Continuing from yesterday’s Global Domination theme today I worked on finalising my global annihilation. I worked on getting rid of almost all of the globals in the path way that I’m working on at the moment and I feel that I’ve succeeded. The application is perhaps a textbook example of why globals are evil.
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I think today I have seen one of the most poorly written bits of code I have ever seen. I have so far counted over 50 different global variables interspersed throughout the code occurring three levels deep into the application (yes, that’s three levels of includes before the global was set, scary!) even though they were being used at the root level.
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The other day someone was talking to me about building a version of Joomla! that is effectively just a simple blog platform. I figured that this wouldn’t be too hard to achieve – just need to pull stuff out. So that’s what I did. This is somewhat similar to another journey I took though in this one I’m not adding anything new.
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I’ll admit I’m not the greatest fan of the modern word processor. Being in the web world perhaps the greatest evil is the markup that is generated when text copied from Word is pasted into any rich text capable HTML editor such as TinyMCE. Word is not alone in doing this, OpenOffice.org also has its fair share of ugly HTML and most other systems have a nasty habit of creating ugly HTML. But this isn’t what I’m concerned about in this blog, it is more about the plethora of formatting options it provides and lack of focus in the user interface.
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The other day I was looking at something and came across “Hotaru CMS” which on it’s about page describes the system as a “plugin powered content management system” or “WordPress without blogging”. The system describes that it is a platform to build upon, that “Hotaru plugins provide such key components as user systems and post publishing” and how it has a few different extension types: main themes, admin themes, plugins and language packs. But it got me thinking – wait, this is just Joomla!?
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One of the nice things about Linux is the smooth way that the package management system operates. It just happens. The problem with Windows is that it doesn’t really happen – which is a painful experience.
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In Australia, it’s tax time again. This means that the tax office sends me nice letters saying how much I owe them for my HECS/HELP debt, how if I paid it all up front it’d reduce by X amount (if only I had that much money!) and how they don’t charge “interest” on the loan, they merely “index” it against the cost of living. What ever makes it easier to sleep at night. But recently I realised something simple: the Australian Tax Office charges interest not including amounts you’ve already paid.
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To borrow one of the worst marketing slogans from my countries history, “Where the bloody hell are you? – I feel the same about the so called people who cry out for Joomla!’s community.

I’m an Australian, we have a rather solid belief of just getting the job done. Just do it may be the Nike saying but it does reasonably well for describing Australia. I don’t particularly care for all of the noisy people crapping on about things who are ranting and raving about community. I care about people pulling their finger out and just doing it.

Get out there and do it. The community is anyone doing something positive for Joomla!. Fixing bugs, writing patches, porting to MSSQL even. Organising events, organising JUGS. What IRKS me is that some people don’t seem to be interested in contributing unless they get some form of massive recognition out of it. I’ve seen that recently and it disappoints me that the Joomla! community has people who work on those terms.

Perhaps it is just me, but you do something not to be known but because you enjoy it. I was asked the other day what my get rich quick scheme is but I don’t have one. I do what I do because its intellectually stimulating and a challenge. Why do you do it?

Is piracy the problem or the symptom? In problem solving an important technique and skill to have but the crux of the skill in my mind is the ability to differentiate between the problem and the symptom of the problem. The question “are you treating the symptom or the problem?” perhaps raises this most pertinently. But let me diverge to why I’ve come to this point.
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Looking through various access control systems, it is interesting to see the different concepts and features. The concept of root, a user with all privileges inalienably granted to it. So let’s have a look at how this works for Windows, Linux and Joomla!’s upcoming 1.6 version.
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