I figured I had to learn something about MVC sometime, but here I am doing so — and it isn’t funny.

My friend Kwame had a book on Ruby which I perused and found the language was relatively simple. Now for such a simple, amazing language — and framework — one would think the install process was just as easy. Well, it isn’t 00 at least not to me.

I read tutorials on the arcane of the arcane, built it myself and whatnot and in the end couldn’t get it to run on my Windows machine — not that it was present in the online repositories to get it for my Fedora machine.

My answer? Screw rails. If I need a framework I’ll go for Cake — but we all know I won’t. After all, I’m very egotistical and want to try writing everything out myself.

The crazy context menu item just keeps getting in my way…

Doing a Google search, it’s apparent I’m not the only one who’s looking for such a feature. I know, I know. I could have written the column names manually during the time I typed this.

I’ve called session_set_cookie_params to no avail everywhere in my code — the time in the db’s correct, but the session always expires when the browser is closed. Setting the session cookie myself gives a different problem — it gets invalidated on the next page load.

Arrrrrrrgh! I hope it really is because I’m running it on a local domain. If it isn’t, I just might get angry, download the PHP source, learn C and rewrite PHP in no particular order (I wish!).

Something about code profiling from George Schlossnagle’s Advanced PHP Programming came back to me, and the hunt began. I must have been typing in the wrong stuff because only commercial products kept coming back until I got a Sitepoint article on XDebug.

Downloaded it, got WinCacheGrind and spotted the problem in less than a minute. That ‘nifty’ html_2_xhtml function I wrote sometime before when I was just starting out with regular expressions did a lot of arcane stuff with the e modifier of preg_replace.

Solution: swipe the wpautop and wptexturize functions from Wordpress. The slow content item runs in less than 0.6 seconds now, and the other items take between 0.1 and 0.3 seconds to process. And er, the PHP website warns about using strstr just to determine if a needle exists in the haystack. Replacing it with strpos in my own version of wptexturize saw an increase in response times (by about 17 milliseconds).

Let’s hope I don’t keep profiling away instead of doing some real coding in the next few weeks.

I couldn’t find a basic TinyMCE-PHP implementation back then. FCKEditor (it’s come a long way in the last two years) gave me a lot of bad code. By chance I came across Innovastudio’s editor. It did everything it said it would — the problem was, it wasn’t free.

After some more scouring I came across Solemtra’s Spaw Editor. It gave me some pretty bad HTML code but I wrote a simple regexp matching function that converted all the uppercase tags (a la IE) to lowercase and did some font to span tag conversion.

Looking back now, am I glad I made the decision? You bet!

For one, it gives very very XHTML-compliant code now (no FONT tags + lowercase characters), works in Opera 9 (surprise!) and still has a nifty PHP class I can instantly plug in.

I’m off to look for a PHP Word to HTML parser. I need one badly :(.

From an ethical viewpoint how do you respond to a [fishy] project that asks you to create 100 fake MySpace profiles or these ones that ask you to spam blogs, forums and social networks? On the one hand you’re making your cool money and on the other you’re contributing to problems.

Heck, I deal with spam everyday on my blogs. I wouldn’t want to help someone write a script that’d pass my own filters and hit my own blog.

Here’s the final clincher: a script to achieve higher appeal than MySpace between $100 and $500. If I had such an idea, I sure wouldn’t develop it and sell it for such a measly price.