Joseph Piché, Web development professional with expertise in PHP, MySQL query optimization, Ajax, and XHTML.

I've been working at KASA Capital for about 7 months and I feel like I've gotten a good handle of some of the more “gritty” details of how PHP works. Unfortunately though, it means I have a running list of annoyances with the language—some more difficult to deal with than others.

1. Keywords are case-insensitive. Being able to write the word true using uppercase or lowercase may be aestheticly useful depending on the context, but I don't think there would be any situation where writting tRuE or TRue would be a good idea. The last thing I want to see when optimizing someone else's code is variable-case keywords. Even using all uppercase keywords is highly suspicious, and when I actually saw this the other day, I found the code almost unreadable. I also think that having case-sensitive keywords in PHP would improve parser times, but I haven't tested this theory. What I do know is that other interpreted languages like Python have strict rules for keywords, and Python code tends to run much faster than PHP code (of course this is not a proof though and may actually have no correlation).

2. isset(), unset(), and NULL are confusing. A while back, I wrote a whole bunch of Python code. Transitioning back to PHP for work was difficult first because of the semicolon use in PHP, but second because of PHP’s (lack of) variable declaration. Technically, the documentation is very specific, but most implementations have a low setting for the default error_reporting level so many programmers have learned to be lazy with variables. After a security audit of your site though, you would probably learn very quickly to code using error_reporting(E_ALL|E_STRICT).

3. When using double quotes with a string, you may include PHP variables in it thus having PHP parse the string. This really isn't that big of an issue since it is well documented, but most PHP programmers I've run into don't understand that calling the parser takes additional resources which may in turn slow down your code.

4. Magic Quotes. If you have ever had to deal with magic quotes you will understand that this is the single most terrible aspect of the language to ever happen. The theory of it might have been okay, but in practice it is extremely frustrating--not to mention that against recommendations, debian (and thus Ubuntu) packages of PHP have magic quotes on by default. I am so glad this was deprecated in 5.3.

5. I can't echo HTTP headers. The only way to manipulate HTTP headers is to use the header function. Under most circumstances this is okay, but there are a unique instances like streaming content in a proxy-like manner where the headers are important and it would be too intensive to parse the stream, so I would like to simply be able to echo them. When using PHP in CLI mode, I can use the -q flag to turn header output off, but this is not available in CGI mode, which most people use.

Even with all that, I do still use PHP at work; but constantly trying to write clean, efficient code goes a long way.

This is my apology to users of Internet Explorer version 6. If you are viewing this site in that browser, you probably think that I am a terrible web designer. The real reason my site looks terrible (that is the side bar is at the top and is not a set width) in Internet Explorer version 6 (and earlier) is that the rendering engine of that browser is antiquated and does not recognize CSS commands margin:0 auto; or max-width and nor does it correctly render float, all of which every other modern browser including Internet Explorer version 7 displays correctly.

I don’t understand why you would freely choose to use Internet Explorer at all, but if you are, I beg you to take a look at one of the better options: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome. Of course if you are an Apple user, Internet Explorer hasn’t been an option for a few years.

In case you just think me lazy: my full-time job is writing PHP, XHTML, Javascript and SQL, so when I get home, I don't spend that much time coding. When I built this theme, I only spent a few minutes on it here and there; so I actually just forgot to test it in really old browsers. But yet again, I feel less-than pleased with the theme, so hopefully on the next rendition I will get around to fixing the site in Internet explorer 6.

I have been a loyal customer with Verizon Wireless for about 4 years for a simple reason: they have better coverage than anyone else. This well-advertised fact is not disputed by other companies, and I can personally attest to it, having lived in North Dakota for a 5 years.

But they are behind the times and just don't understand customers. When I buy a phone with Bluetooth, I expect to be able to use that functionality. No. With my Bluetooth-capable phone on Verizon, they would not allow me to transfer pictures off my phone via Bluetooth.

So after sampling a bunch of phones, I decided on the Pre with Sprint. I will be saving about $30 per month over comparable Verizon plans. (I don't understand why their plans are so expensive either.) So far both my wife and I love our new phones, and soon I hope to figure out how to write blog posts from my phone.

So at last, au revoir Verizon.