I was in a hurry; the parking lot was empty at the time, so I may not have been particularly precise… Of course when I came back, the lot was full, and someone had left this nasty note stuck to my windshield:
[img[/img/misc/parking-note.jpg]]
Ah, Googlers…
I had about 700 comments to mark as spam in WordPress, which shows 20 comments per page on its bulk-edit-comments screen. That’s too many pages to hit “check all” and “mark as spam” on, when the database server on this host is a little pokey, in general. To make a long story short, I opened up the PHP source file (“edit-comments.php”) for this screen and saw that the number of comments per page is hardcoded, with the number “20″ appearing several times throughout the file. Huh? It took me, literally, two minutes to set a constant $COMMENTS_PER_PAGE at the top of the file, update all the “20″s to reference that, and set the value to 100. I thought everybody knew that hardcoding values isn’t the best of programming practices, and I’ve gone through four or five upgrades of WordPress, so clearly it’s actively being developed. Unless I’m completely missing something, I’d have thought better of a project with such popularity.
When I was little, whenever I felt something wasn’t fair, and I went and complained to a parent or teacher, etc., and got a “well, life’s not fair!”, that response always bothered me. I would reply, “Yeah, life’s not fair, but the whole point of everything we do is to work towards making it as fair as possible, so ‘life’s not fair’ is just a cop-out, it’s you saying that although you recognize that this situation isn’t fair, you just don’t care enough to do anything about it.”
I’ll remember this in case I ever end up with kids someday, so I can respond more diplomatically when I really don’t care enough to do anything about it.