June, 27, 2004 archives

age of miracles by john brunner is probably the weakest of his books i’ve read so far, which still puts in the category of pretty good. it starts slowly, but the idea of an indifferent alien presence appearing on earth and causing chaos is strong enough for a good story to gel.

lamb: the gospel according to biff, christ’s childhood pal by christopher moore is a modern-day apocrypha: a (very) humorous story about the life of christ from the point-of-view of biff, his best friend. it’s a new gospel, through the lens of a coming-of-age road-trip buddy story. (and with a hearty disclaimer that it’s just a story. make of it what you will.)

the guys who founded zend used to get hot under the collar because they believed they weren’t getting the recognition they deserved for php, whereas rasmus was more frequently quoted, interviewed, and credited. Andi and I created the language in 1997, when we needed a solution to implement a shopping cart project for University. Some ideas were borrowed from PHP/FI, a tool that we tried to use beforehand, but that proved to be far too limited and unreliable for our purposes. (via linux today.)

rafe colburn writes about using google to find javadoc pages, but i’ve been using it for something that feels even more odd — to go to amazon to grab album covers (to import into itunes) or find the isbn code of a book, i’ll just do a search like lamb biff amazon and it will be the first result. and because amazon loads so slowly and has the needless confusion of two search boxes next to each other on the front page, it’s a lot faster.

suddenly various projects are poking out of the dirt.