Before, like all noob worthy of that appellation, back in the days where I had no friends (on the internet), I used to live with one soul instant messaging client, that is MSN Messenger. Of course, from age ten and later, I got a bit better at my practices and downloaded a bit of extensions and tweaks, amongst those were the very famous Messenger Plus and several of the plugins available for it. For Messenger versions 6 & 7, I was pretty much hooked on Messenger Plus. Of course, sometimes I would go wild in one of my Linux/Open source follies, and I ended up trying several remakes of messenger clients, amongst which many browser-based clients like eBuddy and Meebo, and eventual, I stumbled upon Gaim, probably the most known cross-platform, cross-protocol, plugin-extensible messenger client out there. For me and at that time, it was wonderful for two reasons:

1. It could support numerous logins on numerous protocols, something that I really found cool be really never used.
2. It was open source, which back in the day was an incentive by itself. If it was open source but I didn't need it, I had it anyways, just because I thought it was cool supporting GNU and GPL and stuff.

Despite these two reasons, several features, or lack of features, made me uninstall Gaim, stuff like the raw ugliness of the buddy list, those cheesy, old-skool, Gnome-style icons, which for reason I couldn’t bare, and the lack of support for the brand new funky feature on MSN Messenger 7, “personal messages”, that customizable sub-nickname that could display what tune you were listening to. I thought that this new feature was essential, so I ditched it, and went back to my old habits.

Once again, the people have presented me with something that I can’t live without anymore. A member one day asked the forums if anybody was using twitter, and his answers must have disappointed him lots. There were both sides of the spectrum.

What the hell is twitter?

Right down to:

FAG!

I was mostly confused about this new thing, so I decided to check it out. At first, the layout of the site and the crap and chinese characters that were displayed across the page. I still didn’t get it. Then, I decided to actually read what was written. Then, I clicked. But what kind of turbogeek would want to update something at least once a day just to tell the web what he was doing? Who stayed in front of his computer enough to get an occasion to update this?

You know what? Forget everthing that I wrote about class variables, I was totally off on what concerned the setting of those variables. Here is the scoop: you cannot, even with $this->, $this:: or the static keyword prefixing your variables, SET them. I repeat, you can declare a variable but you can not attribute a value to it directly between the classe’s curly brackets. In fact, everything that is considered an operation, like incrementing a global which is not even a member to the class, will yeild an unexpected T_VARIABLE error, causing many frustrations for the OO PHP beginner who doesn’t know this.

I’m just a couple of days back from a trip in Alberta as a part of student exchange. This trip gave us a lot of opportunities to discover a whole different culture and lifestyle. A culture lifestyle full of steak, oil, and cellphones. Steak and oil, I can get over, but cellphones, not. Having those awesome pieces of coolness flashed around me every moment of the day by pretty much everyone (a 10 year old girl on a bus had a Razr. JAWDROP) was just too much for me. On our way back, in the numerous cell phone company booths that the West Edmonton Mall had to offer, I begun checking out how much one of the those brain-tumor generators would cost. I got a rough idea other there, and right back at home, I shopped the intertubes for some decent phones and the plans to go with them. I pretty much decided that I was going to take the Telus Talk-to-me 25 package, with 100 all time minutes, 1000 nights and weekends, and unlimited incoming calls for 25$ a month, plus the unlimited text messaging, which is 10 more bucks per month, plus of course all those standard bullshit hidden fee stuff.

WARNING! I currently still at my noob stage in OO PHP, and in OO in general. Do not take anything found in this article as rock solid content that you can trust, for all I know, even the slightest bit of code that I pasted may have errors in them, as I generally learn from error messages. Feel free to point the baddies out, and they will be corrected.

It’s been only a few weeks since my first venture in OO PHP (which for some weird reason looks pretty obscure), and already I have found something that is very sparsely documented, or at least not very easy to find for the common noob.