Far more often than I care to recall, I feel as though people don't read manuals. I think this is due either to the feeling that the author of a manual is somehow talking down to us or the feeling that needing to read the manual somehow makes us less of a person. Basically, it's due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of a manual.

Oracle and Google have been battling in court for years over whether Google's reimplementation of the Java APIs in Android constitutes copyright infringement. Note that the issue at stake is not whether Google infringed on Oracles copyright with regard to the implementation source code, but to the APIs themselves. Pivotal to understanding the situation is determining what, exactly, is an API. The judge in the case (who is cited in most articles as having learned Java specifically so he could understand this case, but that reads to me like a failure on the part of the prosecution to adequately explain what an API is) uses this metaphor:

How often have you written a piece of code that sets state (opens database connections, sets variables to let the rest of the world know what it's doing, etc.) at the beginning, does some processing, and then resets (or unsets) that state at the end of the function. Something like the following, which is arguably a subset of what I'm describing, but is realistically analogous to the piece of code that led me to this pattern (by fixing what may be one of the most embarrassing bugs of my career):

There's a little-known variant of Murphy's Law that says "Whenever a server goes down that absolutely needs to be brought back online immediately, it's inevitably the one that's accessible only via serial console and its only text editor is ed."

This morning, I listened to a recent episode of Hanselminutes, "Developing Designers with Catt Small". During their discussion, Scott mentions that "Internet Explorer will die" and "Safari is holding the web back," which immediately prompted a discussion of how evergreen browsers are presenting new and exciting challenges to todays web designers and front-end developers.

After a year and a half of (slowly) developing my PHP MVC framework pails, complete with its plugin architecture, CMS framework, authentication system, and eventual plans to embrace the composer ecosystem, I'm excited by some of the new things from the .NET community.

Well, it got to be about that time when I started to miss podcasting. More accurately, I started to miss rambling aimlessly about topic that I knew something about that listeners would listen to. I don't know if anyone has started to miss the podcast, but I feel it's time to revisit the format and give it a bit of a refresh.

So... I just got home from pitching the Picturebooth Social Wall at Colorado Springs New Tech with Ross Hill. The response was extremely positive and it's very exciting to get all the feedback we got.

This is the first release of Pails CMS 1.0. It's not necessarily the most full-featured, but it's definitely a CMS and it's definitely pretty cool. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Since the downsizing and restructuring of Synapse Software, I'm sure many readers are wondering what the next chapter in my life will be. Will I get a day job? Will I start going on a lecture circuit? Will I focus on my side projects? Will I ever do another startup?