I’ve been looking for a decent PHP editor for Mac and PC for the last few days but have been unable to find anything really great. There is the Eclipse Project, which looks very good and with a plugin can do most of the PHP work I need it to. Zend has a development environment that would be perfect but it’s pricey and is written in Java (and I’m not sure how good their coding is). The last one I looked at was ActiveState’s Komodo which looks awesome but only works on Windows and is again, somewhat pricey.

If anyone has any opinions on what editor would suit my needs please send an e-mail to ssegraves [AT] gmail.com

My main requirement is a color syntax highlighting, class browser, works on both Windows and Mac OS X, and intellisense would be nice.

We have recently started restructuring a site to include some new elements to make managing it easier. When we first set out the design of the new features was straight forward and my coworker and I both felt we had a good grasp of what was going to happen on both the database side and in the actual interface. We were dead wrong.

Development started out on the right foot but as we added certain functionality we began to realize that the functionality was beginning to change other pieces of the software. The result was database problems that could not be resolved through rewriting queries and making table changes, to fix the problems we would have to restructure the database completely. Not an option at this point.

The solution? Inform the client of the bigger requirements and the change of certain elements and let them make the call.

Basically I hate being in a situation like this, it is not fun for anyone and it just adds costly time to development. Was it a problem of foresight for my coworker and I? Personally, I think we could have taken more time to lay out the needs and the changes that would occur but I also think that there were certain things we wouldn’t be able to see effected until we put the system in action.

This makes me lean much more to modular design in software, with components completely seperated from one another and linked by a central “switchboard”. Hello, Java! Java’s OO design forces this onto the developer (for the most part) and makes software development a much more modular process. C/C++ do this as well but since they do not force it like Java there are ways to get into sloppy, nonmodular code.

We are waiting on my new PC here at work so I get to work on a new Power Mac G5. It is a fairly high end model with dual 2.0 Ghz processors, 1.5 GB of RAM, 250GB harddrive, and a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card. I am thoroughly impressed with the usability of the Mac. I spent most of my time today coding some new modules for a past product and I was able to switch between my terminal, my browser, my coding application and my local folders a lot more quickly than I am with the PC.

The keyboard that comes with the new Power Macs is awesome! The keys are soft and close enough together to where you don’t have to work to get a key combination to work.

I did notice that simple things like tabbing over in a form didn’t work as I thought it would and I found that Firefox and Safari both skipped over dropped down lists. I also realized that the “End” key didn’t work when I was coding. Whenever I wanted to go to a line of code and add something to the end I was forced to use the arrow keys which though small was annoying enough for me to get frustrated.

Other than that I am jaw-dropped by the machine… If I had the money I would definitely consider purchasing one.

I will be offline for the next few days as my dad and I finish up moving. If you need to get ahold of me just shoot me an e-mail. I will try to post and keep up with everything from work but I don’t know how much time I’ll have for it.

I made some progress this evening in the way of getting this site to automatically ping another site when it’s updated. All of this will come together when I have the new version finally completed, which could a little ways off.

We moved a lot of stuff into my new apartment today. Most of it was kitchen stuff with some office supply type things. My dad and I will probably hit it strong again tomorrow and finish cleaning up at my current apartment so that we can get checked out and not have to worry about it anymore.

I am fooling around with building the functionality to allow this site to autoping sites like Ping-o-matic and I am having trouble creating the right XML-RPC calls to do it. If anyone would like to help me figure this out and get it working please e-mail me at s [at] badice.com.

My dad and I made our way back to Lubbock yesterday. It was a decent trip and I am feeling a little bit better finally.

We’ve spent most of today cleaning and packing things up to move to my new place. Everything is going smooth and I am guessing that we’ll stop for the day sometime soon.

In my spare time I have been playing with a redesign of the database that runs this site. Messing with more of the internal abilities of MySQL I think I will be able to half the number of queries required to make the site function.

So what’s in store? Well, I’ve been entertaining the idea of bringing comments back, but I am still worried about comment spam. I also have been working on a better way of categorizing and organizing posts in a way that will allow me to keep track of things easier and make it easy for readers to find what they are looking for.

Search functions has also been at the top of my list as I try to make it as fast and effective as possible.

So that’s where everything stands right now. I believe that most of the site’s searching abilities will be written using Python but I have not completely settled yet.

After being home and using my parent’s 17″ flat panel monitor I have come to realize how useful a high resolution is. More screen real estate does equal more productivity.

The more you can fit on the screen the more you can see at once and the more you can see at once the less clicking and searching you have to do. Little timesavers like that add up big in the end.

So what’s my point? Well, it would be great to have a new computer with a video card that supported dual monitors so that I could use two 17″ LCDs (or CRTs) to do my work. Hey, I can dream can’t I?

So Sugar Land is boring. I tried to go to Target last night with a couple of friends (who haven’t seen in a year) but it was closed at 11:30pm! Wal-Mart was next on our list because it should be open 24hrs. but it was closed! What is going on in this town?

Wal-Mart boasts that they are open 24hrs. well, they better get their facts straight.