KDE -> Ratpoison -> Awesome

KDE is great to flaunt (esp to your friends on shiny Winedwhores 7 junk), but too bulky for my liking. Htop reported that I was using approximately 350MB of memory consistently (no Nepomuk *)) and this sounded ridiculous enough to warrant a full-scale switch to Ratpoison.

[8:32:32 am] * pavan_ just switched over to Ratpoison from KDE.
[8:33:20 am] Quit SandGorgon has left this server (Ping timeout: 265 seconds).
[8:35:51 am] <wheels> [10 minutes pass]
[8:35:59 am] <wheels> * pavan_ just switched back.

Apart from the curious lack of direction (virtual-solo projects and the FUDs thereof), there hasn't been too much worthy of interest in the last 3-4 months or so.

* Much ado about JavaScript:

node.js: Finally, JS outside all the pot-plumbing in DOM-land. It's been a tremendous journey discovering node all the way this far, and it looks like a project for the future.

[UPDATE]: Facebook plans to release a rewritten PHP runtime shortly. There was some speculatory report which made claims of a 10Ximprovement over mod_php.

Lately, I've managed to push myself to work on a new (and hopefully useful) pet project. For somebody whose constrained world-view of PHPLand was centered around producing or maintaining MVC frameworks that weren't full of shit bloat, It's been an interesting experience treading previously uncharted territory.

The most bitter truth is complicated
Let's accept it. PHP (for it's 33% share of the web, facebook, wikipedia, yahoo! and everything else included) is a tough nut to scale. The conventional way of scaling the PHP-layer for an application from scratch involves getting your hands dirty in the world of web servers, load balancers, opcode-caches and more.

http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html

Matter of notice, especially for PHPers, MySQLers in one of the EU nations.

This is a laughable account of profound hypocrisy. MySQL maintained a smart dual license policy throughout (I'm not complaining!), and sold out to Sun in it's ailing days(?) (This was disappointing) and eventually Oracle got a runaway deal on everything, but it's now that Monty expresses moral outrage over Oracle's ownership.

You might call me cynical, but this is a ranty (and nothing new) list of complaints + FUDs against most web development / application frameworks. Seems like this is also a natural point of transition for believers in another (new) faith, that of self-help (albeit more self deception and vanity all the same).

You fit the bill, rather than the bill fitting you
So many times, it seems that the problem is with MVC as a concept itself. The inherently flat flavor most frameworks put MVC in action to makes it that much more difficult for large codebases. It can't be helped feeling that adopting an MVC design is in many cases, squeezing yourself into a car rather than walking into one.

The true spirit of traveling is in *NOT* planning on the places or (the intention of) arriving.
— I don't know who

Not to appease my reader-base (which hardly exists in the first place), But for some soul-satiation which writing does provide.

On the other side of things, Traveling has hit an all-time low and life has been so hectic that I've found very little for all else. Maybe it *should* be this way, atleast at times: You get to savor those breaks in that much more bliss. Then again, Being the perennially paranoid restless person that I am, it takes more than an escapist getaway to find true peace. As Lao-tzu remarked, "I must find my way".