LinLog

Unlike most episodes of "From the Archives", this one is just going to be current-day commentary. This was supposed to be a "linkblogging" post from way back on February 22, 2006. (That was probably not long after I added draft support to LnBlog!) However, it only had three links and I no longer care about two of them.

The one that is still good is Douglas Crockford's account of The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System. (The URL has changed since 2006, but but luckily Doug was considerate enough to keep a redirect. However, this publication date is a little misleading.) It's about the back-and-forth they had with Nintendo when trying to port Maniac Mansion to the NES.

I remember playing Maniac Mansion on the NES. I rented it from Video Entertainment, the video rental store in the next town over, several times. I never finished the game, but I remember liking it. I never played the PC version, but even the NES version was more than a little weird.

This article is Crockford's account of some of the odd things that Nintendo insisted they remove from the NES version. They range from silly to head-scratching. But if you've ever heard anything about Nintendo's approval process for NES games, you know that they were very strict about maintaining a certain image and so were very particular about what kind of content they'd allow. Either way, it's an entertaining read.

Like many kids, I watched professional wrestling when I was growing up.  From the time I was about 10 or 12 I was a big fan of the WWF and WCCW.  For a while I would religiously watch the regular programs on TV and even rented the older Wrestlemania VHS tapes from the local video store.  I lost track of it when I was in college, but it was great fun for a kid - lots of bold, flashy characters and enough action to be exciting, but not scary.

A few weeks ago I listened to Joe Rogan's interview with Diamond Dallas Page and it made me wonder what happened to some of the other iconic wrestling figures I remembered from my childhood.  Some of them I knew about - Hulk Hogan has been in the news; I knew Andre the Giant had died; I'd listened to Jake the Snake Roberts on Joe Rogan a few months ago.  But what about all the others?  What about people like Mr. Perfect, Bam Bam Bigelow, Ravishing Rick Rude, or the Ultimate Warrior?

Well, it turns out they're all dead.

I learned this from an unexpectedly captivating site called the Ten Bell Salute.  It's a database and tribute site dedicated to memorializing the deaths of professional wrestlers.  And it turns out there are a lot of them.

Part of the reason the site is both captivating and depressing is that it really brings home how tough the life of a pro wrestler actually is.  According to their data page, of the 2024 wrestler deaths in their database, 473 died before the age of 50 and the average age of death was only 61.  It's actually strangely comforting when you happen across one who was old enough to collect social security.

Each wrestler listed on the site has their own story, but many of them are quite tragic.  Many were due to drug use or complications thereof - sometimes from the performance-enhancing drugs used to build muscle, other times from narcotics to deal with injury or stress.  And some, like Kerry Von Erich, who committed suicide at 33, or Chris Benoit, who killed his family and then himself, are their own special kind of tragic.

Beyond the stories themselves, these deaths seem so impactful because it's the first time I've really looked at them as actual people.  On TV, I knew them only as their characters - big, muscular, walking down to the ring in elaborate costumes, putting on larger-than-life personalities and engaging in epic feuds with each other.  They hardly seemed capable of having the same problems as regular people.

But, of course, they were regular people. 

The fact is, you don't get into a line of work like that if you have a Harvard degree and a trust fund.  Wrestling may be "fake" in the sense that the outcomes are predetermined, but it's still incredibly physically demanding.  It's hard to take that amount of punishment, as often as they do, without your body starting to break down.  These people lived tough lives and it took a toll.  

So if you, too, loved pro wrestling as a kid, I recommend browsing through the Ten Bell Salute.  It's a nice way to bring back those childhood memories and, at the same time, reflect on the transience of life and the reality of the human beings behind the heroes and villains that we know from the media.  That may sound a bit heavy, but it's a surprisingly rewarding experience.

The other day, one of my co-workers posted a link to a semi-comprehensive list of everything that's wrong with PHP. This should be required reading for anyone who claims to like PHP.

The best thing about this article is that I actually learned a number of things from it. Apparently PHP has a lot of WTFs that I simply hadn't run into. Though it's relatively minor, my personal favorite is :

"gzgetss - Get line from gz-file pointer and strip HTML tags." I'm dying to know the
series of circumstances that led to this function's conception.

I would also love to know what motivated someone to include this function in the zlib extension. I mean, how many people have ever actually used that function? Like, three? It's ridiculously specialized and isn't part of the C API (I know because I checked) - there's no reason for it to exist. To me, that perfectly sums up the language's lack of any coherent design or sense of priority.

Of course, there were plenty of other nice little gems. For instance, the face that when $x is null, $x++ is 1, but $x-- is null. Or the notion that named parameters were rejected as a feature because they would "make for messier code". There's certainly lots of information and humor value there for anybody who is familiar with PHP.

Personally, after reading that, I think it's time for me to brush up on my C# and Python. I've been making my living writing PHP for five years now, and I fear it may be causing brain damage. After all, Edsger Dijkstra said that BASIC warps the mind, and PHP has been called "the Visual Basic of the web". And after reading this article, can there really be any doubt?

In the spirit of Raymond Chen, it's time for new year's link clearance! In other words, I'm posting all those links that have been sitting open in my Opera window for weeks which I'm probably never going to actually do anything with.

• A post with some code for doing prototype-based inheritance in PHP. As in, writing your PHP like it's JavaScript. Yeah, cause good things always come from trying to openly defy the conventions of your langage of choice.
• MVC is a lie. Good, at least I'm not the only one who finds some of these "MVC" frameworks a little questionable, with their grossly anemic domain models. Although I guess I have to give the CakePHP people credit on that one. They're at least in touch with reality. What with passing around of arrays of database records, they don't even pretend they're working with real model objects.
• A helpful link from F5 about parameters for Powershell scripts and some other useful stuff.
• Request/response testing in Powershell using the handy, dandy .NET WebClient class.
• A Get-ScriptDirectory function for Powershell. Kind of like PHP's __FILE__ trick.
• An interesting article on object-oriented event listeners for JavaScript.
• Wikipedia page on the SEI's Personal Software Process (PSP). I was put onto that by reading Smart Bear's book on code review, which was actually quite interesting. I'd definitely recommend it. It's totally free, but is published in dead-tree format, which is weird, but I haven't gotten any sales calls or anything, so they're cool.

Ah, Raymond Chen. You can always count on him for a good tip stated in a way that makes it seem blindingly obvious.

The other day I got a couple of good tips from his blog. While writing a simple batch script to wrap up executing some Selenium RC test cases, I had the need to change to another directory and then change back. A little Googling led me to this page, where Raymond expounds on the eminently useful %CD% environment variable, which stores the current directory. (Of course, I ended up just using pushd and popd, which I'd forgotten Windows had, but that's not the point.)

On the same page, Raymond links to a handy little 90-byte batch script that does the equivalent of the UNIX which command. I thought that was really great. In fact, that's something I've always wanted. I've got the UnxUtils, which includes a Windows port of which, but it's just not the same, because it requires you to specify the file extension. I'm not much of a batch scripter, so I never would have thought to even try doing that in a batch file. Go Raymond!

Just on a random link propagation note, today I found a very handy guide on making your own CD jackets out of paper. I was burning a couple of DVDs and didn't have any empty cases laying around, so I figured there must be a good way to fold them up in a piece of paper. A little Googling turned up this handy guide. It has a PDF of instructions and even measurements for use with different sizes of paper (though you can pretty easily eyeball it, especially with US letter).

Just thought that was a useful little piece of information. I'm going to have to hold on to that one for those frequent occasions where I have a disk and nothing to put it in.

Some quick links and commentary on news that's shown up in my RSS agregator this week.

Longhorn reloaded was shut down.
Apparently some people tried to take a copy of Windows Longhorn (the code-name for the beta releases of Vista) and publish an improved version of it. Naturally, Microsoft put the kibosh on that. The only news here is that some of them were actually surprised by that.

Dvorak says what I've been thinking.
Yeah, I'm sure the iPhone is great, but seriously, how many people are going to spend $600 on a freakin' cell phone? Unless you're rich, that's gadget-lust taken to an unhealthy extreme. Plus I'm getting really sick of it being the topic of every other link that gets posted to Digg.

Mono team does Silverlight in 21 days.
Well, sort of. From the sound of it, they have a working prototype rather than anything releasable. Quite an accomplishment, but it doesn't do as much to feed the self-congratulatory über-hacker mythology that programmers in general and the open-source community in particular like to cling to. But still, great job Miguel and company!

Westciv is running their free HTML and CSS courses again.
Right now they're on week 2 of CSS. I did these a few years back when I was first getting into web development and they're pretty good. If you want to learn web design, or if you're one of those backward incompetents who is still writing tag soup and freely mixing content with presentation, you should give it a try.

Mark Rasch on the legal implications of letting Google store your documents.
I've always been a little queasy about storing my personal stuff on somebody else's server. Apparently I'm not just paranoid.

Speaking of VMware, while researching some VMX file settings, I came across a very handy page on manually creating VM images. It even includes VMX file templates and pre-made empty VMDK disk image files. Very useful stuff.