what to bring to Comic-Con

I’m having a little trouble deciding on which of my many random gadgets I should bring with me to Comic-Con this year. I’ve been thinking a bit about how this has changed over the years.  I think, for the first couple of years I went, I probably didn’t bring any — no cell phone, no laptop, nothing. If somebody back home needed me, they’d have to call my hotel and leave a message. (And if I had to return the call… geez, remember how much long-distance calls from a hotel phone cost?) And I would just ignore e-mail for the week. It wasn’t a big deal. (Hard to imagine that now.)

I remember bringing various handhelds over the years — my Palm VII, Palm i705, Toshiba E310, and possibly others. And I have occasionally brought a laptop. And a camera.

This year, I will of course bring my iPhone and iPad. I’ll probably bring my Kindle, though maybe not. I want some stuff to read on the plane, but maybe I’ll just bring a couple of graphic novels. Or read comics on my iPad. I *should* bring a laptop. But the wifi on my MacBook has been acting up, so I may not be able to use the internet on it, unless my hotel has wired connections. And my ThinkPad is kind of bulky, so I’d rather not travel with it if I don’t need to. I’m seriously thinking about just taking the iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard. I like the idea of not having to lug a laptop around with me.

This will be the first time I’ve gone to Comic-Con since leaving NMS. I had a bit more responsibility there than I do at my current job, so I felt then that it was pretty important to keep up with things, and have the ability to run Lotus Notes, and remote into the network, and stuff like that. My work now is such that I can probably just scan e-mail once or twice a day, and maybe shoot off a quick reply or two here and there. There shouldn’t be any real reason for me to have to remote in. If I’m lucky, I may actually be able to relax and enjoy the con…

More Comic-Con stuff

I spent a little time today double-checking some stuff related to my travel arrangements for Comic-Con. First, I found the paperwork from the last time I went to the con — 2008. So I’ve skipped three years. I guess that’s long enough that it’ll feel fresh and new, to some extent, this year.

This year, I’m staying farther away from the Convention Center than I ever have before. I’m staying at the Hilton San Diego Mission Valley, about 5 miles from the convention center. It’s on one of the con bus routes, but I know from previous experience that those buses can be less than reliable, so I’m happy to have found that it is also a 10 minute walk from the trolley station at Hazard Center. And they’re running some special trolley service for the con, so that should help.

PHP

I’ve been doing enough PHP work lately that this blog post really speaks to me. Here’s a good quote:

PHP isn’t so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory.

I kind of like Drupal, which is of course written in PHP, but I think I’d like it more if it was written in… something else. I’m not sure what.

You can certainly write good things in PHP, and Drupal is an example of that. CodeIgniter seems like a good thing too,  though I haven’t had much experience with it.

I recently had to do some work on what I’d call a “legacy” PHP site, which was basically all PHP spaghetti code, poorly done HTML, and questionable JavaScript. I wonder how many sites like that one are out there, written 5 or 10 years ago, possibly by an amateur, and working *just* well enough that nobody wants to pay to rewrite it from scratch. Probably a lot!

Stack Overflow to the rescue

Don’t you love it when a completely random person on StackOverflow, with a reputation score of just 1, has the answer you need to an annoying problem that has completely screwed up a production rollout? And which you would never have figured out on your own? Thanks!

Drush on Windows and Mac

Yes, this is another post about Drupal. I just feel like I need to write some of this stuff down as I figure it out, for my own reference if nothing else. I recently got Drush working on both my work PC and my Mac.

Surprisingly, it was a lot easier to get working under Windows than under Mac OS X. The Windows setup is mostly accomplished by just running this installer. The main MSI file up on the site right now is dated 6/4/12, so it’s up to date. The only thing I changed was to edit the path settings post-install to put my existing copy of PHP in my path, so Drush could find it.

On the Mac, I wanted to follow the recommendation on the main Drush page to do the install via Pear. I did not have Pear set up on my Mac, though, so I needed to figure that out first. That’s not hard to do under 10.7, as described in this blog post. I then had a couple of permission problems to work through, but after taking care of those, I seem to have a working Drush install.

I also needed to do a little follow-up work to add /usr/local/mysql/bin to my path, to get archive-dump to work. I’m not sure why I hadn’t added that to my path when I installed MySQL back in December. (I was amused, by the way, to see that the last edit to my .bash_profile was from back in 2005. Apparently, I was trying to get gpg working. Also, apparently, .bash_profile gets pulled along when you migrate to a new Mac, since my current MacBook isn’t quite that old.)

I intend to write a post soon on how I’m running a PHP script under Drush to import data into Drupal, but i don’t think I’m going to write that up today.

Drupal 7 Development

I’m continuing my somewhat slow attempt to become a Drupal expert. After finishing up a couple of general Drupal books from Packt, I started “Drupal 7 Module Development,” also from Packt. I got up to chapter four, then put it down in frustration. I’ll likely pick it up again, but it’s not an easy book to read straight through, with little prior Drupal dev experience.

So, then I picked up “Pro Drupal 7 for Windows Developers,” and I’m doing much better with that one. I just finished chapter 5, which walks you through the creation of a simple, but non-trivial, module. I found it fairly easy to follow, and a good start. The book is (obviously) written for Windows programmers looking to learn Drupal, specifically ASP.NET developers, so it’s a good fit for me.

There’s still a lot more to learn. Drupal’s API and hook system are fairly complex and extensive. But I think I’m on the right path.

PHP IDEs

Since I’m doing more and more PHP development, I’ve been spending a bit of time trying to figure out if I can put together a decent development and debugging environment. Up until now, I’ve just been using Notepad++ (on the PC) and TextMate (on the Mac).

I’ve switched over to Komodo Edit on both platforms now, and that works pretty well. To do debugging, you need to spend $300 on Komodo IDE. But Komodo Edit does a lot, including auto-completion, syntax checking, and the ability to drill down into function definitions.

I like the idea of having a debugger, of course, so I decided to explore a couple of free IDEs that would support that. Netbeans looks nice, but it’s pretty heavy. Eclipse PDT is a bit better, but still kind of bloated. I think I may have to spend the $300 on Komodo IDE.

AdSense

I put AdSense on my blog about two years ago. I haven’t really been looking at it very often, but I just took a look, and I’m now up to $2.99 in earnings. It looks like Google doesn’t pay out until you reach $100, if I understand their chart correctly, so I guess I won’t actually see any money from them until about 50 years from now, if my current rate of earning remains constant. In terms of hits, I’m averaging about a dozen per day, most of which are probably bots.

Of course, my intention with this blog is not to make money. I recently started reading John Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, a collection of some of his blog posts, so this has gotten me to thinking a bit about the purpose of keeping up a blog. I’ve been blogging for longer than most people (since 2001), and I’ve been doing it with some consistency. My purpose has been, variously: to make note of certain events in my life, for future reference; to post information that may be helpful for anyone who happens to stumble across it; and to, in general, have an online “home” where people can find me and see a bit of what I’ve been up to.

Other sites have popped up to assume some of these roles of course. Facebook is the online “home” for most people, where their friends can find them and keep up with them, and where they can post photos, funny links, and whatnot. StackOverflow, Code Project, and similar sites offer a way for a programmer to give back to the community by posting useful information and sharing code. But I still think it’s a good idea to keep a blog going, especially when you’ve already been doing it for so long.