more about him more than I know already.
• Since I don't think Hans Reiser will be able to continue the meme, I'll choose Monty Widenius because I am positive he'll come up with some very interesting tidbits about himself that may well make its way back to his Wikipedia page.

And, of course, the rules in case anyone missed them:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Trying to get a bit of overview of all people who have put up their "Seven Things" list, I created a little map that shows who tagged who with an overview of the most tagged persons.

Check out the Seven Things map at http://in2it.be/whotaggedwho.php.

Several people have tagged me in this meme that's been circling the PHP community, so I'm going to get off my arse and do my duty. This was actually fairly hard to do as I'm not generally shy of sharing what is often TMI about myself, so what I've listed is probably already known by several of you, but maybe it isn't...

What you don't know about me

1. I didn't learn to drive until I was 19. I just didn't see the need. When I did finally start driving, it was only for about 2.5 years before sold off my car (which I couldn't afford), and wound up living without a car for the next three years. Even today, I really don't like driving if I can avoid it, my five year old car only has 40,000 miles on it, and most of those were put on by my wife.
2. I used ASP before learning PHP, and I didn't hate it. Generally speaking, it's every bit as capable a web scripting language as PHP is, it just lacks platform independence and isn't particularly performant under load. If all you need is a small intranet app though, then it works just fine.
3. As a junior in high school (with diabetes), I sold $250 worth of candy for CSF. (California Scholarship Federation, basicly "Honor Roll Club") The previous record was $50.
4. I worked in Berkeley, CA for seven years, yet I've never smoked pot or cigarettes in my life. Although part of my reasons for avoiding cigarettes comes down to the unhealthiness of them and their addictive nature, my ultimate reason is the same one I apply to marijuana. I just don't like the smell of them. Cigarettes make me want to vomit, and pot is just too sickly sweet...I also don't drink coffee, though I do try it evey now and again to see if my taste has changed. It doesn't change...
5. Not only do I know ColdFusion, I've written extensions for it in C++. Having used the extension API for ColdFusion, I can reliably state that it was designed by an epileptic raver on ecstasy with a methamphetamine chaser.
6. I've had twelve piercings, only four of them are still open. Five up each ear, one nipple, and my belly button. The ears were just too busy, the belly ring I took out in a freak moment of adult rationality (they don't happen often), and the nipple had to go because it was migrating out anyway.
7. My father once told me I was too honest for my own good. Given how much children lie to their parents, this comment has always stuck with me. I think it's even managed to make me more honest with the people in my life in an effort to live up to that standard.

Continue reading "Seven Things"

So, my Haystacks teammate Brian DeShong tagged me in his list of seven.  We won
that trivia contest by the way.  It was a real team effort.

So, here goes my seven things:

1. I have six kids.  Okay, let that sink in.  Yes, six.  Logan(12), Macy(11), Molly(9), Parker(7), Collin(3), and Hudson(6 months).  I know what causes it.  Yes, it is hard at times.  But, there are those moments when you are sitting in the yard or in the den and all is right in the world.  The best program I will ever write will not compare to what have done with my children.  They are truly my greatest project.  My wonderful wife blogs about them at Moonmania.
2. I started my career as a Visual Basic programmer.  PHP and VB are very much alike.  Neither is OOP, yet people keep trying to make them so.  You can write truly powerful applications if you know what you are doing.  Much of the outside community thinks poorly of the language.  In both cases I was way too busy making cool things and getting stuff done to care or pay attention.
3. I play disc golf.  It is a great sport.  It reminds me of the Open Source community in that it is a very community driven sport.  The courses are installed and maintained by the players, usually on public land such as parks.  The tournaments are run by local players.  The sport is largely managed by players.  I maintain the web site of one of the larger regional (maybe the largest) tournament series in the world.  I have played in most cities that I have visited including those I go to for conferences.  We have a group of 9 or so people at dealnews that play on a semi-regular basis when the weather is right.
4. I never graduated college.  The VB work and then the PHP work got in the way.  It is a regret in some ways.  But, I can't tell you what I would have changed about how my life has gone.  Perhaps I will go back and finish my degree at some point.  Sadly, in this world, there are doors that are closed to you no matter how brilliant you are if you don't have a simple piece of paper.  I know people with that piece of paper that ended up working fast food.  But, they could get an interview where I could not.  They would not get the job, but I can't even get in the door.
5. I have contributed two PHP internals functions.  mysql_fetch_assoc and the now deprecated set_file_buffer.  In the case of mysql_fetch_assoc, I was fixing what was IMO a bug.  mysql_fetch_array originally returned only an associative array.  Someone decided it should return the data in both associative and numeric forms.  mysql_fetch_row already existed to return numeric keys.  So, I simply copied it and added mysql_fetch_assoc.  That was the real wild wild west days of PHP CVS.  You either had full access or you didn't have any access.  I did not keep my development up on PHP so I lost karma on the core later.  My C is not super polished.  Still I will admit I liked being part of the club.
6. I watch pro wrestling.  There I said it.  Guilty pleasure.  The Tivo makes it easy.  2 hour show only takes about 40 minutes.  Heh, I skip most of the wrestling.  Not everyone is entertaining.  My great grandmother would sit and watch it every Saturday night.  I was hooked from that point.  I won't get going on it.  I would lose you guys.  FWIW, I am a big fan of mixed martial arts too.  That stuff IS real and very exciting.
7. I am a compulsive code rewriter and/or write it myself kind of guy.  It is something I struggle with every day.  It is why I started Phorum and Wordcraft.  Luckily, the guys I work with at both dealnews and on Phorum are good programmers.  My biggest problem is opening a file I last worked on 5 years ago.  The way we write web applicaitons has evolved so much in the 11 years I have been doing this.  I am using the same language, but have such different ideas.  I can only imagine what the next 11 years will bring.

I will be tagging these seven.  Forgive me if I get a title wrong.

1. Brian Aker.  The creators of sites like Facebook and Digg may have had some great ideas.  But, without guys like Brian Aker, they would be nowhere.  He makes the things that make dealnews, Facebook and Digg possible.  And he continues to contribute with Drizzle and t

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 3046 bytes)

I haven’t hacked the PHPIDS for a while but David Lindsay (AKA Thornmaker) inspired me. When I say hacked I mean in a good way because finding bypasses helps improve the filters

Here is my vector:-

/Please submit the string\ to help us make the \ PHPIDS better./,y=('aler\ t'),x=this,x=x[y] x('I cant let you have all the fun thornmaker'),/abc abc\ abc abc abc\ abc\ /,/abc abc\ abc abc abc\ abc\ /

Notice the English like text in order to bypass the centrifuge detection. I use backslashes to create strings in order to bypass the regular expressions. “this” refers to the current window and the string alert is passed to the window object which creates a reference to the alert function. It’s worth noting Mario fixed it very quickly so it no longer works. If you want a go and want to come up with your own vector then check out the phpids demo page.

Thanks to Brian Deshong I have been tagged with the “Seven Things” meme. I was born about 5 miles (and one state over) from where I now live, but I moved to Colorado Springs when I was one year old and I consider myself “from” Colorado. I first learned to program in BASIC, so I could figure [...]

It doesn't seem like that long since the last time this happened, but apparently its been two years and the "tell us something new about yourself" meme has come around again. I was trying to ignore it but now I've been tagged by Matthew, Davey and Kathy I guess I can't.

1. People often mistake me for being younger than I am. This will be more fun when I'm older but right now I'm 28 and wishing people would take me seriously as a professional. (28!! Pay attention people)


2. My family has a system called "Family Post" - if you want something transporting, you give it to someone who might see someone who might catch up with someone who has a family member in the same town as the person the item is intended for. Sometimes this system takes years but we can transport almost anything to anyone in the family, free of charge, including plants (and look after them on the way). There is no tracking system however, you just have to throw in your item and hope for the best


3. My secondary education was at an all-girls grammar school (state-funded, examination entry). I even have a GCSE in Latin to go with it


4. I have been dating the same man for over 8 years, which probably most people know. What I don't usually mention is that when we met, he was already in a relationship and we're now close friends with his then-girlfriend. In fact we're just about to go to South America for 2 weeks to see her.


5. I am terribly domesticated. I am a great cook and can feed varying numbers of people with relatively little stress or warning. I can knit and sew, so I can make clothes, soft furnishings, pretty much anything really. I am a competent gardner and an accomplished pianist.


6. My boyfriend and I bought a 100+ year old house with 4 bedrooms over 4 floors which needed a lot of renovation. Its our first house and we've since discovered neither of us is great at or enjoys DIY. We'll get through this experience but I wouldn't recommend it


7. I have no idea what I want to do when I grow up and I don't have a 5 year plan. If I'd had a 5 year plan 5 years ago, I'd have had a much less interesting life so far.

Last time I did this I refused to tag anyone but this time I'm going to take the opportunity to introduce some of my blog readers to blogs I read myself.

EmmaJane - we have the same middle name and she's also a geeky knitter
Girls Can't What - Gretchen has a site full of brilliant female role models, and she's an ace designer
dotjay - he tagged me last time, and he should blog more
Erik - a cool colleague who will be surprised by this tag
urbanwide - I joke that Deb is "the other girl developer in Leeds"! She's a camera geek, ruby developer, and she helps me understand how "girl" goes with "geek"
Cally - the then-girlfriend in question
Mark Aitken - ex-colleague, mentor and friend

And now the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.


• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some wierd.


• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.


• Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

So my friend Andi tagged me and here are my seven confessions.

1) I really love coffee. I always have, and luckily I work for a company that has extremely decent coffee and coffee equipment - at least in the office I was hired into. So I don't possess a real coffee machine other than the Senseo, one I got from my parents so that they can get coffee on a visit.

2) Just like Andi, I also have an issue with shaving. And just like him, neither Army nor Wife turned me into a responsible daily shaver. We'll see if our son Felix Alexander, whom we expect in May, will convince me to change my unruly ways.

3) Speaking of the Army. I was a tank commander and got to be the first Lieutenant to be named in a brigade meeting to conclude a several day training, for having parked my tank in the mud. That alone was not so much of an accomplishment, but having performed my duties while taking about a day to get the tank out under supervision of every high-ranked officer in the area was.

4) I have always done lots of sports of all kinds. I even became a licensed trainer during my university time and gave fitness and aqua fitness classes. For some time I did up to 20 hours of sports per week including Aerobics and Step Aerobics, and I even performed in a few shows. I ran a marathon but nowadays limit myself to snowboarding and inline skating. Probably because I spend too much time on Open Source. And working for a company where internally everything is like Open Source does not help either.

5) My university, having several professors directly connected to CERN, was one of the first to participate in the Internet. So I became interested and trained my colleagues to some success. So much success, in fact, that I had to write a web server myself so that the company could ship the now html documentation to their clients, which did not have the slightest clue what this was all about nor had heard of a webserver at all.

6) I once got a call from my very good friend, Rainer, while sitting at breakfast with all my friends, saying, "hey pour me a coffee, I'll grab you in a minute." After the coffee, we drove to a company run by friends and I was asked to say yes to everything. Apparently a major German television channel had problems with one of their internet apps. So we spent Saturday morning to Monday morning trying to fix it. Well, I said "it's not fixable but can be redesigned" and so I did. After 2 days without sleep, I took a nap before teaching an aqua fitness class that evening. Coming back into the office afterwards, I ran into a meeting and hearing 'Money doesn't matter', I sat down, listened and became a freelancer that week.

7) I lost weeks and weeks of my university time playing Ultimate Underworld IV. Having killed the dude that can repair the sword that is the only weapon to kill the last opponent, I couldn't even finish it. That's why I do not play video games.



And here are the rules I'm supposed to pass on to the following bloggers:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

And as for chaining, in no particularly significant order:

• Lukas Kahwe Smith
• Johannes Schlüter
• Aaron Wormus
• Etienne Kneuss
• Yann Larrivée
• Rob Richards
• Kathy Ahn
  

Since Kore, Lars and Marcus forced me to do it:

• Sebastian's first foreign language was Latin, for me Latin was the reason to start programming (by trying to hack the vocabulary trainer my brother wrote, so I learned Basic instead of Latin)
• I started PHP since I was too dumb to get my Perl CGI scripts working after our home server crashed
• I still have more Perl books than PHP books
• Compiling PHP 4.0 on our Pentium 90 home server took a night or so - and often forgot to activate some extension I used
• I learned SQL using the university notes from my brother, and I soon learned that MySQL 3.23 doesn't support "CREATE VIEW"
• I used my unicycle to ride to the office where I had my first job application ever (that trick worked!)
• Sometimes I am tour guide in Munich, but only for friends, like Kore

And now I have to tag seven more people ...

• Ulf Wendel
• Scott MacVicar
• Helgi with the untypable last name
• Hannes Magnusson
• David Soria Parra
• Lukas Smith
• The elePHPant

There was a lot of disagreement on the value of code comments after my earlier post Comments considered harmful. Perhaps the most important objection that was raised was the idea that it's OK to improve the code, but it's even better to keep the comments in addition to the improved code.

As one of the critics expressed it:

No, comments are there to comment. Period.
That has nothing to do with how good is your code.
You can write perfectly clean code and add good comments to it. Nothing wrong with that. This is one of those ideas that seem obviously true in theory, but fail to work in practice. The reason is that comments get out of sync with the code. The comments rot, or rather, their meaning does. They become more and more misleading as the code gets changed and the comments are not adequately updated.

Let me give you an example. But first, I want to make it clear that I don't think code comments are always a bad thing. Sometimes, they are necessary. But much less often than people think.

API documentation is often indispensible, but that's really a different matter. When API documentation is generated from comments in front of each method, the primary purpose is to explain how the code can be used, not how it works. In fact, you might say they are code comments only in a syntactical sense.

On to the example. One of the comments to my blog post presented a code snippet that illustrates my point well. It's supposed to be a example of a useful inline comment in code.

// first handle the case where no records were found (if $records == 0) { return false; }  

Is this really an case of good commenting? I don't think so. If it's hard to understand that $records == 0 means that no records were found, we can change the code to make it easier. The simplest way to do it is to rename the variable to something like $numberOfRecordsFound or $numRecordsFound. Or extract a method. But typically, it's possible and preferable to avoid this kind of check altogether.

Anyway, the comment is unnecessary. But as I only realized a while later, it's also misleading. Does the code "handle the case where no records were found"? No, it leaves it to the calling function to handle the case. The one line that returns false is not handling anything, it's just passing a message.

So the comment is already misleading, never mind what will happen when someone changes the code and neglects to update the comment. For example, let's say the next programmer to work on this code is in hurry to fix a bug. Now maybe the code will look like this:

// first handle the case where no records were found (if $records == 0 && $state == ACTIVE) { return false; }  

The programmer wonders briefly whether the comment is still fully appropriate, is unsure, and decides to do nothing about it (or postpones the decision and forgets about it). Now, perhaps (we can't quite tell without the full context), the comment is even more misleading.

In the next round, yet another programmer comes along, makes some more code changes and wonders: "Should I update the comment? It looks all wrong to me, but it was probably written by someone with deeper insignt into the code. Better leave it alone."

The code would have been better off without the comment, but no one wants to delete it, especially since they have been told that comments are so important. It's a downward spiral: the code changes make the comments misleading less chance that they will

Comments that lie are worse than no comments, and in practice they tend to big liars.

Thanks to Chuck, I've been tagged -- rejoice. Now because I'm a web2 slut, it'll be hard to tell anyone seven things which they don't know already, but here we go anyway!

Seven things

1. Little did you know, but my middle name is Felix.
2. I'm deadly afraid of rodents. =(
3. By birth, I'm a real commie. I was born in Karl-Marx-City, East-Germany, before the wall came down.
4. I can go without computer and Internet for two weeks!
5. I'm a liberal by heart and member of the liberal party of Germany.
6. Back at school, I argued myself through my history exam without using a single date, ever.
7. I got interested in the Internet because my mother bought a book about html for her job.

I hereby tag

This is pretty hard, I'm trying to not tag people twice. So bear with me.

1. Christian Weiske -- because he's pretty brilliant, and friend.
2. Thilo Utke -- who does Ruby (on Rails), but talks about testing without a prejudice for programming languages.
3. Thomas Bruederli -- for founding RoundCube, the best webmail to date!
4. Just -- who doesn't do PHP either, but takes awesome photos and writes about street and urban art in Berlin, and Europe.
5. Helgi -- for all the hard work^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^commits, very early in the morning.
6. Colin Percival -- because he does a lot of awesome stuff (portsnap, freebsd-update, security@, depenguinator, ...) for FreeBSD!
7. Last but not least, my good friend Allen! -- Because he's one of my best friends and because I think he can tag more interesting people.

The rules

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.