jmoiron.net

After a long downtime, and probably another few days of a transitional period, my backend is finaly back to an order that is working enough for me to update with it. Or at least, so things seem. I promised lots of things; pictures and at least a little blurb about the rally I went to, and a few other things, and these promises will be delivered eventually. For now, though, I have to pass on them.

I've gotten used to a very strange schedule in which I fall asleep around 12:00 or 1:00, and then wake up on time for work and/or classes. Its odd, I know, but I've actually come to like it; and for these reasons things have not been so quick around the website recently. Quite frankly, I've had less uptime than say, jeremy "stupid phrase" mikola, so I haven't been nearly as productive. But; I've been extremely well rested, so I guess all is good.

I have finaly forsaken FreeBSD 5.0 for the latest and greatest offering from slackware, and I must say that its confectionary goodness is sugary sweet off the scale of conventional sugar cane methods. The font rendering of freetype keeps getting better and better, and thanks to my cache of excellent ttf fonts, a desktop environment has never looked so good.

I've decided to go with gnome over other offerings (by default kde and if I wanted too, flux/blackbox) for a number of reasons. Gnome seems to be both polished and slim, offering only what I need and for the most part only 1 copy of what I need (having 3 aim clients, 5 text editors, etc. has always been KDE's major pitfall imho). Gnome is also built off of GTK2, which is something I hope to learn (since I learned a bit of GTK1). Gnome also has some of the best font shape rendering available, and configures itself nicely with Mozilla ET al.

I've been surprised with how well this system works for a slackware install. The new kernel (2.4.20) has given me little problems; my reiserFS partitions have worked smoothly and efficiently, and to my staggering amazement, there actually exists a samba browser that doesn't felate on a regular basis.

So I'll stick with Linux for a little while; until BSD can offer something better; or another Linux distro can offer something better. I'm not sure that the newest version of slack would be enough to persuade votaries at the shrine of microsoft, but its enough to make me want to stick with it for a while. Its definitely something I can work with.

The "news" section should be up in a few days, and by then I should also have my back end's editing section a little more squared away. At the moment, editing works; but I don't trust it, and all of the features I want to implement have not thus far come to light. Also; most of the content in my content related sections (code, docs, etc) are based mostly on the inclusion of ASCII flat files. While I do not in any way mind this method (better not to hit my DB too much with requests for non-dynamic content that I do not need nor want stats on), it does make it much harder to adapt my current backend towards the administration of these files.

At the present time, my goal is to, if need be, be able to completely administer my website from a browser. Of course, no re-designing could be done, and I suppose allowing myself to write any code whatsoever could be dangerous, but at least complete content administration would be preferable. Speaking with phil gengler briefly on this matter today, I've decided that he had something going with his simple web based file browser Idea, and I've already had quite a few ideas on how I could make it more useable.

Classes have not been kicking me in the rear as much as they had in recent months, mostly because they stopped assigning work due at the same time. While this is a welcome change unfortunately, my professors being the group of stormy petrels they are, all have assignments coming up that will probably culminate in my ultimate destruction. But if not, and if I actually have time to do anything, I have a few coding ideas lined up that might be of some interest. The first of which is obviously the legend of Zelda clone that I started last winter; although my OpenGL is probably extremely rusty at this point, and the value of such a project is material or display oriented at best. I have also wished to make a nero-like GTK based front end for cd-record, a sort of melange of a nautilus window and some other that utilizes some kind of drag and drop technique; creates the ISO automatically using mkisofs and then burns it on the selected device using cdrecord. I also have some web style things that I've been meaning to work on; namely my to do list, along with a quick random quote kludge, implementing a bit more of textism in my news update mechanism, and perhaps a search for the journal archives.

The problem with the gtk cdr software is, of course, it'd probably require 1. cdrecord 2. mkisofs 3. ide-scsi enabled in lilo/grub. These are things that it probably couldn't do by itself; and enabling the modules for this might be dangerous if they are not present. I could work at a way to get around it, but when future versions of the kernel start to support things like supermount, or newer versions of cdrecord start to support atapi drives better, they might be obsolete. So.. I'd be at a crossroads I'm sure every UNIX programmer has been at: should I 1. write all the software myself, thus reinventing the wheel and lengthening the developing process significantly but removing the need for annoying dependencies.. 2. utilize third party open source software, perhaps slowing down my program, but allowing it to adapt as those projects improve, or 3. just say fuck it. With what's ahead on the horizon, my bets are on 3.

Finaly, on the politik front, I've purchased 11 books from amazon for the paltry ammount of $100 american. It might seem like a lot, but most of that is in the cost of 3 or 4 books; the wide majority of the books were no more than 5 or 6 dollars; the cheapest one being $3. I've been reading about how the American media fits the propaganda model, and I must say its rather interesting. Expect more thoughts on this to come when I actually have time to write about it. UN til then, take this paltry update and a promise that there are more to come.