I keep trying to write a post about it. But I don’t know how to approach it. Read comments on slashdot every once in a while. In the world of tech a lot of people think that we live in a meritocracy. That poor people are poor because they are lazy and stupid. If people just worked harder they too could be successful software engineers.

This is clearly not true, but how do you explain that to someone who’s world view depends on this belief?

I mean, it says safety right there in the name…

I mean, the only way I will feel safe is if my ISP has a nice, discoverable log of all my traffic (I assume they already due, but still). Because if they don’t have a log how will we make sure people aren’t committing thoughtcrimes?

Ruby on Rails is tempting me. It sounds really amazing. Like .net 2.0, but more sensible.

I just wrote a simple CMS in PHP5, which was nice but there was a lot of leg work to build the back end. We are writing an ASP.NET cms at work, which is very quick at first but once you leave the realm of “things that microsoft thought of” it becomes very, very difficult. I also wonder about the sensibilty of using an event-driven model for a web application framework. To me it seems to be TOO abstract. The idea of a framework is to provide a certain level of abstraction, but the event-driven model provides you with a development view that does not reflect the reality of what happens in the HTTP world. HTTP applications, by their nature, are stateless. Every action can be seen as a server request, and then a server response. The MVC pattern makes sense to me in this regard, because you still build an application by creating responses to requests.

ASP.net creates a metaphor that is more user-centric. You develop your app as the user might think of it, rather than how it works. Click on a button, something happens. The requests and responses are still there, but they all happen down in the code-generation world of the framework. It works, and it is very quick to develop, but it just does not reflect what is happening. Which bugs me.

Google Base is so simple and so amazing. Like all google products. It is disturbing of course that they basically created a sort of uber-craigs list type thing. Except its google searchable. I can’t even imagine the kind of amazing hacks people are going to figure out with this.

I don’t like Microsoft’s crap. Never have, quite likely never will. I read a couple of flame wars today over ASP.NET vs PHP, which were pointless and ugly. Mostly “real programmers use X, kiddies use y” kind of stuff. Really, it all comes down to what tool you want (or have) to use. I don’t like windows servers. I don’t like the point and click administration interfaces. I like the idea of open source software. I want to run on linux servers.

I have noticed that when I’ve been working with front page all day I feel grouchy at the end of the day. When I’m using dreamweaver/ultraedit all day I feel good. I don’t have any more reasons that to avoid microsoft. Of course, at work its asp.net and front page server extensions all the way. Which is life in the big city.