Robin's Hood

I just had to blog this one. I am weak. I couldn't help myself.

Large Raw Sewage Spill In Port Of Sacramento | EcoEgg: "Fishing in certain parts of the Port Of Sacramento are closed tonight as crews try to clean and test the waters from thousands of gallons of raw sewage."

Reading this excellent article in El Reg it reminded me of some information I did not previously impart to you my loyal readers. Although I have blogged about the BBC's ill-fated iPlayer before but what I did not reveal then was that I actually attended an 'interview' to join the project back in 2005. The interview was a disaster and in just one hour I could see clearly three things:

1. The person interviewing me was confused about what he wanted (see "didn't have a scooby").
2. The project was mired in politics.
3. I wanted no part of it

Why is the iPlayer a multi million pound disaster? | The Register: "The story of the BBC's iPlayer is of a multi-million pound failure that took years to complete, and was designed for a world that never arrived. More was spent on the project than many Silicon Valley startups ever burn through, but only now can we begin to piece together how this disaster unfolded."

I project manage the development of websites for my clients. Where possible I like to use an open source package as basis such as Wordpress, Mediawiki, Joomla, etc. and then extend with PHP or whichever scripting language is to hand. Sometimes a project calls for pure old fashioned bespoke and I always go with PHP. It is easy to understand, easy to get resources for (for both development and support) and is ideal for quick cycle time iterative prototyping.

I was interested to read the experiences of Derek Sivers with Ruby on Rails below. He found PHP to be more appropriate to bespoking a website than its younger and sexier cousin.

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails - O'Reilly Ruby: "I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom."