Levels of abstraction

The other day I was .. "surfing the web" (which these days means looking at an endless twitter feed) when I stumbled across an interesting (and very long) post about a programmer's career and how to not screw it up, basically. One point Patrick made was about communication. Let me copy the paragraph and discuss it later:

A Github portfolio

In many professions, having a portfolio is a really good way of letting your work speak for yourself. A portfolio of your past work can help a potential employer decide whether they are going to hire you, and colleagues see what you're made of, and it often much more useful than a CV. Programmers can have portfolios too, in the form of public repositories, which is why I'm starting my own using Github.

God's chair

It's May 21, 9:16pm, and a big event hasn't yet occurred, but hey, have some faith, we still have a couple of hours. God, as I am right now, is probably just chilling in his Aeron chair.

USB Monitor

It's been a couple of days since I got my brand new iMo Mini-Monster Touch, which finally brings my monitor count to a grand total of three. I had tried the old-fashioned "get an extra video card" setup, but for some reason my computer didn't start at all (not even the BIOS) when I had the second card installed, even if both cards are supposedly compatible with my Intel motherboard and between themselves (screw you Nvidia).

Validation in Zend Framework model

The model part of the Zend Framework is very open. In fact, ZF doesn't help you at all with it, other than providing some classes that manage a DB connection. Zend_Db_Table is good and all, but if you want a real-life model you need to work from scratch.

Which is how it should be, really.

The model is the base for your application. It should have all the so called "business rules", and this includes, of course, validation. Now, ZF has some pretty neat validation classes that you can use. The problem is how to write the code only once for the model and for the forms (view).

Biometric login

In Ecuador we have this bank, which we will call .. Banco del Pichincha, since that is its name and I have no intentions of masking it. My dear bank is arguably (very, though they are quite confident about themselves) the most reliable and stable bank in the country, or at least one of the most reputable ones.

So a month or so ago they decide to change the login system for their website, which means people have to register again and answer a bunch of questions about themselves if they (we) want access again. So far so good, we are promised a new login, which basically consists of a username and password instead of your id number and the incredibly unsafe 4-digit PIN. The new system is called nothing less than "biometric login". Now, I assume anyone with a slightly greater-than-average curiosity will try to figure out exactly what it means, but there's no real explanation on the website other than something like "it magically knows who you are using a digital fingerprint, of your damn soul". (I'm paraphrasing)