Not your older brother's XAMPP stack

Let's face it, web development has a lot of moving parts: web server, database, various libs and PHP as programming language. And if you're on Windows then your doing it in hard mode. 

I've been using XAMPP but I getting bored with Apache and MySQL. It's time to use something else, learn something new. Who knows, it might be helpful down the road in trolling someone. This is where I found out about WPN-XM. It's an abbreviation of something pretty long, just read about it on their website.

WPN-XM which is the same as XAMPP except it uses Nginx instead of Apache and MariaDB instead of MySQL and it even has MongoDB. Think about it, MariaDB and MongoDB all in a single dev stack. It also have a few tools that any PHP5 programmer will appreciate like Webgrind and XDebug.

This should be interesting.

Personal Note: My country's sometimes sad state of health care

The Philippines is moving up in the world. If you called it a third-world country, then you're dead wrong. We haven't been third-world since the late 1970's. But if you called us a developing country then you're sort of right. Here's a little story of mine living in a developing country.

I have an annoying skin thing called Contact Dermatitis which me or my doctor doesn't seem to know what the trigger is. My doctor has sent a piece of my skin to UP to a Skin Pathologist to confirm it is indeed contact dermatitis. My doctor is excellent, she's an expert in her field and I don't think anyone in the world would be any better. The point is I have access to good doctors and generally decent health care.

Then, my doctor said that I should get a skin patch test to figure out what's the trigger of my dermatitis so I can stop itching. Guess what, it isn't available in Cagayan de Oro but in Davao City, 400 miles south. To make it more "challenging", its only performed in a single hospital: Davao Medical which is now Southern Philippines Medical Center.

I never really understood this. Why the test is available is in Davao city and not in my home town? I have seen the test and it isn't that complicated.

Sometimes you just have to suck it up and deal with the sad state of affairs.

You're a lazy bastard making a website and you need image placeholders

Yes, you read the title right.

How many times I have needed image placeholder while building website then get hit by lazy. I don't want to be creating image placeholders in Photoshop or Fireworks.

So, Google the Internet to find a service and it did not disappoint: http://placehold.it/

I hope this site stays online. I'm too lazy to find another one.