Angus and Robertson have announced their intention to stop selling books from small and mid sized publishers, unless those publishers agree to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege.

The response from Michael Rakusin of Tower Books makes me want to rush out and buy a bunch of their books – from anywhere but A&R.

Many thanks to Charlie Rimmer of Angus and Robertson: you’ve saved me the trouble of ever again wasting my time in an A&R store.

(via nielsenhayden.com and boingboing)

Matt takes issue with the push for PHP 5. He makes the point that PHP 5 offers no real advantages over PHP 4. I won’t argue with that, but I can’t resist suggesting some things that could have offered a compelling reason for developers to upgrade, had they been implemented in PHP 5, 6, or whatever:

Namespaces

It’s 2007 and we’re still stuck with one enormous big list of functions in a single global namespace. A typical production PHP installation on a shared web server has 1000-4000 built-in functions in the global namespace, many with inconsistent or contradictory naming conventions (count_chars vs str_word_count vs strlen, for example).

This could have been fixed in a relatively simple manner: just prefix each function name with its module name, much like python does – so we’d have array.walk() instead of array_walk(). Forget objects and instances, just a simple prefix (basically, treat modules like singleton objects, automatically instantiated by PHP). To preserve backwards compatibility, offer an amnesty mode that permits global function names to be used for functions that existed in previous versions.

continue reading…

My first real Wordpress blog: Flight Path, a photoblog. Built with wordpress.com, the Sandbox theme, and a Custom CSS upgrade.

As of Monday I’m joining the fine folks at Automattic Inc. I’m looking forward to the change, and hope to bring some new things to Wordpress and other Automattic projects.

Since it’s a full time job, I’m no longer accepting freelance Textpattern work. Anyone needing custom Textpattern development should contact Team Textpattern. Mary and the rest of the team are working on launching some new services soon, so stay tuned for news.

New subscriptions to Redirect Pro are currently unavailable. I’m hoping to work out an arrangement where the Textpattern dev team will publish Redirect Pro — and other as-yet unreleased plugins. Existing subscribers can still access documentation and downloads, and I’ll continue to honour support requests.

..is now shipping. My copy arrived today courtesy of the kind folks at Apress. Congratulations to Kevin, Robert, Nathan, Mary and Cody — it’s excellent work, the first of (no doubt) many Textpattern books.

The accompanying web site is at http://textpatternsolutions.com/. More discussion at the Textpattern Forum.