Really not digging the blog form lately. Especially not for rants and such — they really deserve their own little slice of heaven, custom styling, custom typography, always different, always new. And kind of “back-to-the-future”.

With all the tweets, facebook updates, posterous, tumblrs and whatnot gaining traction and becoming increasingly popular, I find myself missing “ye old days”. You know, the times when it all wasn’t mainstream. Back then it felt good being a part of something no one (quite yet) fully understood, but you had that feeling it’s important and BIG for some reason, and every day was something interesting and new.

Or I could just be getting “too old for this shit”. Love that phrase!

I cannot stress how important it is to have someone to share your accomplishments / suffering with at work. Often overlooked, this is one of the most important feats to look for in your future employer’s offering. Make no mistake about it.

Case in point

I was having a really hard time today with some of Croportal’s partner feeds. Two unrelated issues came up, both having something to do with parsing Atom feeds using Zend_Feed:

• A certain site published it’s feed in Atom format using non-absolute URIs within the <content> element. That’s not a problem per se, since the spec allows it (and defines how to deal with that). However, Zend_Feed has no knowledge of what’s going on (and that’s probably ok, since it’s a general purpose lib). However, publishers place whatever HTML content they want within their <content> element and expect the same behaviour from aggregators as they get from browsers when they open their feed URLs in them (ie. Firefox). This means you have to do a shitload of “magic” on your end. And that shit ain’t trivial.
• Another site published their feed using Atom as well, except they decided to use the (rarely used) <content type="xhtml"> feature of the Atom protocol. Which is all fine and dandy untill you actually have to pull the content and display it on your end (being an aggregator). The spec is somewhat vague and yet pretty specific at the same time. Except it doesn’t cover what to do in cases such as this:

  ...
  <content type="xhtml">
     <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
        <p>Paragraph with an <img src="whatever.jpg" /><![CDATA[This is <strong>XHTML</strong> content.]]></p>
     </div>
  </content>
  ...

  Which kind of sucks, since you’re on your own now. I have an actual publisher with such a feed. And the feed validates. What does one do? Well, you start introducing crap code into your codebase. Shit such as this, to handle the case described above:

  ...
  if ($item->content && $item->content['type'] && $item->content['type'] == 'xhtml') {
      $item_simple = simplexml_import_dom($item->content->getDOM());
      $item_summary = $item_simple->asXML();
      // end-tag is fixed in form so it's easy to replace
      $item_summary = str_replace('</content>', '', $item_summary);
      // remove start-tag, possibly including attributes and white space
      $item_summary = preg_replace('/<content[^>]*>/i', '', $item_summary);
  }
  ...

  This sucks on so many levels it’s not even funny. Zend_Feed’s $item->content() method returns only the raw text, but my use case requires the surrounding elements as well (images etc). So, I hack my way around all this using SimpleXML which allows me to (somewhat) easily dump the structure into a somewhat acceptable form of HTML.

  Of course, later on you have to call strip_tags() on content such as this (to display it safely on your end), but — surprise, surprise — you run into another issue: if you have a <![CDATA[ string anywhere within a larger string that you call strip_tags() on, you’re gonna get an empty string back as a result. How’s that for fun, eh? This is where you start pulling your hair out and thinking male prostitution ain’t such a bad line of work after all.

Folks, I’m not making this shit up. This is real world PHP on a (relatively) large scale project.

End result

Several hours and hundreds of lines of code later — both issues are fixed. And everything works flawlessly. Except no one but me is aware of the fact.

No one in the entire company hasn’t got a fucking clue about what has transpired today. Or why shit like that matters. Or how much future money it has saved. Or that I’ve written an URL parser library that can be used generically for any possible scenario that deals with relative/absolute URL conversion, URL joining, URL parsing etc.

Worst of all, no one could hear (and understand) my cries about how horribly broken Zend_Feed, parse_url(), strip_tags(), DOM etc. are.

After (23.02.2009 14:10; right after the surgery, about 10mins after I woke up from narcosis):

Getting another x-ray probably on Friday, to see if it healed ok and if I can start physiotherapy finally.

The signed copy of James Zabiela’s brand new “Renaissance: The Masters Series” arrived while I was away. What an excellent homecoming present from myself :)

Here’s a crappy phonecam photo of it, sent via MMS to email, and then uploaded (cause I broke my usb bluetooth adapter):

Tonight, though, has been extra special. First I was forced to endure the whole Dora 2009 final evening terror, and then I had to listen to the winning song twice. Painkillers paired with 0,6l of dark beer helped (to an extent).

What I’m listening to now is a different beast altogether. It’s an amazing dissonance of running water sounds (coming from a non-purged-of-air radiator) paired with a cacophony of snores — there are 3 beds per room, mine’s in the middle — sometimes the left snorer performs a wonderful crescendo, sometimes the right one, sometimes they just complement each other perfectly. The running water sounds are randomly constant.

I’m dubbing tonight’s performance “Radiatorium Klokotur Stertor in D-minor”.

According to Wikipedia, surgery is rarely used in clavicle fractures, but there’s always a “but” and a “special case” when my ass is involved with something.

Clavicle (collar bone) is supposed to be a fast-healing bone (or so they say). The usual healing time for adults is 4-6 weeks, after which some physical therapy will probably take place (as my left hand might be weakned by the 4-6 weeks of immobilization).

If all goes well, I think I have an idea for my next tattoo :)

UPDATE (17:48):
Woke up around 14:20. Survived the surgery. Vaguely rembering going to the x-ray machine right after the surgery, which means they have x-rays of the metal plates they just installed. I need to get my hands on those and post them here.

I know I will, you know, with me officially working from home on Fridays. Officially. Last friday was my first. It was fuckin’ awesome.

Since I’ve been hard at work for the past 16 months non-stop (no sick days, no vacation), it’s time to take a lil’ break now (during which — hopefully — I’ll finally finish up and publish some of the draft posts that have been laying around for the past year).

I was thinking of listing all the good & bad things that’ve happened in the past year, but there’s no need — It’s all in the past and lessons have been learned. The future matters.

Happy New Year everyone.