cftopper.com

I followed a link from Digg.
Appantly my programmer personality type is:

   DLSB

You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.


You like coding at a Low level.
You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.


You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.


You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

The Googlebot is retarded.

Why? Because it has absolutely no idea what a base href tag is for.

I use a base href on all my sites to make internal linking much easier - no matter what the URL for the page on the site looks like, the link to another page will remain the same.

For those who don't know a base href looks like this <base href="">. When you use a base href on your site, all relative links are from that URL. So a link to "index.cfm" from the URL "page/somesubfolder/" will go to "index.cfm" instead of "page/somesubfolder/index.cfm".

But Mr. G, I-control-the-world, A. Bottie chooses to plough right on throught my base href scoffing at my pityful attempt to direct it to the content.

This is why I am continually getting error reports from sites where I have something like <cfparam name="URL.id" type="numeric">

Instead of getting a normal link like index.cfm/page/viewproduct/id/34, the bot is interpreting URLs like index.cfm/page/viewcat/index.cfm/viewproduct/34 and this is generating an error report which is automatically emailed to me every time the Googlebot goes into action on one of our client sites.

For FS, how hard is it for the Google engineers to intrerpret that there is a standard base href on the page. Or is it that the Googlebot is hedging it bets and checking to see if the base href was a mistake and there IS a valid page at it's conjured link URL.

ps. I'll probably get a permanent thumbs down in the Google ranking for this - Mr G.Bot tie knows when hes being insulted and he doesn't like it. You don't fuck with the bot - he controls the Internet, he can break you like that .

Don't get me wrong, I like Internet Explorer 7 and I applaud the effort made by the IE team but guys could you not have improved the shoddy error reporting.

Not long ago, I used Internet Explorer almost exclusively and one of the reasons Firefox has stolen my soul is down to it's developer-friendly error reporting and debugging.

What prompted this rant was an error I encountered first thing this morning on my current project. Internet Explorer simply said, "Hey dipship, you have an error, go figure". Also IE seems to displays the exact same error message, 'Object missing', for a myriad of different scenarios.

In Contrast

Firefox on the other hand, says "Yo! Little problem on line 1. There's no init() method.". It tells me exactly what the problem is! No thinking involved. Time saved. And it also provides a link to bring up the code, be in in the current file or on some dynamically generated JavaScript file. Very handy.

Appeal to the IE7 Team

IE Team, please help us developers. Is there some developer extension for IE7 I don't know about? I just searched and installed the developer toolbar for IE7; it's good but alas, it doesn't provide better debugging services.

Final IE Rant

One final rant: IE7 should lose the annoying Error on Page message in the bottom left of the browser.

It only advertises how crummy some developers are (notice I didn't say we) and frightens little children .

 

I think Ruby on Rails sucks. I'm sick of hearing about it.

I just watched all the videos at:

http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts

and i'm not excited. OK maybe "sucks" is extreme, but in fairness, it definitely is way over-hyped. It's nowhere near as great as it hype. Really!

One thing I will say, the documentation doesn't make RoR look like a piece-of-cake.

It's late - I'm too tried, lazy and inarticulate to make a decent argument so I'll leave it to the experts... just do a google search for "ruby on rails sucks". I just did... wow apparently I'm not the first to blog this exact opinion - people are sick of reading "yet-another-ruby-sucks-bait-post" so i'll shut up now.

But there, I said it. I'm happy now.

ColdFusion is a much better platform in my humble, biased opinion.

Update

Excellent - Joel shares my opinion.... and he's actually used it. And it makes interesting reading. Aside from all the hype, it looks like RoR ain't no smoking joe.

The solution is to stop playing and start over at the beginning and DO THINGS RIGHT THIS TIME, DAMMIT! Here is an actual entry from the Rails FAQ:

"Q012:That stinks... I want the scaffold code without starting over!

Too bad. Start a new rails project, run scaffold, then manually add the missing stuff to your new project from your old project with copy and paste."

Are we having fun yet?