Simon in Peru

When a man writes is it with the intent that it will be remembered in time? Is this the reason a man writes? I've never believed that. However, I should qualify that statement, or perhaps restate it and say "I don't believe that a man who writes only to be remembered will ever write something worth remembering!"

That said, I am always moved when I read something worthy of remembrance. I recently came across the below while reading of Simon Bolivars' trials in Peru. He was obviously in a rather dark place and managed to express his feelings in a way that's just plain amazing, tho it may be a bit loquacious for modern tastes. ;-)

Until now I have fought for liberty: in future I will fight for my glory, no matter what it costs. My glory now consists in ruling no more and in thinking of nothing but myself: I have always had this intention but it increases progressively by the day. My years, my ill health, and my disillusion with all the dreams of youth prevent me from taking any other way. The presence of another person kills me: I live amongst the tress of this miserable place on the coast of Peru and I have become a misanthrope overnight. But you must understand that I am not depressed, and this loathing for people and society does not come from a physical cause or from an personal trouble, but from a conviction deep within me. Ambition, says Rousseau, guides men when they reach the age of forty, and I have reached that age. But my ambition has died. I have nothing to hope for and everything to fear. Observe the breakdown in human affairs. At all times the works of men have been ephemeral but in our day they are like the emerging embryo that dies before it even develops. On all sides I hear the sounds of disaster. My ear is one of catastrophes. Everything comes life and dies before my eyes as though struck by lightning. Everything passes and I would be a fool to flatter myself that I can stand firm in the midst of so many upheavals, in the midst of so much destruction, the the midst of the moral subversion of the world. No, my friend, that cannot be! Since death has not decided to take me under it's protective wings, I must hurry to hide my head in the midst of oblivion and silence, before I am struck by blows from heaven and reduced to dust, to ashes, to nothingness. It would be madness on my part to watch the storm and fail to take shelter... Everyone falls, struck by be disgrace, or disaster. Can I remain standing? Impossible. I too must fall.

Feel free to return to your romance novels now.

And yet more bad code!

I guess it really doesn't matter where the code comes from or how high tech their name sounds. Most of it is just plain bad! I'm now staring down the pipe of more headache with an absolutely terrible code base that reads like a collection of ALL of PHP's (and development in general) bad practices.

Coding is the one place where all of it's practitioners need to be like Monk. That's because all code needs to be well ordered, commented, and laid out. Otherwise, nothing is efficient and nothing is easy to work with. When your guests come over and need towels for the shower do you just say, "Oh they're somewhere back there" with a dollop of uninterested hand waving? More often then not (assuming you care), you tell them where they can find it. Even it it's just "In the closet next to the bathroom", it's a good bet that your closet (once again assuming you actually care) is well ordered enough that Jane Guest can just open it and quickly grok what's going on.

Now I don't claim to be the best or know the most (but I do like my stuff!) but perhaps I should start charging what some of these tossers are for chucking out that crap code. After all...

a) The cream rises to the top.
b) In order to be cream, you must first believe you are cream!

OK.... End rant.

Dealing in a sea of noise

"What is that supposed to mean"?

"Nothing".

I don't really care much for his politics (In particular, his foreign policy), but you have to admit that this is just downright cool. Are there any reasons we can't relax while working at world domination?

Your embed code here!

More bad code woes

And it's not my code this time either. I've been working with Opencart on the behalf of a client and it's really turned out to be a pain in the arse. Much more so then I expected. I initially thought it was fantastic by virtue of it's MVC approach, but jumping into it has really left scratching my head in areas.

But rather then really go in to details, I'm going to complain about one thing that makes less sense then any of the other odditities. In particular, it's how it handles options for products and especially how it updates them. The update method in the model actually deletes the rows in the database then re-inserts all of them regardless of their being any changes. This is an extremely brain dead algorithm and makes extending the feature a trip to hell.

Oh well. Life is going to suck for the rest of this evening.