Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

I’ve recently made a few changes to my blog and thought that, in the self-referential tradition of bloggers, I should mention some of the decisions I made and how they affect my blog. The most external change, and the one mentioned in the title of this post, is that I do now have a domain to host this blog on. By “external” I don’t just mean it is potentially visible in your address bar when you visit any page of the blog, I also mean that it involved interaction with various third parties. It is a change I had been meaning to make for a while now, and one I should have made long ago, but hopefully it should last a long time.

By a strange coincidence, I’ve recently bumped into another PHP gotcha, well, actually three of them depending on how you’re counting, but I’m sure that these must be the last three unexpected things about PHP and I won’t soon have to write another blog post detailing something else unintuitive that PHP does. The reason these could be seen as one gotcha is that they all involve PHP’s support for floating point numbers, so one workaround would just be to not use that datatype at all in your programs. As I will show though, it is harder than you might think to avoid them, so perhaps the best advice is to avoid using numbers at all. To be on the safe side though, maybe you should just use a different programming language.