While his concoctions were all superb, and he's now off taking a molecular cooking class, I'm sticking to the basics. Here are this weeks attempts.

This week I made a grapefruit chicken:

and a salmon steak with a cream sauce (basil, garlic, parmesan, cream):

I'll be stopping briefly in Berlin to see an old friend and do a little work for him, and then it's off to colder pastures.

My office building at the Baha'i World Centre:

My School in Montreal:

What I find particularly interesting with this graph is convergence. PHP is losing its footing as the top dog as the one and only web development language. This preliminary glance into technology popularity doesn't factor "Zend", "Ruby on Rails" and "ASP.NET", which are the framework counterparts that make "PHP", "Ruby" and "C#" suited for enterprise web development.

The state-by-state breakdown is even more peculiar. In every US state except for Washington, PHP is the dominant search keyword. In Washington, it's C#:

If I was an ASP.NET developer, or someone trying to market ASP.NET products, I know I'd start in Washington. Take a look at the full data at Google Trends.

Now this is where the clincher is: Rails is a Ruby FRAMEWORK and yet, the hosting provider gets to pick which version I'm running. Obviously, this leads to a forced migration in a production environment. If they decided to upgrade the Ruby language processor it would be a different story. It seems like the Rails team didn't take a hint from the abomination that was PEAR / PECL due to hosting providers bearing the responsibility of versioning what were essentially early extensions of the PHP language.

Why can't I run my own Rails instance? Well hosting providers are being sold on mod_ruby which is really mod_rails. That's like your hosting provider installing mod_zend_framework and then getting to pick the version as it comes out. Let's not forget that four years ago, Zend didn't exist and Rails was a pet project by an young, but innovative group soon to be known to the world as 37Signals.

What bothers me is that this application is a little over a year old and due to the naming changes in the Rails tree (without graceful failures for deprecated functionality) I'm stuck hunting down why each controller is failing. Thankfully, if you're clever in ASP.NET, you can include a lib/ folder with any binaries required for compilation, and the codebase has matured to the point that migrations only occur at the *.5 release. You have to give Microsoft credit for not breaking backwards compatibility as well. As much as they get burned in the browser wars for this reason, it does mean that you're not forced to unravel the cobwebs on a deployed application and spend a week debugging it after 13 months!

While PHP 5.3 is offering some radical enhancements (like namespaces!) to the PHP language, they're at least waiting until 6.x before dropping some of the painful design decisions (like magic quotes etc...) that were made what is forever (more than 2 years!) by web development standards.

Ultimately, having an Apache module design to work with a specific version of a framework sounds like a mix of concerns. Why does the webserver module need to know the details of how Rails handles it's templating engine, or how it dispatches requests? Why is it so bloody complicated to get standardized rails hosting? Why do people develop in webrick, deploy using FastCGI and then have to deal with mod_ruby.

My suggestion is either buy your own machine, get virtual hosting environment, or wait until the dust settles and a unified development / testing / production environment presents itself.

Adobe's Flex and Air (the deployable runtime version of Flex) seem to stem from an opposite strategy: Instead of using an existing market share that consists of a heavy technology stack (MS SQL - MS Office - .NET - Reporting Services - BizTalk - etc..), they've managed to catch the adoration of the web through their already entrenched flash runtime and by laying out a language roadmap similar to C# and Java for Actionscript (while they still appear to be suffering from the growing pains of their MovieClip, Stage-driven birth.)

I have to give credit to Adobe for implementing the WebKit rendering engine inside their AIR runtime and providing support for the latest DOM querying language - E4X. This will help propagate Apple's open source code base which does wonders with Javascript (particular when dealing with animation). Especially since WebKit recently passed ACID3 (along with Opera) while Internet Explorer is still struggling to make it to the ACID2 finish line. I think they've made the best partnership possible for pushing a mature browser into an embedded runtime.

Whatever Happened to Statelessness?

Web developers love and hate statelessness. Managing session judiciously makes you ever-conscious about how you store and what you store of a particular user's interaction with your application. Everything is explicit, whereas when you develop a desktop application (or any runtime), statelessness goes out the window and you're left with an inverse architecture, where objects can be left behind or that panel you wrote can be caching private members and causing data inconsistencies and concurrency issues. As we start writing fat clients, data structures and concurrency issues will become ever more prevalent. Whether it's a local instance of an sqlite database that synchronizes with the mother site (the AIR / Microsoft OneClick model) or using the YUI Data structure and mapping it back to a database through an AJAX call to a web service.

In short, the next wave of web applications will likely involve web services, some XML / JSON, a light database on the client and a whole bunch of client-side processing. I'm still waiting for Adobe to start touting the Flash Virtual Machine as a potential competitor to NetBeans and JSP Servlets. After all, it makes sense to capitalize on the Flash or Flex client interacting with a robust Java back-end via web services.

Here's the full error:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Exception' with message 'Invalid controller specified (st)' in C:\wwwroot\library\Zend\Controller\Dispatcher\Standard.php:193 Stack trace: #0 C:\wwwroot\library\Zend\Controller\Front.php(911): Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Standard->dispatch(Object(Zend_Controller_Request_Http), Object(Zend_Controller_Response_Http)) #1 C:\wwwroot\index.php(34): Zend_Controller_Front->dispatch() #2 {main} thrown in C:\wwwroot\library\Zend\Controller\Dispatcher\Standard.php on line 193

Every time I see something like this I'm reminded of Knuth's famous and beautifully written talk entitled "Art as Computer Programming", written in 1974.

Maybe this is part of a bigger question that I'm asking myself about the relationship between code, art, design and architecture and how they all have commonalities. The one thing I can say about all of them is that they all are dynamic and iterative processes. By dynamic, I mean that they're redefined by their context as well as their intention. Where code can be situated within a software movement or even a certain level of technical abstraction, it could just as easily be viewed in relation to the politics and ideologies of its creators (I'm thinking of Java's single-inheritance and Scheme's recursive tendencies here). In terms of art, you could just as easily see how something like the Venus of Willendorf, while situated in a 20,000 BC past, has been recontextualized because of it's dynamic (now post modern) context.

I don't quite know how to correlate this to architecture and design, however I get the sense that these four disciplines are related and will become increasingly interdependent as we further abstract ourselves from the punch card and the brush.