One of the best things about working with ColdFusion is the <cfdump> tag: give it a variable and it will lay out a visual representation of it in nice colours, which makes debugging so much easier and faster than in PHP. Trying to make sense of a four-dimensional array with just a bit of indenting causes brain injury, so dBug is a wonderful addition to the PHP developer’s toolkit. Arrays, objects and resources returned by database queries are all now beautifully readable:

The dBug site says it has been downloaded 26,000 times, which doesn’t seem like a lot given the size of the PHP developer community as a whole; maybe it helps to have used ColdFusion in order to know what you’re missing.

There’s a good piece in the current issue of .net magazine on the evil that is CAPTCHA – images of letters and numbers distorted to nearly, but not quite, the point of illegibility. Alastair Campbell, their ‘Access All Areas’ guru, makes a series of good points, viz. everybody hates them, even people with 20/20 vision have trouble with them, they’ve all been broken, they’re sent to sweatshops in the Far East for ‘translation’, and also not all spam is submitted by robots: human beings can be malicious too, just more slowly.
But something has been troubling me about these things for a while: aren’t they illegal? The Disability Discrimination Act requires that the same experience is offered to everyone regardless of physical impairment. Blocking a visually-impaired user seems to be pretty clearly in breach of this; and even if an alternative is provided, such as audio, now you’re excluding the deaf-blind, and so on and on.
It’s surely just a matter of time before a court case tests the as-yet woolly extent of the DDA’s provisions as they apply to websites. The RNIB keeps threatening to bring one, but the threat seems to have been enough in each case so far to get modifications made to the offending site. But when it happens, and it will, I wouldn’t bet against CAPTCHAs having to be ripped out of millions of sites across the UK and beyond. And not a moment too soon.