piotr_krzyzek

There is one thing that I've found that'll boil blood faster than anything in a developer: telling him (or her) that something isn't possible (in code).

I recently had the displeasure of signing up for a service where their system is actually pretty good, though it has a few. Being in business and being a developer I thought, hey ... it's a Sunday evening might as well have some programming fun to see if I can work around this system issue.

Before starting I shot off an email to the support team to ask if maybe I missed a button, option or setting somewhere. Eventually they replied with Nope, not possible within their own system. Normally that would be understandable right? Some systems just don't have some features, not the end of the world.

Except ... this issue is about having hidden input fields when submitting an opt-in form. I find it rather handy to have hidden fields which let me track where my opt-ins are coming from, thus it's kind of a required feature for me. Though their reply was specifically "not possible inside our email system". Well, after going back and forth and telling them I'm not using their email system, but just their opt-in page editor and using MailChimp which can accept reasonably any field ... I knew for a fact it can be done. It's just a simple <input type="hidden" .....> field!

After a few heated emails back and forth they just stopped replying and I got to working around their issues.

Suffice it to say: custom code and hidden input fields do certainly work, just have to work around it a little bit. So never, ever tell a developer something isn't possible when we know for a fact it is possible (based on their system setup).

Sorry for the rant.

Moral of the story? Literally anything you want is possible with code. Don't tell developers something is not possible or we'll go around proving you wrong. It's bad for business.

While I still am a huge fan of Linux and would love to go back to Linux, I've been using OS-X primarily for work. The one thing which greatly saddens me and makes me worry for the future is the lack of an open and centralized place (controlled by the user) to manage, install, find, update, and delete apps just like Linux has with pacman (Arch) or apt-get (Debian).

OS-X has the App store, but that's Apple controlled and limited.

Windows has ... ? I haven't been in windows lately so I don't know what it is. But at least windows has the Add/Remove programs panel!

So, why aren't there any real public tools such as apt/pac/yum (whatever) for Mac/Windows?

It seems like a single central point of search and control would make life a lot simpler (with the possible addition of certain UI elements, ect ect...).

Is there even anything like that around?

There are many paths to technology. Our modern smart phones are the most perplexing to me because I, for one, think that overall having more specialized technology is a good thing. For example, a dedicated physics processing unit on a GPU, a dedicated camera, specialized speakers for high end audio manipulation ....<p>Though where is the line between specialization and generalization, for which one is more appropriate or better? For most people (the general public):<p>Is is better to have a general widget that does many things well enough, or have several unrelated widgets that each does it's own one thing extremely well?

Are there more Windows exploits and vulnerabilities knows and documented because of the larger user base or because it is less 'secure' than Linux/OS-X?

I'm doing a bit of research about Joomla, partially because a client asked me to though also because I'm having trouble finding qualitative data for or against it. Instead what I mostly find are useless posts simply ranting about how they hate it because of XYZ but never back up their claims; in other words, to me they seem to talk trash about Joomla without any evidence to back it up. The other side of the coin: I see articles saying how great it is, but all they tell me are the feature set in layman's and sales like terms; all I can think of when I read those are: well, there is nothing here that tells me how it is different, better or unique when compared to other platforms on the interwebz (yes, with Z!).<p>One popular article mentions the difficultly of upgrading from Joomla 1.0 to 1.7(?? or some version like that). Though it seems rather silly to assume a completely re-written CORE would be 100% compatible with old stuff. Stuff from Apple OS 8/9 does not and will not work with OS X. It's just too different of a system.<p>That said, my current bias is to just say "I don't see any reason to use Joomla over what we use now," though the technology does interest me. So, can someone please shed some light for me on how or why Joomla may (or may not) be a great system with proper data to backup their claims. Simply saying "it sucks" or "it's great" will not help this conversation since it's just favourtism at that point.<p>Thoughts?

This is a question that has been plaguing me since I started web development and consulting. The more I reach out into the world, the more I see companies with absolutely horrid website designs and yet the companies are doing extremely well. Maybe I'm missing something? So: while I understand a company isn't it's website, but I believe a website helps define a companies image. So why do companies stick with, pardon my language, P.O.S. websites?