Joe Maller: Site Notes Archive - May 2002

May 30, 2002

I'm trying to catch up on work in the few days between my family's visit and this coming weekend's events. This new parent stuff is a different kind of exhausting that I haven't previously experienced.

I had no idea Ben was updating his site with details of the weekend while he was here. Ben's amazing. And funny. He's also a mystery. I was with him the whole weekend and had no idea this stuff was going through his head:

• Friday, May 24, 2002
• Saturday, May 25, 2002
• Sunday, May 26, 2002
• Monday, May 27, 2002

May 25, 2002

My mom, dad and brothers are visiting this weekend. This is my parent's first visit to New York City and first time meeting Lila, so I'm going to be spending most all of my time showing them around. Be back Tuesday.

May 20, 2002

Lila's photo page is up to date through week 8.

MacStumbler - Finally a wireless network scanning (war driving) tool for the Mac. This is going to be so much easier than clicking the menu bar over and over while riding in cabs.

I got a new PowerBook on Friday, it stopped working shortly thereafter. More later when I know how this ends.

For some twisted reason this reminded me of a passage from the miscellaneous section of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations:

It is so soon that I am done for,
I wonder what I was begun for.

Epitaph of a child who died at the age of three weeks

I remember finding that back in college and being blown away by it. Now, as a parent, it just freaks me out. I'm continually thankful for modern science. My mind often makes bizarre connections without asking first; garbage in, garbage out.

May 15, 2002

Odds are, I'm not going to get to go to the movies for a while. Considering my microscopic attention span and uncanny ability to nitpick everything to death, I'm not all that upset about it. That said, I really wish I could have been in the theater for this: Yoda Kicking Ass.

CD rants bore me, I should stop.

May 13, 2002

I hate buying CDs. Three years ago I tried unplugging my CD player and have been listening to MP3s exclusively ever since. I've already downloaded and listened to several of the albums below and liked them enough to own. When the albums arrive I will take each CD out of the jewel case exactly once, rip the songs to MP3, eject the CD from the computer, place them back into their jewel cases and throw them into a box with the the 500 or so other CDs which have never been unpacked since we moved.

CDs are obsolete, they don't hold enough data (early eighties data compression), they don't contain any meta-data about the music and they take up far too much space. Additionally I hate knowing that my purchases are going to help the RIAA continue to exploit artists and further erode my fair-use rights by lobbying Congress with half-truths. If there was any way to bypass the recording industry and send money directly to the artists, I would. I'm buying these CDs for convenience and because I know I should, but it feels like an obligation and is completely devoid of pleasure.

Anyway, I'm buying these:

• Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
• Craig Armstrong: As If to Nothing, The Space Between Us
• Moby: 18
• Tom Waits: Alice, Blood Money

Babies love these things, no matter how ugly they are. Lila's is coming later this week.

May 7, 2002

For the past several days (months if you count thinking about it), I've been researching different content-management systems for the FXScript Reference. I'm currently evaluating:

• PHP-Nuke (installed, far less than thrilled)
• Geeklog (installed, might be too rigid)
• phpWebSite (installed, this might be the one)
• PostNuke
• Greymatter (no database)
• Movable Type (been thinking about this one, it might actually work quite well)

...and a others as I stumble across them.

My goal is to end up with something between an O'Reilly Nutshell book and the PHP Manual, which is not only dynamic and searchable, but also actively commented by users. User comments would be reviewed, edited and potentially deleted, but it would open up the FXScript Reference to be much bigger than it is now and much bigger than I could do on my own.

I'm bouncing between a do-it-all solution with most of the bells and whistles removed or a simple solution where I custom build the features I need. Currently I'm leaning towards a stripped down solution. It must use a database and will hopefully allow attributed, non-registered posting. (I hope that isn't a mistake.)

I'd like this to happen with a pre-built system for a few reasons: First, I don't really know how to build one of these yet. Second, I don't have time to build one from scratch right now, even if I did know how. Third, an open-source solution can be taken apart and learned from, so next time I will be able to build my own. I've been wanting to learn this stuff for a while anyway and this was supposed to be my "database year". Most of the new web projects I'm thinking about these days should be built on a database, so it's about time I learn this stuff.

Notes and Archive thanks to Blogger Someday I'll build my own.