Johannes Schlüter

I forgot to announce some talks in the past here but the next bunch are already scheduled:

• Next week I'll attend PHP Quebec and talk about PHP 5.3 and, together with my friend Marcus, PHP Worst Practices. Really looking forward to this conference.
• In April I'll give an introduction to DTrace at the OenSoure Datacenter Conference in Nuremberg, Germany
• DTrace, with a focus on the AMP stack, will also be a topic at the Spring edition of the International PHP conference in Berlin. There I'll also present some Hidden Gems in PHP 5.3.

Recently I was debugging some code. That happens. But this code was cluttered with @-operators suppressing error messages. That's annoying. So I wrote a simple extension disabling this operator. That helped.

I then proposed that extension to pecl, while doing that I found out that Gopal has written a similar extension before. After short discussions we added that extension, using the name scream to pecl and released the extension there. Documentation is written and committed and should appear in the PHP documentation within hours.

Some time ago I already wrote about me not understanding twitter. But well, sometimes at least I'm open for learning new stuff so, I did what everybody does and started to use twitter. I tweeted some messages, followed some people, by using the web interface and by using different client. And I still have to say: I don't get it.

My initial thinking when watching twitter was (and still is) that people are using it to tell pointless things like that they are on their way home or on the way to the restroom. I actually don't see the point in this information - neither why I should give it, nor why one might be interested in reading this.

When asking "What is twitter?" before I was told "it's kind of a delayed IRC". Well, I use IRC and IRC is used for useless stuff like above, too but for one often in a different way ("Sorry can't answer on my way home") or as an information for specific people. But well often pointless, too, but IRC is about more: It is about discussion. For that I can see a point in a delayed IRC - that might mean something like "hey I don't have to be on my box all the time to follow the whole discussion". But that doesn't work with twitter. So let's assume I have a question, I put it on twitter and maybe one of the few people following knows the answer answers me, maybe I have a question ins response and get an answer, again. That's fine. But looking at it from a third perspective is bad: I follow the one having an interesting question. How do I get the answer? - One way is to follow everybody who follows the person asking the question so I get the answer, too. This won't work as I'd have to follow way too many people and have tons of nonsense information. The other way is to search for answers, maybe using search.twitter.com's web interface, maybe using the API (and some client). But there the APIs suck for that purpose. Although twitter has the "reply" feature and tracks it I can't search for answers to a givin tweet, all I can do is search for tweets mentioning the name of the one who asked the question and then then check whether that's a reply to the question, then I'd have to do this recursively to get all answers. That's just broken.

Well, I'll continue having that twitter client running and post things from time to time maybe the enlightenment comes or I get bored of it ... I'll see

Falls den Parteien Wahlkostenerstattung fehlt sollten da evtl. inhaltlich nachgebessert werden und die Bevölkerung begeister werden anstatt Wahlen zu einem Hacker-Wettbewerb zu machen ... wobei, wie kann man etwas hacken was von Anfang an das Ergebnis feststeht?