halO

I would argue that usage of subdomains for sections within a site should be avoided. Take for instance Slashdot (Oh how I can hear the crowd screaming for blood right about now: "HERESY! HE'S BASHING SLASHDOT, BURN THE INFIDEL!"). Their sections include such as science.slashdot.org, linux.slashdot.org etc., all with their own subdomain.

Now, if I were to log in while visiting an article within the science section - the wand cannot possibly let me use the same login for the other sections. The reason is that browsers cannot, unless specifically coded in with special cases, know wether a subdomain is part of the same site or not. Ok, so we humans know that politics.slashdot.org and science.slashdot.org is probably part of the same site, but how can a computer determine that? How would you determine wether aaa.yyy.zzz can share login data with bbb.yyy.zzz? What if those two domains in reality was "bankofengland.co.uk" and "evilhacker.co.uk"? Special cases would remedy the issue somewhat, but it's an ugly hack.

I think the point and click interface is a bit too basic. It feels like being a caveman, pointing at the screen and go "ugh, agh. Me want THAT one!". Now, in the "olden days", everything were done via the command interface. It was clunky and hard to use, but I'm starting to think that it was mostly because if you didn't know which commands to use, it took a while to learn what to type.

What if we could have some sort of natural language command prompt in addition? I want to have a box where I can type in "disable CD autorun" or "set screen resolution to 1280x1024".

Combine this with text-to-speech and voìla! The next-gen interface. Sounds sooo easy, doesn't it?

It seems impossible to criticize anything about todays society without someone else telling them "stop whining, things are good".

Yes, things are mostly fine. "Things", however, could be even better and without people criticizing status quo "things" will get worse pretty rapidly. Free speech and our very freedom will probably always be on the line. However, improvements in technology makes it even more feasible than ever to create a society of surveilance. If we are not careful, the 21st century will be remembered as the time when our civilization traded our freedom for security, and lost both.

I keep coming back to old code written by myself and can't help but think how bad and naìve my code was. It's just two years since I became aware of SQL injection attacks and today I almost flip out if I see anyone doing it. Imagine my reaction when I reviewed some code for my almost three years old webpage, hybelmat.com. "Luckily" that site has magic quotes enabled so it's not in immediate danger, but I keep a backup around at all times... :-P

It's a bit sad to have created something that you feel so proud of, and then a couple of years later you look back and go "Hot DAMN what was I thinking?!?".

My most recent revelations are PHPUnit (which is a port of JUnit) and how to write better and more maintainable code as an effect. Combined with an SVN server which keeps track of all my code changes, my life as a programmer has become much more comfortable. I'm curious to see the next thing I will discover that I two weeks later can't imagine being without. Live and learn...