I actually have a utility somewhere that was designed solely to insert carriage returns and line feeds in C source code because there was a period when a lot C programmers thought it was ‘cool’ not to use them in their source code, nor to comment anything.

Just converting the source to something readable was a big step forward and there are tools around that will automatically reformat the code.

Looking at some of the modules in WordPress it is obvious how many people worked on it, because they all had their own styles. That just sucks for maintenance. There should be a published ‘style book’ for the project, so that all the code looks the same. There has to be a standard editor that everyone could use that would take care of the style issue.

Which is nonsense. Perl is famous for code that looks like line noise on a 300 baud modem where someone just picked up the acoustic coupler and whistled into it. (Us old farts get that reference, the youngsters never will). But I have a fairly massive hunk of code that was written in Perl which is perfectly readable — well structured, well documented, easy to follow. It all boils down to having coding standards and *following* them. If you do that, you’re gold. If you don’t do that, it’s going to be a mess. If the project doesn’t have a team lead that insists on coding standards before he’ll accept code into the system, the result is going to be cr*p. Just how it works.

BTW, the core coding standard for Perl is, “Don’t use all those shortcuts and tricks that Larry Wall mentions in his book.” Use standard structures that are easy to read and easy to follow, not syntactic tricks. Yes, there’s three ways to do anything in Perl, but you should choose one, and only one of them, and the most readable one, and outlaw the other two ways of doing that. Do this, and you stand a chance of maintaining sanity. Don’t do this, and six months later you’ll look at the program and exclaim, “what in the world is this gibberish?”

You have to plan the solution to get the desired results. A lot of the PhP code looks like an amalgam of styles rather than a completed program. People don’t seem to care what the code looks like, i.e. whether it looks professional or not.

We used to follow that model, when anyone cared about consequences. But consequences are just about last on any list these days.

Exploits are created by people who are willing to go through the code line by line, so that is the kind of scrutiny necessary to stop them.

Announcement:
John Blackbourn is leading WordPress 4.1 (and announcing new committers!)

And more details:
Meet John Blackbourn, WordPress 4.1 Release Lead

What’s on the horizon for WordPress 4.1?

This will be the first time that Blackbourn has led a release, although he has been a core committer for both 3.9 and 4.0. WordPress 4.1 will be a short release cycle, with less than three months, due around December 12th. He shared a few ideas with us about where he thinks 4.1 will be heading.

Apparently The Reason Comcast Has Crappy Customer Service Is Because It Was Lacking A ‘Customer Experience’ VP

I have found a couple minor glitches in that Dashboard. Development stopped at WP 3.8. *shrug* I don’t use it on my K42 blog, because the theme I am using there has it’s own full framework, including dashboard. I am designing my own theme for the biz blog, because it has to be consistent with the biz website, of course. So I use anything that makes my job easier and faster! 🙂 However, that may change! LOL

I just got a lifetime Developer account @ Tesla Themes, and we are talking about developing a dual HTML5/WP business theme with common framework together. 🙂 that will be a first! 😀 Anyway, we’ll see. 🙂

I’ll check out the dashboard after I upgrade to 4. I was going to do it this weekend, but real life in the server world happened. 😉

They have been installing a lot of new hardware and at some point a couple of the older servers didn’t get the cluster software updates. Apparently there was a conflict between the different versions, as well as failing hardware. Nothing was lost except what the support people had planned for their Saturday night.

I appreciate the fact that they actually tell you what happened and don’t give out a lot meaningless non-information. The guys who own NFS are working hard not to have to work hard, so they are making their system better, faster, and cheaper for users.

I mentioned some time ago I was using a 3rd party WP Admin dashboard. It’s MUCH nicer than the default! The developer decided to make it public domain and put it up on GitHub. I just tried it on my WP 4 blog, and it seems to be working OK. 🙂

If you are interested:
DevPress DP-dashboard v3.7