Facebook profile URLs

So, Facebook is going to land on the moon in a few hours.

But the thing that strikes me as weirdest of all is that after years of insisting that people only use their real names on Facebook, they've now set up a system where it will be virtually impossible for most people to do that, even if they want to.

If I cared more about Facebook, I'd have more to say about this.

I wish this period of the Internet would end, it's so exactly like AOL. I've seen this show before, I know how it ends. Only this time there won't be a Time-Warner to cash them out.

Anil Dash:

June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of "It's alive! Go get your name!" posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

Jun 12 2009 • by Marc Ermshaus • language=en type=link facebook rants • 0 comments

Not-so-advanced PHP tips

Smashing Magazine has published an article featuring (what they call) "advanced PHP tips". Half of the described techniques can be considered bad style or pure and utter nonsense in any programming language (#3, #4, #6, #9, #10).

Then there is this bit from #5:

If you're using regular expressions, then ereg_replace() and preg_replace() will be much faster than str_replace().

That is comparing apples and oranges. If you are using regular expressions, str_replace() will not even be an option because the function cannot handle regular expressions.

The article is a bad piece of advice but a good example why reading comments can be useful.

Nov 19 2008 • by Marc Ermshaus • language=en programming php type=link rants • 0 comments