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psaintlaon We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

I think there are two bigger issues:

1.) Things like this should not be warnings in the first place. There should be more strict handling of invalid input so they result in actual exceptions being thrown instead of output that can be exploited in incorrect/undocumented ways.

2.) The php.net documentation for number_format doesn't even state that NULL is a possible output value. And I can't find anything in the changelogs stating when this change was made (admittedly I glanced quickly so I may have missed it)

You state that it is a bug in PHP, but I respectfully disagree. This is a bug in the varied way in which PHP returns output based on invalid input. Some functions return 0, some functions return NULL, some functions return FALSE and it seems as if it is all done arbitrarily. This really should end, invalid input should result in standard exceptions being thrown so they can be handled.

psaintlaon Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

go back to work

psaintlaon Awful Recruiters

Add Techlink to the list. Not only do their recruiters lie about the positions they are looking to fill but they get the hiring managers to lie about the positions as well.

psaintlaon The Demise of Kodak: Five Reasons

I'm not sure the author did their research, I actually worked for a startup that was purchased by Kodak and eventually became one of the only divisions that was profitable within the company. Kodak did invest in several startups including ours and they did a miserable job of managing them, here is a quick rundown of the issues we had after we were acquired.

1.) No one knew where the company was heading long term. It never seemed like Antonio Perez had a real vision for the startups they purchased. All the management in Rochester knew was that we generated revenue.

2.) Kodak middle management consistently threatened to offshore all of our engineering team jobs when we had disagreements about our product direction. This was how they thought they could control us and it failed miserably, several engineers including myself left soon after we were purchased.

3.) They refused to pay high salaries for excellent developers. Hiring came to a standstill because we couldn't find people to work for the measly 75K that Kodak budgeted for engineering positions, our salaries were grandfathered in but Kodak had hard salary tiers for new hires in certain positions that were completely inflexible.

4.) Every job at Kodak was highly specialized to the point of ridiculous redundancy and spectacular waste. If you were a Java engineer you weren't allowed to write Python, that was the Python engineers job. If you were a sysadmin, you couldn't write code at all, if you were a software engineer you were never allowed to touch any part of the operating system. The team that we had was highly experienced in both software engineering, system automation and maintenance. When we were purchased we all became "Java Engineers" and were never allowed to do anything other than write application layer code. If we needed to add something as simple as a cron we put in a request to a ticketing system and it took a bare minimum of 5 days for the request to be filled. We ended up finding out that the Systems Administrators were actually sitting on tickets so they could spread out their work and look busy and not get canned which leads us to...

5.) Everyone in middle management or anyone who had been there for a long time seemed to be trying to run out the clock so they could earn a pension. They did everything from dragging their feet on tasks to actively thwarting other divisions from being successful so they wouldn't look bad in comparison and get canned.

6.) Incompetence at Kodak was pervasive. Kodak should be a case study in the Peter Principle.

I could go on about this for a long time but you get the point.

psaintlaon I Like PHP

https://github.com/symfony/symfony

http://flow3.typo3.org/download/ This is still in alpha but has good source code regardless.

psaintlaon I Like PHP

Do yourself a favor. Never ever use wordpress as an example of a quality PHP application. Please look at the source code, the open source wordpress is a monstrous hack that has no clear architecture, has a terrible system of hooks that plugin authors regularly abuse and doesn't scale unless you write your own hack of plugin to override the db handler so you can do things like r/w splitting or sharding.

psaintlaon Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

I totally disagree, Habari's code base is far superior to wordpress in every regard it simply needs a larger user base. Try it if you are looking for a new blogging platform you'll be pleasantly surprised. http://habariproject.org

psaintlaon Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

If they use the same codebase that is on opensource wordpress they store the password as an md5 hash which isn't much better. Take a look at the wordpress source code one day, you'll be horrified.

psaintlaon A Built-in Web Server For PHP

psaintlaon How is WordPress.com made?

I'm curious if wordpress devs ever contemplate doing a complete re-write of the codebase. It has one of the worst "architected" codebases of any major open source product out there and even people in #wordpress-dev on freenode make jokes about it occasionally.

psaintlaon Engineering management at Facebook

I once worked for a company that hired the way Facebook does and it is a recipe for disaster in the long term. Two things brought an end to the practice but it was too little too late:

1.) Employees were agreeing to hire people who weren't as skilled as they are because they were afraid of newer and younger competition. As each generation of new hires were brought in they were successively worse than the previous. The most senior employees saw the degradation of overall talent level and eventually left for greener pastures. The company slowly ended up becoming composed of people who were barely qualified for their positions and several years after I had left they were bought out for pennies.

2.) They were sued for discrimination, it was a ridiculous accusation, but the company had to settle. The reason was that without consciously trying we had all hired people who were of similar backgrounds to ourselves in many regards. Apparently "One of our team members wasn't sure about her" doesn't cut it in court.

psaintlaon 17 years old, 11 startups

Richard Branson agrees completely, going to clubs, chasing girls, and dirt biking is too immature at 50. Girls chase him to go to his private island and do this:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/04/20/article-1171739-04...