the eXternal mind

I’m very thankful that the internet exists. I was searching for literary essays and/or criticisms on John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse in preparation for writing a independent reading project paper for AP English. I first tried a dry search in Google and found those typical ‘plagerize-me’ essay sites which were of no help to me. But ah, I exclaim, Google just came out with their scholar journal search function, and so I trudged over for a search: nothing revelant.

But of course, I was far from defeated because, you see, I had an important trump card: a VPN through Carnegie Mellon University :). Yes, that’s true. Before my account at CMU expired, I created a VPN that, as I suspected, did not expire. Eh? What is a VPN? You ask. Well, I answer: A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. Essentially, it allows your computer to become part of a network through the internet without actually being physically wired (routers, hubs, ethernet cables) to the network. In other words, your computer that is connected to the network via VPN has an IP address from that network.

Why is this great? You ask. Well, many universities and colleges buy subscriptions to journals through their IP block. Therefore, if you are accessing the journals on the campus transparently without a login, but once you are off campus, the journals cost money to read. In fact, articles usually cost around $20 each!

So I went literature journal searching. I initially used Project MUSE for searching since it seems to have the largest collection of modern literature journals. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any revelant articles despite running many searches. I was a bit disappointed here and a little concerned. Lost in the Funhouse is supposedly wided used in college so I expected many essays about it.

Finally, I came across JSTOR which in its huge archives was able to pull up 4 good critical essays about LITF. Four clicks. Four PDFs. Life is good.

At that point, I had this horrible vision where the internet didn’t exist and I had to spend about two whole days running between and inside libraries to search through hundreds of journals for mentions of LITF. Very, very scary.

Thank you JSTOR! I love VPNing, I can access tons of scientific journals too :).

In post Xcomic 0.7.0 released, vboy writes:

it’s sad that you have to change your design to accomodate with oop shortcomings in php. Next time try choosing python or ruby

He brings up a good point. But infact, I did not change Xcomic’s design because of “PHP’s OOP shortcomings” (I think it is robust), but rather, it’s just that I didn’t want the script to be designed around a single driver script calling other class files. This design is great for client side programs. In fact, I do that with big Java projects I write. The idea is great which was why I tried using it for PHP. Unfortunately, I soon realized that the same design ideas for client side programming is not the same for server side interpreted languages. Instead of running a main script (ex. index.php) that calls other files (ex. PostComic.class.php and PostNews.class.php), I decided to go with individual files that were self-contained (ex. instead of calling index.php for everything, I would instead call postcomic.php and postnews.php). By self-contained, I mean that the developer would only have to drop in the specific function in order to use it with the rest of the script. For instance, if I wrote editcomic.php, I wouldn’t simply drop it into the admin directory add the link to the menu and use it right away. If I kept with the old design, I would add a bulk of the interaction and display code in index.php (so this file would soon be bulky and slow to execute) and keep only the actual interactions with the database in a file called EditComic.class.php (acting as a black box).

Currently, Xcomic still uses classes for specific functions, but over 50% of the script is procedural. I considered making the classes self-running (able to display their function page and also carry out their function), but that would detract from the intended purpose of OOP’s black box design (having a ‘driver’ program use the black box).

Even if I used Python or Ruby for the design, I might still run into these same problems. In fact, I looked at Python’s implementation of classes, and I’m not particularly fond of it. I was inculcated with Java classes and the style of Python’s classes are different in a few ways. I haven’t programmed with Ruby before, so I shall take a look at the language sometime. On a final note, PHP is widely supported by web server configurations so I tend to program in PHP for web scripts.