jmoiron.net

As you would probably expect with how problematic and generally incomplete it feels, this blog is based upon a long and wretched history of failed or aborted blog projects. Beginning in February 2002, when I wrote far more often about completely uninteresting things (a trend that's caught on with the web at large), this blog has seen 7 past versions:

From some talks with Greg Deangelis, who seems to have taken Jeremy's design aesthetic to heart, I have decided that I should fix this broken site. Fixing it means a lot of things:

Happy Anniversary to 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 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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..."

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!

I'll get my <pre>!!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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!

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.

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.

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:

To Do:

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.