Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

It recently occurred to me that a certain website that I check regularly could be given an unofficial RSS feed by writing a script to pull in data from its SOAP interface and spit it out as a feed. Not many websites have SOAP interfaces, but this one does, and while I’m not sure they created it to allow third-party RSS feeds in particular, I’m sure they don’t mind if I just use it for my own secret consumption. That means I won’t be disclosing which site it is that my script is accessing, although the general principle about how to write a script like this should be more useful anyway. Of course I used PHP for the script, because that’s what webhosts support, so if you want a version written in a nice language like Groovy I’m afraid you’ll have to port this script to that language.

Yet again I have found myself on the wrong side of Debian’s strict packaging policy. There is a piece of software that I want to install which isn’t packaged for Debian, but which fortunately is packaged for the sister distro, Ubuntu. This alternative source of packages is only useful, though, if Ubuntu uses sufficiently similar package names and version numbers, otherwise the Debian package management tools will treat the package as invalid due to dependency problems. The last time I had to deal with this sort of problem was with an earlier version of the same package, plasma-widget-adjustableclock, but this time the dependency problem is slightly different and I’ve tried fixing the problem in a different way too. Below I detail what the problem is, and my not-entirely-successful efforts at solving it.

The opportunity to speak with Americans about their federal system is one I rarely turn down, as it helps me understand Europe’s federal system. While talking to a particular American, I found that, despite the stereotypes, they did not believe that the EU was a federal country, and although this meant they agreed with the vast majority of Europeans on the matter, I decided to dismiss their view as uninformed and presented them with a video of the EU president celebrating the EU national day by reading a speech and watching the EU flag being lifted by members of the EU army, followed by a military band performance of the EU national anthem. I feel, though, that to really convince an American (and possibly a European too) that the EU is a country, I must provide a list of the state flowers of each of the EU states, which was, as I explained in an earlier blog post, one of the only things the EU was missing.

I’ve recently made a few changes to my blog and thought that, in the self-referential tradition of bloggers, I should mention some of the decisions I made and how they affect my blog. The most external change, and the one mentioned in the title of this post, is that I do now have a domain to host this blog on. By “external” I don’t just mean it is potentially visible in your address bar when you visit any page of the blog, I also mean that it involved interaction with various third parties. It is a change I had been meaning to make for a while now, and one I should have made long ago, but hopefully it should last a long time.

By a strange coincidence, I’ve recently bumped into another PHP gotcha, well, actually three of them depending on how you’re counting, but I’m sure that these must be the last three unexpected things about PHP and I won’t soon have to write another blog post detailing something else unintuitive that PHP does. The reason these could be seen as one gotcha is that they all involve PHP’s support for floating point numbers, so one workaround would just be to not use that datatype at all in your programs. As I will show though, it is harder than you might think to avoid them, so perhaps the best advice is to avoid using numbers at all. To be on the safe side though, maybe you should just use a different programming language.

A project at work recently reached an interesting crossroads where it had to be decided what the spelling convention should be for some code which the company’s partners would have to interact with. The use of English as a common language had been uncontroversial up to that point, but there had crept into the software words which had different spellings between American English (en_US) and British English (en_GB). As a passionate European, it made sense to me to choose the version of English spoken by the English, but the more I researched it, the more I realised that the correct international standard really was en_US. Perhaps the deciding factor for me was that the coding standard for the European Space Agency requires the use of en_US spelling, which I will mention below in my depressingly convincing argument for that same linguistic standard.

While my previous blog post covered what may be an actual bug in PHP, there are still a couple of gotchas which might be worth mentioning. Firstly there is the inconsistent way it deals with single and double quotes around strings, and then there are the undesirable consequences of how it juggles variable types, for which I have an example. Of course, all languages have their problems, with the obvious exception of Groovy, the superiority of which I will demonstrate with a one-liner, possibly accompanied by an excuse to explain why that simple one-liner was so hard to write.

The title of this post is even less helpful (and less fair) than the title of the blog post which inspired it, so it should probably be viewed as parody. However, I do sadly have a file on my computer called hate.php containing a series of lines of valid PHP source code which produce unexpected and even perplexing results. Admittedly there are only 6 lines, and the behaviour of half of them is as documented, but I hold PHP to a higher standard than I would a “messy” language like Perl, so I thought this deserved a blog post.