jmoiron.net

Happy Anniversary to me!

6 years ago I started my blog on the now defunct IRIX server attila.stevens-tech.edu. The first post in this blog was made with a bash script that basically used cat & sed to style a quasi-structured text file that I'd shell into the server and create. The server did not offer any CGI services (for fear that the students would screw up and bring down the server, which also handled email), so it would be a year or so until I was able to move my website to PHP.

From there, I wrote two versions of jmoiron.net using the classic LAMP stack. The second one used PEAR:DB for database safety, a thin home-grown templating system based in PHP (both heavily inspired by jeremy mikola).

In May, 2003, I started to learn the Python programming language (This was the beginning of my summer vacation for the Junior->Senior year of University). My very first mention of the language in these hallowed pages was, well, completely retarded: I was "gonna write an interpreter, or a C compiler, or something." It's funny ha-ha.

By late 2004/early 2005, I had ditched the PHP beginnings and had written some custom mod_python stuff to run the site. I ditched mysql at the same time. By late 2005/early 2006, I started writing my own plain-text -> HTML markup language based on MoinMoin syntax. I had almost my whole database converted (automatically) to this script when, in mid 2006, I traded manual mod_py for django and my markup language to markdown.

I quickly ditched the first iteration of the django site and ended up with what you see today; It's been here for over a year and a half! It was by far the harshest transition, because I also made a switch from storing my posts as HTML to storing them as markdown (which I am, of course, now unhappy with); and back then the automagic html->markup filters left a bit to be desired. I am working on yet another iteration with yet another set of technologies; the next iteration (probably set to finish around April) won't even involved SQL at all, and will be the first one without a real solid framework since I moved to Django.

This site is kind of a technical experiment of mine; It's where I express myself both through code, through design, and through words. Hopefully sometime soon, through pictures too. I hope that it will continue to be something that I can hang out there to dissuade future employers from hiring me!

It was sorta forecasted for a while, and looking back on it I remember now getting I/O errors on sections of the arlongpark wiki but rebooting it and seeing them go away. The hard drive on my server crashed this past week as wt was playing with postfix. The only noticeable dataloss, after over 24 hours of recovery, were comments to my posts in the last 6 months. Even my apache logs were saved, although I'll have to make sure I get the statistics engine working from the cache as it took 22 hours the first time I ran them in October.

I've got rough ideas for an improved backup system bouncing around in my head; but thus far it has not escaped the confines of my skull and found its way towards a life in code. I want to back up user home directories, databases, /etc (although I'm thinking about perhaps backing up only select pieces of /etc), the apache web root, my trac installations and my svn root, and a list of installed packages. These will be synched thrice a week, with weekly biweekly tarballs saved (in case someone wants to revert from a backup, the sync would not have overwritten their data, since it will be a lossy sync).

I want some easy way for a user to stop the backup system from bothering with their data; perhaps something like apache directive files. This is important for privacy as well, although right now there is no one on my server besides friends of mine I trust.

I mentioned before that I had splintered off my blog developing efforts into a project I named saudade. The first somewhat releasable ball of code is now finished and in operation at jmoiron.net. This is a (thusfar modest) blog engine utilizing Django and focusing on levereging existing technologies, best practices, and a slim codebase. Some features saudade has over my previous software:

Saudade Specific

• saudade is developed with deployability in mind
• auto-summary support utilizing the BeautifulSoup html/sgml parsing library
• improved rss feeds
• more reliance on generic views (reduction in code size and complexity)
• ditch custom flatpages for django.contrib.flatpages (reduction in code size)
• improved blog navigation
  • navigate by date or page/list view

STILL PLANNED:

• generic callendar widget for linking information
• todo list user interface enhancements
  • removed 'created' from editable fields

I need to work with the template system and get the template loader working so that I can have a drop in system before I release a tarball, but development is coming along well enough. I'm officially done with the todo list for now, even though there are some enhancements planned, and turning my full focus to the gallery application. First up is to work w/ ceache on his pyexif project to get the parsing and table creation working for at least Canon cameras. After we have an idea of how that will work, things can proceed!

1.0 of this site (what you might have been looking at for the past few months) was simply the migration from my own mod_python framework to django. 1.1 is the the culmination of about 3 months of work, mostly on the todo list application, but also a great deal on reorganizing the backend to make redeployment easier. There is still a great deal more work to do in that area, and the gallery is still yet to come, but development pacing has started to get pretty fast now that I'm very comfortable with all of django's nuances and idoioms.

The new features for this release:

• pull entire site under one directory
• reorganized /media/ to section off admin media
• implement published bit
• move urls.py to various apps
• changed to RequestContext
• login/logout
• added edit shortcuts for logged in staff
• todo app
  • reached 1.0
  • ajax based add/edit/removing of tasks and 'groups' (sublists)
  • color coded priority system
• various improvements to blog app
  • changed date to auto_add
  • fixed date display

This one's a quickie. I promised to make available some changes I made to Gene Cash's EXIF.py library. I'm only providing them as a diff patch because ceache is working on improving the performance of the library extensively by using PIL's exif parsing code with EXIF.py's MakerNote deciphering code.

Image.open()

parse_file()

He's hard at work banging out the changes and hopefully once he's done long awaited work on the gallery can start anew. There is already quite a lot going on in terms of development, but I still have to document a lot of changes and finalize some things. I'd say the todo app will be ready to launch in another week or two.

I missed what seems like quite a few get-togethers of jeremy's, and when people asked my why the only excuse I could muster was that I don't like sushi. It's a pretty valid excuse, but I think if the company had been different I would have gone.

Zoro's hard drive bit the dust rather suddenly last week. I lost only a small bit of data, and it could have been better were it not for laziness. It could have been a hell of a lot worse, were it not for laziness as well: I had never transfered the movie files that I took off of my laptop, so a few movie files (mostly of skateboarders) that I had taken in Tokyo were lost, but I also still haven't even removed the pictures from Cairo from my camera, so those are all still safe on my CF card. Irony!

Palomar has a new album coming out someday soon, and although it won't be on the 30th of August, they will at least be playing live at the Mercury Lounge along with another great band Supersystem, who will be releasing their new album A Million Microphones on the 22nd. The following day, Asobi Seksu, who just released their new album Citrus (which is quite good), will play at Maxwells in Hoboken approximately 5 blocks from where I work. I encourage everyone I know to come out and have some fun.

Shifting a music discussion back into a technical realm, I purchased some cheesy $5 sennheiser earbuds when I bought my mp3 player, thinking that I'd just skimp on my commute headphones because they weren't important. But I've been regretting throwing that $5 away on cheap headphones ever since, and if my impulse $65 theft of HD280P's has taught me, a good pair of headphones is money well spent. So I did a little bit of impulsing, while at J&R in the city handing over my laptop for a warranty makeover, and purchased a pair of sennheiser CS 300's. I hadn't read any review of them, but I know that in ear headphones tend to be quite good, and that sennheiser headphones seem to be quite good.

For a few years yet, people in the US won't have usable internet on their cell phones. Until this isn't true anymore, what I did next will become more and more common. I called up a friend I knew would be by a computer and asked him to quickly look at some opinions on the headphones. He told me that they seemed pretty good, and that the price I got was also pretty fair (I consider anything within 15% of online to be fair after you add in instant gratification, and the headphones were $50), so I went ahead with it.

As I walked down the stairs at the WTC path train, I turned on my zen nano and fiddled around with the in-ear phones, trying to get a snug fit in my ear canal. Suddenly, the world around me was gone: the bustle of the financial district was just some unfortunate youtube video that ran without permissions to /dev/dsp, gasping for a hold of the mixer only to have it audaciously yanked away. These headphones sound fantastic, with a full rich bass and enough isolation to lock out all that path train noise. I listened to Interpol's Hands Away (a slow, bassy, quiet song) on my way back to Hoboken, slackjawed and in awe. So, when you purchase headphones, purchase good ones. You might be one of those "CD's and MP3's sound the same to me" people, but anyone would hear the difference between these and ipod headphones.

Just to ensure that this entry has the least ammount of flow and the maximum number of tags, I'll briefly mention some of my recent development work. I've been hammering out some administration side improvements and reorganizing the backend of this site on a development fork. There is the beginnings of some user-facing stuff, including some harmless tweaking of cookies (to remember comment names). I haven't found out a good way to do this yet, but I have a way to edit virtually any type of object from wherever it is displayed. Unfortunately it turns the page into a crap-shoot when I'm logged in, so I need to figure out a new interface for it.

Finally, due to some external pressure, I have been hacking away on the gallery section. I am still a little unsure how I want to store EXIF data or how I want to present the images for browsing, but I think the gallery is going to be a bit flashier and definitely a bit ajaxier than the main site. Most of my hacking so far has gone into EXIF.py, since PIL seems somewhat unable to garner any MakerNote data. Today I successfully hacked in Casio type 2 MakerNote tag handling, and added the PrintIM and other various tags from the 2.2 standard. I think eventually I'll decide on a decent subset of data to keep stored away in the database, and viewing details can strain the server a bit to introspect the actual file.

I'll write more on the hacking and make my changes available after I add in some other cameras. If anyone wants to help me out by submitting some EXIF loaded jpegs from their digital cameras to me, please do so.

I spent most of today investigating different ways to read EXIF data in Python for the up and coming gallery. A few days ago, as noted elsewhere, I spent a day investigating Mono and writing trivially simple GUI applications in boo. These were kind of liesurely activities, but their usage was immediately relevant to anyone.. even a non-coder. When my images are immediately available to everyone along with the ISO setting, shutter speed, and timestamp, normal people will understand. When I show my parents GUI apps that I have written, they understand its uses.

The complexity of programming is shifting from technical complexity to a more user-centric complexity. I spent more than half of today looking at different existing image gallery software and image gallery presentations. Some css only galleries are actually quite impressive. After quite some time, I finally got something working and grabbing exif data from photos taken from various cameras. Figuring out how exactly to present this (What should I cache, and how? What will I do as far as thumbnailing, fixing orientation, etc?) is going to take quite some time yet; at least some number of weeks.

Speaking to amit about this this evening, he came up (independently) with the same idea that Ceache and I had been kicking around ever since he got his SLR: combine GPS data w/ pictures and integrate a google maps mashup into your gallery. As more and more complex and useful API's are made public and available, the hard part is increasingly knowing what is out there and what you need to leverage them, and not really writing the program.

In the end, PIL did what I wanted but was missing a few vital pieces of information from the vendor specific tags (notably, the ShutterSpeed and ISO number are MakerNote's for canon cameras), so I settled for using (and modifying slightly) EXIF.py. I was a bit disappointed not to find anything simple for using ImageMagick for python (I could have sworn I had seen it), but PIL looks like it does most of the things I will need for image manipulation.

I suppose this is it. I have finally somewhat crafted a "new version" of "the site". The old comments are all safe, but I haven't migrated them over to the new system yet. I'll get around to it sometime. They're enabled again, until the spam bots attack!

I've been writing this for quite a while, even though it doesn't seem like there is much to it. The back end is actually quite powerful and flexible, but I am having some speed issues that I think are due to CPU load from another site that I host.

I tried pretty hard with the design, and kinda stumbled upon it while wandering aimlessly. I wanted to be green, but I ended up looking like a lot of other django sites. I wanted to be somewhat web 2.0 ish, and for no reason at all, other than to be trendy. The 'idea' to lack a textual heading (besides the title, which will probably be changed at some point to be more contextual) was Wei's, and I kinda like it. It manages to be down to business without looking amature.

You might notice that the gallery doesn't lead anywhere right now. I'm working on something somewhat advanced for that, that will kinda tie into the fact that a lot of the pictures I share are during my travels. I have some lofty mashup's in mind, and with what I've done at work in the past I guess it's not out of the question that I actually complete them this time.

Last night, somewhat randomly, I went to see Palomar again at the last minute at the Bowery Ballroom. When I got back I realized once again that I wanted to write something, and that once again I was letting the fact that the new site was unfinished stop me. I had promised somewhat lightheartedly that it'd be up in early June, and this post misses the mark by about 36 minutes!

Palomar played tonight at Mercury Lounge with Hockey Night and some 2 piece that I didn't stick around to see. The playfulness and joy that Palomar show when they're playing is totally infectious; Randy told me that they were going to be playing in New Brunswick next week and I am really looking forward to bumming a ride from someone and catching that show. Their new album is coming out "Sometime..."

Hockey Night also impressed with their 70's feel. When they really got into a groove (3 of their 8 song set), they were really enjoyable. I hadn't heard them previously, but they seemed to be at their best when they were incorperating some disco into their stuff. Although it wasn't quite the same feeling as Palomar before them, these guys had fun while playing, and they played tight.

One thing that I've noticed about Japanese bands is that they never seem to be having fun on stage. The ones that live here (and sing in Japanese) probably have trouble getting record deals and keeping down jobs that are flexible enough to make the band work out without friction. Those that are visiting must feel somewhat alienated or intimidated, especially when their English is poor. Note that the Pillows were an exception to this, as were the unfortunately named Doodoos. The reason I bring this up is that I missed out on a chance to see the most solemn of them all, MONO, this past tuesday.

I've been somewhat delaying the announcement publically, partly because there were some people I still needed to tell in person and also because I seem to cry wolf on this kinda thing quite often, but I'll be moving from my current apartment to one in Hoboken on June 1st. Also on June 1st, I start levels 3 & 4 of Japanese (with Minamoto-sensei again) at the Japan Society. If I can read it by next year reasonably well I will be extremely pround of myself. There's actually something else happening at the beginning of June that I'm really excited about, but I don't know if its a secret or not so I won't mention it aloud for now! So now, If anyone (who knows me, or is cute) wants to get together for some drinks sometime in Hoboken, I'm all over it. Part of the reason for the move is so that I can do what I want (hang out and meet people) without constantly wondering how I'm going to get home.

Every few months I claim that I am writing some brand new system to host this site. In my mind it's going to do about two hundred thousand different things each more awesome than the last, everyone will love it, and my backend software will thrust me to the forefront of the literati. In reality, I never get past ugly proofs of concept rife with glaring bugs. I am not sure what this means; am I a horrible programmer, a horrible system architect, do I not have the time or the patience or even the mental stamina to work on a project and not abandon it?

Well, this iteration of the cycle, I decided to learn something that seems like it's really starting to hit critical mass: Django. Django is a python web framework "for perfectionists with deadlines", and somewhat follows the model-view-controller method of development. Of course, every framework these days is loaded with buzzwords that all say "I'll let you separate your data from your logic and your logic from your presentation" (even the ones that I've attempted to construct myself), but the loose coupling always feels like it gets torn around the edges.

Django not only does a good job at maintaining the loose coupling of the system, but also (somewhat more importantly) comes with tools to do the things that are boring and repetitive quick and elegantly. The documentation that exists is quite good, especially their 4 part tutorial, but once you start to leave this scope you are pretty much on your own. #django@irc.freenode.net is a decent source of information to answer quick questions, and the people there (even the Django developers) are very open to ideas on how some things might be done differently.

One last note. Due to massive comments spam (2500!) I've silently disabled the comments. They'll be re-enabled with the next version of the site (HEH) launches sometime early June. Sometime!

As some of you who pay close attention might have seen, my site was in limbo for about a month as I switched away from my friend's server and migrated over to my own. What you are seeing is both a result of this switch, and a result of a migration from an older design to this new design that has been in sporadic development since January. If you don't see a difference, but think the site looks oddly better than it used to, then I made some good decisions. I still have a lot of work to do on it, but its finally usable up to the point that the previous version was. Of particular note, you'll find that the 'news' section has finally been killed (as it should have been a long time ago), and the comments and posts were all consolidated and correctly merged into one repository. This has inflated some post numbers (mostly those beyond 120) by no more than 20, so although all links will lead somewhere, most of them made in the past year to "permalinked" stories will point to the wrong one. I tried hard to figure out an elegant solution to this problem but sometimes the most elegant solution is to break backwards compatibility!

Anyway, since doing this merge (late February some time) I of course did not want to write until the backend to manage the reconfigured database was done, and since my server was promised to disappear, work on the backend stagnated and the updates stopped.

Fortunately, I'm finally back. The past two months or so have been filled with stress and frustration but also periods of elation. In late February, I got to witness Guitar Wolf at CBGB's; a 90 minute (+ 2 encores) hard rock spectacular that would unfortunately be one of their last. Their bassist, Billy (aka Bass Wolf), sadly died on March 31st due to heart failure that I heard on good authority was a result of a drug overdose of some kind.

Before this tragedy, I thankfully got to appreciate the penultimate concert-going experience: I got to see The Pillows twice. Their two concerts were absolutely incredible! The fact that I got to see Noodles again (twice), which would have been great on its own, was completely eclipsed by finally fulfilling what I thought was an impossible dream. They rocked the doors off of Piano's one Sunday in March, closing an unfortunately short set with an encore of "Blues Drivemonster", which was amazing. I got the chance to barge my way into conversations with Manabe (the guitarist) and their Drummer, and pleaded with them with a delicate ballance of force and pathetic-ness to play Swanky Street the following night.

It was hot at the KF Main Stage that Monday, just like it always is. A new aquaintence of mine, Janiel, was setting up to record the show from side stage (and one day I hope I get to at least watch that footage), and the band was doing their pre-show excersizes. When they came out on stage, the burned their way into an amazing set that included many songs I hadn't heard the day before. The crowd broke out in a frenzied chant for Kim Deal, which I have previously tabbed. The lead began playing it, but when the band didn't follow he playfully began laughing and they regrouped center stage. Manabe wailed on his guitar the opening 3 chords of Swanky Street and flipped a thumbs up my way (I was only 2 or 3 rows back), and the band rocked the fuck out! Jimbo and I went nuts and the crowd was overcome with pure rockness; it was the best show I've ever been to.

This period devoid of any kind of writing was also filled with some stress; some job related stress dealing with a few bugs that turned out to be incorrect usage of memset() and calloc(), and some school related stress in my epic quest to create a java interpreter (that never quite got finished, but was more than in working order). All of that is behind me now; the sun has been out, the weather has been above 55F constantly, the days are finally stretching past the border of 19:00, and my server is up and chugging along quite nicely.

Other people seem to be looking up, or at least working towards positive changes. Jason Evans (a co-worker of mine) found a new job in the city, but his departure from the center has for now been received in the most positive light as far as keeping in touch and leaving us with the ability to survive without him. An old member of my compilers group (the oddest group of computer science students I've ever worked with) has joined the center, and things are finally coming together for the project that I'm working on as well as our new website which I somewhat obviously "designed". Johnny has found a job, Krupnick is going to El Paso to work for 9 months, Wei seems in good hands as he weighs his options, and Jeremy, considering his upcoming car purchase, seems to have things figured out.

Its springtime as usual in northeast America. I hope someday I'll feel nostalgic about these times off in some far away place.

I'll get my <pre>!!

echo "hello world"
print "hello world" 
printf("hello world\\n"); 
System.out.println("hello world");
cout << "hello world" << endl; 
DISPLAY "hello world" LINE 1 POSITION 1. 
outtext("hello world");  outimage; 
puts "hello world" 
Writeln("hello world");
(write 'hello world')

All services will be terminated effective March 15, 2005. All active paypal subscriptions have been cancelled, so everyone should be receiving the full amount of hosting they have paid for, and possibly up to an additional two weeks. On the above mentioned date all DNS records will be removed. On March 20th, 2005 all relevant customer data will be deleted.

I don't really want to provide any information relayed to me which might have been in private, but the gist is that server that my site runs off of is basically a one man operation (run by a friend of mine) and he's not going to have enough time to handle dozens of service requests on top of a full time job. Over time my access to the server has become less (first I was jailed, then the jail was more restricted, etc..) to the point where his newest server was not planned to have any shell access for users. These plans were all probably scrapped when his automated user system plan failed and he was basically forced into shutting down his server.

My site should survive relatively unharmed. My domain name and a server that it points to (whichever or wherever that may be) probably won't be interrupted in the near future; in the mean time I have to decide what kind of hosting solution I want. I had actually been looking at 1u server rentals for some time now, since I was unhappy with the prospect of losing shell access. We'll see what the next month or two will bring, but there's a chance that this site (and subsequently any email sent to (anything)[at]jmoiron[dot]net) will go down for a small period of time.

Sometimes I wish that one toolkit would just win, and then I wouldn't need to waffle back and forth between them. They can look the same and function quite similarly; it IS possible; but in the example image, I had to wrestle with spacing issues in Qt for quite some time in order to get it identical to the Gtk version. Part of me has just wanted Gtk to get better than Qt so that I could actually use it and not feel like I'm implementing parts that should be done for me (like cut&paste).

Qt3 has outperformed Gtk2 thusfar; there are rendering issues on slower machines because Qt is not automatically double buffered, but other than that Qt apps outperform Gtk apps as far as responsiveness is concerned (and really, to the user, that's all that matters). I have been of the opinion for some time now that when Gtk eventually used Cairo (and more specifically, when you had Cairo set up to use Glitz) their speed issues would somehow vanish, their rastering would go vector based, and they'd totally wipe the floor with Qt in every way.

In GTK HEAD, they've gone Cairo. Qt's solution is interesting and perhaps better, though: Arthur uses whatever fast rasterizing (pixel or vector) backend exists on the system natively; when longhorn comes out in 2010, this will be double plus good for cross platform apps. I guess we'll have to wait and see what's better; Gtk+3(Cairo) or Qt4... and somehow, my money is somewhat sadly on Trolltech.

Qt will always be more delightful to use, because they have the developer in mind, and Gtk has the user in mind. Until the user experience of Gtk can approach that of Qt (as far as speed is concerned), no matter how nicely things are spaced and padded and margined in Gtk, it will always be inferior. Until I have to stop doing stupid things like iterate over entire tree/list views in order to do things for which there should be quick, builtin functions, when I'm using Gtk (out of necessity) I'll be wishing I was using Qt, too.

A quick note, work on my "new" backend (oi oi) is progressing at a slow yet comfortable pace. I've decided to stick it out with Python for now, and have relegated all of my HTML code to a seperate module that contains only strings (and functions that return strings for output). Its not exactly a template, but I don't exactly care that much; it enables drop-in replacement of HTML, and it's an improvement. As if the current design of this site was ever finished (my administration section looks like it was hit with a bomb), I'm finally happy enough with a motif that I'm sticking with it and only refactoring; you can follow my progress somewhere around here. I really like the way it feels; very clean, slick, and professional... but a number of people have made comments about centering and the like. Feel free to leave a comment somewhere if you feel you can improve upon my ideas (or if you think my ideas are shite and you have better ones); I'm specifically open to more ways in which to cleanly integrate color.

I probably should be sleeping right now, but instead I'm here (on my bed), struggling to think of something to write about. This isn't supposed to happen; I'm supposed to actually have something to write about. I do, indeed; but unfortunately I just can't seem to put any words down on the subject.

I made a few additions to the site recently and decided that it is at least time I make some recording of them. First, I wrote an rss generator (a simple task) and set up a news feed for this site. This would be useful, you know, if I ever update, which most often is not the case. The other thing I did was add a favicon, something that many of my capitalist friends might recognize.

That's right, its the soviet version of the hammer and sickle theme! Their version (the one on their flag at least) featured a star, which is a symbol of communism. The hammer and sickle itself signified the unity of agricultural and industrial workers; those who make up the proletariat. If I lost you in this paragraph, you should be ashamed of yourself; maybe you should put down your latte and go read a book or something.

Anyway, I've asked myself about this icon: "Self, you're not communist; you don't agree with communists, you even break with Marx on his theory that democracy eventually evolves through socialism towards an ideal communism; so what gives?" Nobody else has asked me that question; they just laughed and said it was pretty funny, which was kind of the reaction I was going for. If I can't educate people that my beliefs are different from that mockery of soviet republics, I might as well embrace this mistake and make light play of it.

The new Flesh CD came out; actually, the self titled debut to be exact. 10 tracks weighing in at less than 30 minutes; 3 tracks there I recognize from earlier EPs. I think I miss nightloop; but it doesn't fit in the theme of the album, which is dark, love & death emphatuated spy rock with Gabbie's (I wonder if I can call her Gabbie) psycho circus organ chugging along pleasantly. It's a good CD; I was hoping for more, but "Lonely Little Hunter", another Gab' singing track (Foes) and "Death Ship" definitely make it worth the wait. It's not quite epic, but it'l do.

I don't know what I did; but I suppose I found a way to get around my problem with sleep. I still have it, mind you, but now it no longer translates into a problem with waking up on time. This was really the important part. I had a week; last week; in which I got an immense ammount of things done that I really needed in order to add some semblence of organization to my life: I got going in the morning every day (a small but important victory), I built my chest of drawers, I cleaned up my room to its once, current, and future immaculate state, I worked on this page a little (and I have much more including a complete rehaul of the engine), and I finally got some money in the bank. I'm thinking that getting stuff actually done has put me a little at ease so my mind doesn't race so much at night; sometimes you just have to relax and watch a little West Wing.

Finally, I have had a chance to work with PHP5 at work recently, and will be working with it more in the future. This is not a glowing endorsement, in fact, I have quite a few problems with the language. As Marshal said, it's Pretty Horrible Programming, but considering that I've had serious gripes about it for some number of years, it's time that I address some I have with the latest, greatest version.

The first thing I read in the docs is the new object system, which was supposed to be sane. I had never worked with PHP4's object system, because it was ridiculously under-powered and wastefully syntax heavy. PHP5's seems similar to me, because I do not like things like sigils ($, @, etc) or necessary keywords (public, private, protected) for every single variable.

It's not like these choices are endemic to the particular version of insanity the zend authors have; Larry Wall seems to suffer them too. Thankfully he's on medication and is now publishing the illegible apocalypses (a fitting name for a language rapidly going down in flames) rather than filling the world with his PERL tripe. But, back to PHP, the authors decided to call the "::" operator "Paamayim Nekudotayim". Why? Because it means double-colon in Hebrew.

Now, while this is an etymologic, nomenclature gripe; why choose a language that will double the number of syllables and make everyone pause for longer than necessary? What's wrong with "double colon"? Would that be too complex for the internation community of coders (who apparently were able to learn 'int', 'float', or 'function')? When I make a language, I'll officially name the "." : "Boulder of Sisyphus".

If you would allow me to delve into the insanity further, I bring you this:

PHP reserves all function names starting with as magical. It is recommended that you do not use function names with in PHP unless you want some documented magic functionality.

Right. Then, PHP introduces static objects and class member constants, which cannot be accessed from an instance of the object. That's all well and fine, I suppose; except this means you need to keep the name of the class handy and use the double colon (I fucking refuse to use that other name) to make sure you pick the right scope. But, what if you want to access a constant within the class? This question must have been hard, because the bright guys at Zend HQ decided to do what they usually do, and that is polute their language with more garbage. This is the kicker; they introduce a keyword self that is like a "this" pointer but for the current class definition rather than the instance.

So I close like this; What the fuck is wrong with these people? Why introduce subtleties like these when everything can be simple? Why not do translation on constants (which are sigil-less, for some braindead reason, breaking all language conventions)? Why not, you know, move a little complexity to the interpreter as opposed to the language: that's what its there for. Computers can handle your decisions easily, no matter how stupid they are, as long as you give them a valid algorithm. Humans will just get sick of it and use something else; and if there was another language suitable for what PHP is good for, that wasn't ASP.NET; believe me I would be there already.

My time management lately has been impeccable. I've been going to work via bus, which requires quite the strategic outlook as far as schedules are concerned. I've been working 10 hour days and am still technically without a contract (although continually assured that the paper work is at its last stage, however many steps that might be from me), leaving myself both time and money to go to a myriad of new york city concerts. And yet, with all of this activity, I still have no time to do the things that I want to do besides these things; one of the continual victims is sleep.

One of the things I really want to do is re-write a large portion of the backend for this site so that I can add some much needed features. I'm not going to go the cheapo route of textpattern like so many pretenders to the backend-crown. Rest assured, Jerumu might put up some bland grayscale facade, but underneath the newspaper tone of his exterior walls lies sweet aqua flavored input mechanisms.

Even entertaining the thought of using some pre-fabricated backend mechanism Sully's what we're all trying to do in this mad world; moreso than using flat files in lieu of database expertise. Not to harp on this subject, but what was a passing fancy, merely entertaining the possibility of pondering a thought, has become a fierce excogitation of epic proportions. And as these things always do, thinking about a backend for the music section has snowballed into a desire to redesign my entire backend.

And indeed there are some reasons for me to do this. The seperation not merely by section, nae, but by database table of the "news" and "journal" sections; two things that barely deserve their distinction as individual entities; are more than a thorn in my side. The comments were implemented only for the journals, and since the "news" Id's and the "Journal" Id's intersect, I would have to perform quite the complicated voodoo ritual to get comments working in both sections in addition to rectifying the afore mentioned problem. Then there are always the miscelaneous bugs and desires; like wanting some auto-highlighting code so that you can download a non-html-fucked version as well as browse a pretty version, or the nagging input limit on my backend forms that causes me to, on very long posts, post half of it initially and then edit in the rest.

In a totally unrelated but entirely more central vein, I went to see Shy Child with Q and not U last wednesday, as well as The Wrens last tuesday. The Wrens were good, but rather under-impressive for a band who achieved an 89 on Metacritic. Shy Child tore the fucking house down, although their Sin-e show the previous week had better sound; and Q and not U were a shade or even two over pleasantly surprising; skipping right over pleasantly intrigued to pleasantly excited.

Here's to this weeks featured show: The Flesh, Wednesday at the Bowery ballroom. I haven't purchased tickets yet, so if you want to go please inform me of your intents!

As many of those who would possibly care have been told personally by me, and those who quite possibly do not care have been notified in my latest journal post, theres a new site design being debugged currently. There are a few quite errors that I still have to stamp out; errors caused by either laziness, bad style, bad structure, or just quirky behavior. I'll need help testing this on other browsers since my system currently only has Links and Firefox 0.8.

XHTML Compliance

• "img" tags aren't closed
• "img" tags have "border=" in them -- change to CSS
• & 's occur in links that aren't "amp;"-ed

Visual

• The verticle position of the content from the banner is a little awkward, and changes radically in different browsers
• The green color is not 16 bit friendly.
• The verticle position of the content does not line up in Opera
• The seperate timestamp and title "boxes" were a quick hack to get something presentable. I'm still unsure of how to change it to make it better; I don't want negative margins.
• The arrow images that replace my bullets get 2 or so pixels cut off initially, but on reload (tested in Firefox 0.8 for Linux and Firebird 0.6 for NetBSD) seem to work.
• No attention paid to other sections of the site that may or may not be broken

I'm still not sure what exactly I want to do with the design; I wanted a dark color with a warm, organic feel.. but not too warm (ie. not red). Initially I wanted a tree, but the sunflower seems to work pretty well. I've been trying to test it with the NetBSD ports of Konqueror and Opera (because I don't want them mucking up my clean install), but the versions in the lab are pretty old (3.1.3 for Konq and 7.2.3 for Opera, which actually seems kinda recent).

As soon as I get the major sections ironed out and XHTML compatibility, I'll probably push the design to the main site. This might take a few days; although I didn't change the structure of the site much (besides adding a container in and cleaning up the menu for more ( CSS control), since I'm not a structure zealot and tend to have a loose style to my markup, I need to make little tweaks and revise my earlier structure to be more normalized and easily styled as I go along. The existing white and blue style can probably be saved; although I'm not sure about the old sand style (which I still have).

Another plan that I have that is at this point so tedious that I dread its eventuality is to go through the archives and clean them up; not only for compliance (I'm sure its broken somewhere) but also for uniformity, and dare I say for spelling and grammar. I ridicule others for being so anal about it, but what use is structure and style standards when I don't conform to the standards of the English language... standards like capitalization, punctuation (hint hint, all ye trendy)... and spelling. Note that non-standard uses of ellipses will remain as I maintain some poetic license.

This rediculous dance that people do every time they design a website makes me think that maybe someone could design a browser with a really dynamic HTML engine hotplug system that could just load and unload different engines so you can see what your site looks in another browser by basically running the engine of that other browser. It'd be some kind of Utopian world browser; although I doubt that such a thing is infeasible (as almost nothing is in the world of software), I certainly am not going to be the one to do it, and I doubt that anyone else out there will take the time and energy necessary to do it properly.

Today was not my best day. I slept through archery and physics, didn't have anything to do (and thus didn't really do anything) at work, didn't get any work done at all through the day, slept from 18:00 - 21:00, then stayed up til 5:00 beating Secret of Mana. Figured I should just stay up until my 10:30, then try to remain concious through 5:00 when I get out of work, but started getting extremely tired half an hour ago. My solution was to play guitar to wake me up a bit. I broke the high E string on my acoustic which has been strung without incident for almost a year. I'm tempted to sleep on it, but of course I only have 3 hours until my first class. To top it all off, I don't even have anything interesting to write about, so this isn't going to work at keeping me awake.

I'm going to try to repeat Friday's feat (wake up after 3 hours of sleep and produce throughout the day, end up feeling like gold). My prediction: I will fail miserably after not hearing my alarm go off, sleep through my first class, decide to hell with the second, and the skip my third to go to work.

UPDATE: I found out how to stay awake: heres a preview of the new site design: Ray of Sun. It's not ready yet; only the front page has been worked on and only fairly sloppily. Enjoy. (please feel free to comment to add to my list of bugs)

• In non 24 bit color depth, the png image and background are off.. solution would be to use a color that is more 16 bit friendly. This bug happens on the X servers in lab.cs
• The margins must be a little silly since the two sections don't exactly line up; I'm guessing theres some padding or margins somewhere they shouldn't be

Updated quite a few things on the site, even since the redesign, which happened half a week from now. Here's a list of some of the things I fixed:

• I fixed a bug in the news module that was giving news posts rediculous ID's, and then fixed the "Nothingness" post
• Added pages 5 and 6 to the JTEX tutorial
• In addition to open and save, I got save-as and newfile saving working (so all types of save act as they should) in JTEX
• Fixed the style on the "news" page and to some extent fixed it in the admin section
• Added amit and firu to the ext link section of the menu

Of course, with all of this work, you realize more and more things that you want to do: here's a short list of things I want done (mostly so I don't forget them); anything marked "*" I want to get done sometime in the next 2 weeks.

• Fix news and possibly journal deletion
• Redo the "standard" part of the menu bar
• Rehash the backend style
• Add in (somewhere) all of the information I collect on these posts (edit time, last edited, edit count, etc)
• Redo the docs section so that it's at least quasi modular and database driven
• Redo the code section so that it is modular & database driven
• The code can display in vanilla or highlite modes, either inline (w/ menu and website title) or by itself
• Get New file and cut/copy/paste working in JTEX
• Get the JTEX code up online
• Get another page written for the JTEX tutorial
• Consolidate news & journal in time order on the front page : I have to figure out how I want to do this

That's pretty much it for now; the source highlight thing might come sooner rather than later as the code section is important to me and I have a pretty solid idea on how I want to do that.

The news section can best be described by the title of this entry. JTEX is almost merely a memory; although I am still equipped to deal punches with python power. I still (regrettably) haven't accomplished my tasks that were due 2 weeks ago for cs365, and projects that lay in development for this site are almost forgoten!

So, for now, rather than have a "todo list" or a "changelog" for myself to keep myself busy, I just have this pithy news section. Since I'm probably the only person in the world who reads it, It should do quite nicely.

1. I need some way to mark as "changed" different sections of the site.
2. Get the changelog working and tie the previous change to it.
3. Get a todo list working so that I know what I am working on a month after I forget about it.

That's really it for now; sad really. Luckily, my ability to update and the condition of my laptop seem to be somewhat related, as I have a much easier time typing and reading on this thing than my desktops.

It seems as my newest creation, this site is broken in MSIE; that is, it doesn't react nicely with the object tag. Its not like I should care about it at this point, since the whole page is broken due to unwise decisions with automatic HTML insertion upon updating. But I have some interesting ideas about how to fix this entire mess that will be posted to the news soon.

Progress on JTEX has been slowed down in the past few days as I have been working on the corresponding tutorial a lot (to get it up to date) and hammering out some implementation details for python cgi. In case you haven't guessed yet, Python has quickly become my language of choice for any project I don't deem a compiled module necessary; which is most of them; and I would like to further sharpen my skills by redoing the backend to this site in python. It badly needs reorganization anyway, and the lack of features and abilities is starting to really slow down my development in other areas.

Speaking of development in other areas, while I was at a loss for what in the hell I could do a few weeks ago, I'm getting so many ideas now that I don't even know how to finish anything. In this way, my CMS becomes actually important in my life; and I find my short musings in the news section to be a life saver; or at least, an idea saver. Currently, I'm juggling a website re-write, re-design, a sizeable tutorial, a mid-sized development project in both a new language and new framework, implementation issues for MySQLdb (mysql-python), a summer class that will probably be PHP/Mysql, numerouns ideas that require writing my own XML DTD, and the creation and upkeep of a small library of packages that I find useful.

My Anjuta package (pronounced Un-Zoo-tah apparently) is now posted at linuxpackages.net, which should bring Paul's server some of the tender lovin care that he's been craving. I also submitted the bluefish package, hopefully it will be accepted (I used the same method as I did with the anjuta package), and then slackware users everywhere can enjoy the beautiful IDE's that I have been enjoying.

I was talking to Firu today about how I think that fame is the number one exterior incentive in the open source movement. People don't want money, they want name recognition. Maybe they want to help people, and I'm just a self centered twit, but I think that in some way people always want recognition for the good things they do. While I don't think that this incentive is necessarily wrong, or makes people bad, I do think that it replaces money as the incentive to strive for greatness. Or perhaps its just academic interest itself.

Needless to say, to be recognized for something always feels good; especially for me. Theres a funny thing about guy's; we don't really compliment eachother all that much; its apparently too gay. Of course, I'm too busy cracking jokes half of the time to drop a "nice job dude" or "that was so awesome man"; one could even say that me uttering these could be considered out of character; but to be told by someone "you are good" or "you are so smart", and have them mean it, really feels wierd.

It just doesn't happen in the environments that I am used too. People concentrate too much on what you don't know, not what you do know. I'm just as guilty as anyone in this respect; I remark with disdain daily about the uselessness of the common Stevens student. It seems that even some uncommonly smart Stevens students are also useless. But maybe they're only useless in the areas that I am interested in; or just maybe, to break free of my "modesty shackles", comparing most people to myself is actually unfair.

So when good friends are nice to me, it makes all of my work worthwhile. It makes up for the hundreds of over-zealous critical nitwits that I know. It makes the feverish pace at which I take in and process information (which always seems to be slower than the people I am trying to emulate) all worthwhile... satisfying that 5% of me that is not interested in academic pursuits, but wants to be acknowledged as someone who is not useless. And when an anonymous person does it, its even better.

In an Ideal world, here is what the schedule looks like. I hope to have 0.2 complete by tonight, and 1.0 released by mid to late june. PySCP should start up heavy sometime early july, and I expect to have working scp code by mid to late august. There's also another project on the way... and I need to re-write my website to adjust for my newfound thirst for development.

Goals for Jonas 0.2 follow:

• connect new, open, save buttons to dialog
• connect new, open, save menu options to dialog
• finish implementation of "view menu": wordwrap option and document properties
• testing on "view menu" completed

Goals for Jonas 0.3:

• planned feature list for 1.0
• design properties dialog
• design XML format for RC file

Goals for Jonas 0.4:

• XML RC file importing and utilization

Goals for Jonas 0.5:

• XML file editing from properties dialog

Goals for Jonas 0.6:

• undo

Goals for Jonas 0.7:

• redo

Goals for Jonas 0.8

• cut, copy, paste (with builtin clipboard widgets)
• begin public release or code archives

Goals for Jonas 0.9:

• properties dialog design and implementation: include permissions, meta data(?)

Goals for Jonas 1.0:

• stablize working environment, polish up tutorial, and publish

I can't stand the layout of the site; not that its bad, its just not good. Or; at least, it could be better. How, I'm not sure, but I'm sure that it could be better. Two sections that annoy me in particular are:

docs  
code

They are in complete disarray. The way that files are included are horrible, and it makes the whole site seem less polished. Luckily my site is modular enough to change pretty quickly. Unluckily, I have more than enough interesting projects on my hands; and this website is basically the way I plan to deploy them to the public. At this point, I don't plan on starting PySCP until mid June at the earliest. Hopefully, by mid July, PySCP will be well underway, and a revamping of the backend (and front end) of this website will be closing up. Unfortunately (again), its going to be hard to change the site around without breaking lots of links. Hopefully, this could be the last time I ever do that.

To Do:

1. implement some UL/OL quick tags for auto-replace engine
2. add a space between $num_of_comments and "comments" on view page
3. fix rant and news editing; get administration to 1.0.
4. re-introduce news section (and redefine)

Other than that, there's lots of work to be done in organizing the code section, adding some python snippets, and porting over pygtk tutorials to pygtk 1.99.x. The pygtk+glade are probably the more useful tutorials (and the harder to port). Need to add a how to page explaining how to (cross-*nix compatible) set up the python environment, including how to fix what was happening to me.

I've finally gotten around to creating the news section of the site. This section will eventually hold individual musings on news items that I find of interest as well as information regarding the upgrade of the design, structure, or back end of the site. Hopefully, the rant section can from here on out be the place where I connect my thoughts on the various things I read and experience; and since the news section will no doubt feature some degree of editorial, it should cut down on the size of my ravenous ranting, to the delight of some people at least.

As the title of this news post suggests; the script seems to be totally working. I'll tweak it a little so that it creates some base files for me to work off of; it was a bit of a hack getting the news title in there working; and once I have that I should have a very easy time writing these updates.

But, does that mean I'll actually do it?