Joelith's Journal

Zend, a PHP programmers best friend. A mostly component IDE that generally does everything you need to design and write PHP (people design in PHP ha!). It's let down in a number of areas (well it's on Java for one). But the one that frustrates me the most is the way it organises open files.

Lets imagine you are working on any project of a decent size. At the ACCC I am/was working on a project to 'webify' the paper-based requisition for travel form. Anyway I have about 30 files open when I'm working on this project. Most of them I need open at once (a couple I looked at once in the project and forgot to close). Zend can handily save the files that are open as a project and I can reload that project and have all those files open next time I start.

The problem is how it manages all these files:


As you can see it's a nightmare. It's not in any order (I think it may be in order of when you opened it). Why can't it be alphabetical at the very least? Worse is when you click on one of the entries in the lower lines. That whole line moves up to the top (since these are considered tabs to the document). This is really confusing since all the other lines shuffle around. So I knew that WorkflowActions.inc was on the 2nd line but then if I activate Email.inc it's now on the 3rd line. This is useless for any more than 7 documents (or enough to fit on one line). I spend a good few minutes looking through the tiny font to find the document that I want.

TextWrangler on the Mac puts the documents down the side in alphabetical order. Coda (another Mac programme) is similiar to Zend but doesn't use tabs, rather each file is effectively a button. When you click it highlights and the document is opened. This solves the problem of the lines being moved around randomly since the file doesn't have to move to the top to 'be attached'.

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Two comments on current television programmes:

1. Good News Week: GNW is back and it's dropped the stupid variety hour gimmick it had the first time it came to commercial television. And Mikey's back as well. He's lost a hell of a lot of weight but he seems to have also lost his sense of humour. None of his 'jokes' are funny and his timing is way off. The only reason his jokes appear to be funny is because somebody else runs with it and turns it into a funny joke. Also tonight they had this American who was even less funny then Mikey (if that's possible). If they can just drop Mikey (or make sure the rest of the cast is actually funny) then the show should survive.

2. As crap as the Wedge was, are you seriously telling me that the Shane Warne parody was the one that deserved to be turned into spin-off show - 'Mark loves Sharon'. Not that any of the skits on that horrible comedy show (I think it's offensive to real comedy shows to call that bilge comedy) deserved to be spun-off. This is why even American comedy is funnier then the crap that Australians turn out. Ah for a funny Australian sketch comedy show.

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Today I was at Supabarn getting some fruit. While I was grabbing some apples I noticed 2 people in the space of a few minutes pick some grapes and eat them. And they weren't the people you would normally associate with theft. One was a well-dressed older lady and the other was a middle-aged asian lady. Has it somehow become socially acceptable to steal? I realise it's only grapes and would have only cost less than a dollar, but these people didn't even look guilty. What has happened to society or am I making too much of this?

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Is it just me or does Ten think that I am an idiot? I realise that all 'grumpy young men' posts begin this way, but I'm sicked and tired of the way Ten is treating it's audience.

Let's start with Biggest Loser. I actually enjoyed this show in it's first season. I didn't watch it religously but I enjoyed tuning in every so often to see people that double my own weight and losing large percentages of Peter (smaller percentages of me, but you get the idea). It was on once a week and the epsidoe went through the normal - exercise routines, some politics and backstabbing, a challenge and then the vote. All over in one hour.

Now Ten has the latest Biggest Loser and it's excruciating. Take tonight's episode the stupid host has spent 3 ad breaks getting the votes of 6 people. 6 frickin people! Come on. It should be over in one ad break. Survivor can do it, why the hell can't Ten? It's worse because after each vote she recaps the votes so far. Does Ten think that I can't keep 6 (less really) votes in my head? Is this too complicated for the typical TV audience? Am I some kind of savant because I can keep track of two numbers in my head?

And then there's 'So you think you can dance'. Again I really liked the American version (both times). This was a show that I did watch religously, it was a really enjoyable show. Having now started watching the Australian version I think I know why I enjoyed the American one more - they only had one frickin episode a week. The Australian show has several episodes a week. I can't keep up. I actually have a life (probably comes as a surprise to some of you) and I don't have time to watch all the episodes. To be fair the American's actually had the same problem as us. The difference is that the show we got was a packaged recap of the week (ie: they would have the dance-off and then immediately give the results (rather than waiting for a week to get the SMS results)). This is a far better approach. My time is valuable - Ten should be lucky if they get one hour of my time. Actually screw that I'll wait for the torrent.

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