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In almost every programming language, parsing errors tend to be boring, and PHP is not going to be an exception… unless you get one of these:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

If you aren't aware, what it means is "Oh, there's an unexpected double colon where it shouldn't have appeared".

But even if it's a bit obscure, sometimes it's funny to get this error. Just for contrasting with all the plainly boring rest, like unexpected '}', unexpected ',' … all that. Even more funny is that those characters ('::') are also defined as T_DOUBLE_COLON. But why did the programmers decide to use the cryptic error message is something of a mistery for me yet.

The first time I got the error I thought I had found an easter egg! Either that, or the php interpreter had gone nuts…

I have had to register in this website and holy crap, I hardly could finish the process! I'm amazed there's so many people registered even with captchas like this one. Is it an V or a X? or an N?

But I presume they might be having lots of spammers overcoming their captchas so that's why they need to push it further and make it more and more complicated, even if that means that us the mere mortals can't use the site. Not that I care (except when I need to register, obviously) but I have been working on something which I think it's what they'll need in the future. Without further ado, here it is: the next captcha generation for myspace forms!

Featuring absolutely unreadable text, horrible colours, distorted and unexpected music which clashes violently with whatever you're listening to (I've added several songs playing at the same time so you can feel the pain even if you're not listening to anything right now).

The colour scheme is carefully designed to fit perfectly with every single page in myspace and therefore it requires Flash 9, so it can push the adoption of Flash 9 amongst the internet community thanks to thousands of teenagers willing to show their intimate side to the world, while also making the linux 64-bit system and other exotic systems guys get angry because they don't have a player for watching this monumental piece of crap.

Isn't it nice?

Or that it seems. I tried to enter my full name (which makes up to the big figure of four words) and the system decided it was too much for it. No more than 29 characters are allowed when specifying the full passengers' names.

It shouldn't be much of a problem if it wasn't by this stupid hysteria surrounding flights and security, and the lack of education of some British people which do not understand that there are places in the world where people have more than one name and one surname. Then you show them a passport with the name in full and they get shocked and do not know where to look at, and what is which thing, even if you're pointing at your surname and saying explicitly: this is my first surname, and this is my second surname. And those two words over there are my name - yes, my name is actually two names.

But they look at you like if you stole your passport or something - even if the photo clearly shows that you are indeed you.

In a way, we could also blame that stupid spanish/catholic tradition (I don't know if it's still in use) which dictated that all names to be used in a christening should appear on the Bible and otherwise they should have a biblic name appended at wherever point suit better (whether it was the first or the second name). So most of my generation (and previous ones) ended up with superfluous names prepended or appended to the name that we really use, and we have to revive the extra name for the paperwork.

At the end, the problem is that these long names are unpractical in most of the times. While most of the forms in Spain can accomodate my full name (although not my sister's, funnily), I still haven't found any place in UK where I haven't had to crop or summarise my name somehow.

I must recognize, though, the creativity of the clerks and functionaries is excellent. Within two years here, I have no less than seven variations of my full name, with solutions like:

• abbreviating all except the first surname (feels a bit like american high school movies, like J-C, M-S, etc)
• using only the extra name and the first surname (I don't use to respond to that name so when people gets to me using it I usually ignore them until I find out they are speaking to me)
• using the extra name and mispelling my first surname (lots of variations on this one)
• using the extra name and the second surname (makes my mum feel proud)
• using first name, first surname (more normal)
• using only the surnames (this makes me feel like being at school again)

But getting back to the point, why didn't they just limit the maximum size of the form input boxes? Or maybe they could have added one of those nasty and annoying "Allowed characters count" messages which do a countdown while you enter the data until all of a sudden turn the field's background colour into a bloody red which makes you feel ashamed and cry painful tears of guilt!

It would have been easier and I wouldn't have had to reenter again much of the info in the dropdowns which as expected, is so much of a pain to fill again when there has been an error, that the programmers decided to not to implement it. I wonder if they are preparing each form manually for a site of such a big size as british airways.

The following are hypothetical extracts from conversations with managers. Any resemblance with reality is a pure coincidence:

Case A: He lived in a bubble for the last 3 years

One day the manager started an unexpected although highly desired conversation:

I was thinking of updating the company's website… making it more modern

I was quite surprised of hearing such thing:

Me: What do you mean… updating it or completely rebuilding it?

I kept thinking on the crap which he called website, and how horrified we were each time he wanted to update it since nobody really understood how it worked. And those tables… the source chart extension couldn't cope with so many nested tables…

Manager: Ah yes, completely rebuilding it… current version looks a bit outdated, it needs to look a bit more 2006, more advanced…

I thought: "a bit outdated" he says… it looks like a 1995 website… and what about the crappy stock pictures with wrong aspect ratio… outdated is so mild…!

But I had good intentions, I wanted to help him look a bit more trendy:

Me: ahhhh! so maybe we could have it look more web2.0

I really hoped he had heard at least something about the super web2.0 trend.

Me: Have you heard something about it?

Manager: Ah yes! sure! Any web to have a look at?

Me: err…

I said to myself: I will think again twice before making assumptions next time.

Case B: Master of the buzzwords

Manager: we are gonna rebuild the current website which is a piece of shit to be honest and it looks so old and outdated and we are going to do it very web2.0-ish

I was hallucinating… admittedly the website was a piece of crap without any doubt, but I had never heard such a sincere declaration from a manager in the last years, I think. He continued his principles declaration:

next thing you guys are going to do is to have a look at a website which is a list of all web2.0 websites so you can have an idea of what I'm talking about

Oh thank you very much for showing me what web2.0 is. Had to contain my laughing spams when I saw the "web 2.0 list of web 2.0 websites" - it was one of those webs aimed to appear in digg, like "Top web 2.0 websites - the deffinitive list".
Two days later he came back:

hey guys have you seen the website?

Then he turns to the designer, without giving us time to answer:

cool can you change the current blue background with a web 2.0 blue? like that blue of flickr…

Surprisingly he turned to me and asked me:

what do you think?

I tried to not to laugh (once again) when hearing the sole idea of "web 2.0 blue" and in general the way he applied web2.0 to every possible concept. And said, kind of joking:

Well, for it to be a real web 2.0 it needs gradients. And increase the font size which is too small. And less text. There's way too much text. A couple of badges won't harm, and a big BETA on right side of the title would be superb.

Obviously he didn't understand the joke. Next thing he said to the designer was: OK can you put more gradients on it?

Sigh…

Two authors were discussing about their writing methods and specially, about the paper they used to write in. The first writer (let's call him Phil) used to prepare himself ruled paper sheets, because -he argued- it was the only method to know exactly how the rules were spread across each sheet, so he could control the height between lines, the amount and exact tone of the ink used to print the rules, etc. The second writer (called Rube) used to prepare the ruled paper but he gave up quickly and decided to just buy ruled paper notebooks, so that he could concentrate on the actual writing instead of the rules alignment.

At the end, Phil's home-made sheets were just quite messy and didn't look as professional and serious as Rube's one. Rube was always able to deliver the books on time, while Phil spent hours and hours improving his custom made method for drawing rules and making sure it was efficient and fast. Often the method failed and he had to restart from scratch.
No wonder Phil's father was a very weird architect which believed in making his own bricks. He took it with lots of dedication and pride but was only able to finish a couple of buildings in his life. Going up the family tree, Phil's grandfather was a mechanic which absolutely defended the need to build oneselves' wheels and tyres and re-engineer their design with every new patron which came to his little workshop.

Phil thinks Rube is a pretentious arrogant guy trying to impress women in any of the multiple social acts which he can attend (as he's got lots of free time thanks to just using conventional ruled paper when writing), and would like to be able to say this to the entire world but he's just too busy drawing lines in order to do any actual work at the end.