Turkey Day ’05: Electric Boogaloo

It’s that time of year again. Turkey comas and dessert deaths, and so much to be thankful for.

I’m thankful that my parents are still with us to enjoy the holidays. I’m thankful for my wife, who for some unknown reason, loves me and puts up with me. Now, on with the food!

My First Published Article

After some encouragement from online folk and with the support of the Catalyst community, I managed to write an article about the software I’ve been working on and it got published on O’Reillys Perl.com!

Hopefully I’ll get to do a few more of those.

Technology Dictator

I’ve been pretty much appointed the technology dictator for a huge project at work. Holy stressful batman. I know I know things, maybe more than others, but I’m just never comfortable with the thought that I’m the guy to make the decisions.

Ask a group of people who knows what they’re doing. The ones who do answer “I have no idea”. The ones who don’t answer “Absolutely”.

Ubuntu Breezy Desktop

Since Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger came out today, I decided to wipe my tinkered-up (technical term) 5.02 Hoary Hedgehog install and do a fresh install of Breezy. As usual, the only thing I had to fight was the wireless pcmcia card.

Here’s screenshot of my desktop after I got a not-so-brown wallpaper and tweaked the window style:

Microsofts Open Office Format vs. Open Document

Dave Winer posted this output about how OpenDocument:

After years of maintaining absolute control over user’s data in Microsoft Office, the new version promises to give total control to the user, and creates a path for developers to siphon users from Microsoft to new or specialized products. One would think that this would spawn an explosion of new products designed to please Office users but that’s not what’s happening. A group of large technology companies is proposing a competing set of formats, and has formed an alliance to confuse the market, and at least double the work of any developer who might want to support their products (with almost no installed base) alongside Microsoft’s (with a monopolistic dominant installed base).

Hold on there Dave. Last time I checked, the OpenDocument format specs used by OpenOffice/StartOffice/KOffice, etc were around long before Microsoft tried being ‘open’ and opening the office formats unto XML. It is Microsoft who chose to create a second standard for office document formats, not the OpenDocument people.

Hello From Hoary Hedgehog

After two days of tinkering, I finally got one of my many wireless cards working under the Ubuntu 5.2 Hoary Hedgehog Live CD.

And what took so long? THe format of the WEP key. Here’s a tip for the wireless config developers: give examples! IT won’t work with AABBCCDDEEFF, but it does work with AABB-CCDD-EEFF because that’s what it’s expecting.

Even better, put those in yourself if the user doesn’t. Don’t make it any more harder for the user than you have too.

Now, I think I might just wipe FreeBSD off the lappy and give a real install a try. THat would give me another test platform since I’ll still have FreeBSD on the servers.

Now, I just need an iBook to complete the test farm.

Why I’ll Hate ASP.NET 2.0/VS.NET 2005

First, let me say that there are many vastly improved things in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio (Express) 2005 to be praised. Master pages. SQL dependency caching. XHTML output. The list goes on and on.

There is one thing in ASP.NET 2.0/Studio that really chaps my ass: the SQLDataSource control. You see, back in 1.1, when you dragged a table from the server explorer into your web form, a SQLConnection and SQLDataAdapter were created for you. Way cool. All of the code it created got put into the pages codebehind file.

In 2.0, this SQLDataSource control stuffs a load of HTML server-side tag goop into your HTML…things like connection strings, stored procedure parameter declarations, etc. I call bullshit on that action. It defeats the purpose of codebehind and seperation of code/content.

Sure, you can still program against the SQLConnector/SQLDataAdapter directly, but people who code using the toolbox controls are out of luck: it’s either crap in your HTML, or start writing code. This seems like a big step backwords in 2.0.

Apparently, I’m not alone. These links get the the heart of the problem:

http://weblogs.asp.net/cazzu/archive/2004/08/25/LosingComponents.aspx
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=e2996990-64a5-4308-921d-245071e6f174

Back In Da Hizzle

Well, it took a big of work, but we’re back online for the most part. I must say that I’m very impressed with MovableType 3.2. The upgraded went fine and the interface and features are much improved. I’ve upgraded to FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE, installed MT 3.2 [obviously], installed Apache2/ModPerl2 and Subversion. I still need to my my repository to the new Handel site. Plenty of work to do.

The Big Wipe

Thing are moving along quite nicely on the Handel front. Version 0.18 is out and considered feature complete in terms of tests, checkout, order, and carts in Perl, on AxKit and within Template Toolkit. I need to start on a Catalyst demo site as well.

There is a nice crisp new mailing list. I need to setup a wiki and the subversion repo on the new domain name. This means I need Apache2 installed, which means I want to install mod_perl2 which means I need a newer version of perl. Oh yea, I need to upgrade MySql to version 4.

Considering all of that work, I’ve decided that it’s best to give this web server The Big Wipe and start from a scratch FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE install. Then I can let Apache1/MP1 and Apache2/MP2 fight it out. After that, maybe PHP4/PHP5, or at least PHP4 under both apache installs. You get the idea.

I’ve long wanted to convert everything from 3 1U servers back into one to make life [and my electric bill] much happier. If I start from scratch on this machine, eventually it will become the one and only.

If it weren’t for AxKit, and me wanting to run the Handel AxKit demo online, I’d ditch Apache/MP1 all together. Hell, I might as well upgrade MovableType, or maybe even ditch it for WordPress?

So, after some quick and dirty backups of SQL data, DNS files, config files, and websites, we will be off the air for a while.

Hopefully I can can this all done by the end of the weekend. Famous last word right?

Keep your stick on the ice and out of your friends face. We’re all in this together.

Let It Die Already

Oh for the love of all that is holy. Who in the hell thought it was a good idea to remake the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers; again; for the fourth freaking time? Yes people, a fourth time. Like the third remake wasn’t enough.

Unbelievable.