Well, we’re part way into the CSS redesign, and here’s what we’ve got so far… Minimal testing outside of Gecko-based browsers, expect some breakage…

I figured that getting this up was Step #1, and it would force me to follow up with Step #2, and so on…

So stay tuned…

I very much liked reading Mark’s piece on Club vs. Lojack solutions in regards to Blog/Spam. I will call it thought provoking, because I ended up thinking about it quite a bit. About possible solutions, and whether they were really good clubs, or so-so lowjack type ideas… I thought to myself, hmmm, maybe I should write up some ideas, but then decided not to as I was much too tired, and that probably affected my thought process, though who knows? Maybe I did have a solution. I suppose you could do what I do on my Contact page. I have a drop down menu with various subjects, and one of the choices is Spam. Maybe we need some sort of User Agreement on comment posting forms, a checkbox that says ‘I Hereby Certify that I am NOT a Spammer’ yeah, that should do it…

There’s this radio commercial for some career advancement thing that goes like this “Dude, is your career getting, ya know, jiggy!” Now, I’m not truly hep like the kids, but I thought ‘jiggy’ was a good thing. In this context it appears to be a bad thing. I tried checking with the online dictionaries, but they don’t seem to recognize ‘jiggy’ as a word. Luckily there’s a Jiggy FAQ, where we learn that:

Defining Jiggy is like trying to can sunshine; it cannot be done. It has no definition, it just exists.

I hope that clears everything up…

Apple doc offer details on CSS bugs in IE. Of course we use Mozilla ’round these parts…

Redesign? Maybe this time I really will follow through… See, back around the start of 2002 I worked on re-working this site to not use tables for layout purposes, going to strictly CSS based control for layout, and I did pretty much rebuild things as needed, but I never completed the job. I think now I’ll do that. It seems like a good time… I’ll be over at Blue Robot’s Layout Reservoir or glish.com’s CSS Layout Techniques if you need me…

Oh, with the redesign we’ll probably add the ability to have descriptions in the RSS feed, and link to individual items… depending on how ambitious I actually get…

This weekend was the trick ‘r treating weekend. Emma was a cowgirl and Maddy was a fairy princess, or medeebal (aka ‘medieval’) princess depending on who you asked. We hit the downtown businesses Saturday afternoon until they got tired of walking (about an hour) and then that night did the neighborhood, again for about an hour until they were pooped out. We got lots of candy of course, and we all ate too much, except Mom who is much smarter than Dad or the kids…

Sunday we went out to the relative’s house and did some more. Maddy got tired quicker this time, even though she had a stroller at her disposal, and we went back before everyone else. Still, lots of candy once again. All in all a successful trick ‘r treating experience… Favorite costumes: Home-made SpongeBob costume that someone made out of a big cardboard box, with great attention to detail… also the ‘fancy’ lads, a group of young boys dressed up as girls, quite hilarious…

I started getting back into learning more MySQL this weekend. I didn’t mention this, but I got a SQL book a while back (for 50 cents) titled Teach Yourself SQL in 14 Days. It’s about 7 years old, but the basics of SQL haven’t changed much in that time. In my other life SQL has been learned from trial, error, and lots of hacking. I do a lot of perl related things with SQL, so when I can’t write the SQL to do what is needed, I just do it on the perl side. Learning what I’m learning now should speed things up a bit. Of course I’ve had it more that 14 days, and I’m only 1/2 way through it.

I hacked at Aaron’s weblogUpdates for a few minutes today, and it now supports Weblogs.com RSS Pings… DIY baby… (Note: I think Aaron updated things recently, so I should really check on what he updated…)

Well, I did end up looking at Greymatter again and after a few minutes remembered how poorly written the code was, and remembered why I never used it. Still, it might work for you if security and reliability aren’t high on your list…

Here’s the link I should have had previously, it’s by Eric Raymond from The Magic Cauldron:

First, code written for sale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. …we’ll see shortly that there is empirical evidence that approximately 95% of code is still written in-house…

Most such in-house code is integrated with its environment in ways that make reusing or copying it very difficult. (This is true whether the environment is a business office’s set of procedures or the fuel-injection system of a combine harvester.) Thus, as the environment changes, work is continually needed to keep the software in step.

This is called `maintenance’, and any software engineer or systems analyst will tell you that it makes up the vast majority (more than 75%) of what programmers get paid to do. Accordingly, most programmer-hours are spent (and most programmer salaries are paid for) writing or maintaining in-house code that has no sale value at all-a fact the reader may readily check by examining the listings of programming jobs in any newspaper with a ‘Help Wanted’ section.

I knew I didn’t make it up ;)

You might have noticed a search box show up on this page, or perhaps noticed the Search page has changed. Yes, we’ve slapped ht://Dig in place. Though we’ve still got some customizing and templatizing to do, things seem to be working. There’s even an experimental beta ‘results in RSS‘ feature that is being tested, as well as a Mycroft/Sherlock plug-in on the way… we’re just wacky, ain’t we?

Now that there is a real live search, I find weird things… Like on this day, when I mentioned Greymatter and more importantly, how Microsoft uses fictitious examples in their materials… I could have used that a week ago…

I had (somewhat) forgotten about Greymatter, from what I remember about it, it was abandoned by it’s author, but not exactly given up on, or set free. foshdawg.net claims to be THE place for Greymatter. I dug around a bit and managed to find this bit which is as close as I can find for a license:

You may freely modify and redistribute this program, so long as every copyright notice (including in this manual and in the Greymatter code) remains fully intact. Finally, you may not sell or in any way make a financial profit from this program, either in original or modified form.

The you may not sell part makes sense, it sounds like the GPL, but the whole ‘make a profit’ thing makes me back away from it. It’s sort of open-source, but sort of not really… The whole line in any way make a financial profit is the deal breaker. What if Apache had that in it’s license? Argh…

Funny that the next section mentioned how Greymatter is a completely free program. Free as in beer I guess… I have no problem with people using open-source software and somehow making a profit off of it. The company I work for uses open-source software, and we certainly make a profit. So did the last company I worked for. So do a zillion companies. And not just Red Hat and Apple, but ordinary everyday comanies as well. So as an individual can you use Greymatter? Not if you have a donate button on your site. Though an Amazon Wish List might be ok, since that’s not technically a ‘financial profit’ then. And again, is there a certain measurable ‘financial profit’ that might be allowed? I don’t know…

Update: I must have missed this section:

“…you are hereby free to do whatever you wish with Greymatter and its code for any personal or commercial purposes…”

So maybe I’m wrong about the whole thing… Still, I’d like to see an ‘official’ license of some sort. Or maybe this is it…

Anyway, this is my plan. I’m going to write some sort of ‘weblog type’ software, using perl, that uses a templating system, and writes out static files. It might suck, it might not have any good features, but it will be open-source, most likely licensed under the GPL, though BSD is an option as well. I need this for myself and people I do work for. Yes, I do work for other people and they pay me, so this tool will be valuable to me. And if others can use it and make a profit, yay for them. I do not wish to restrict other people’s rights…

By the way, this won’t be the first time I’ve written something like this. The first ‘news page’ web app I wrote was probably written in 1998, back before the whole ‘weblog/blog’ craze took off. This time I’ll rewrite it and (try to) do it right.

See nf0’s life and inluminent/weblog for some comments on yesterday’s Movable Type piece…

This piece on GPL Blog Engines struck a real chord with me. First I should say that I think Movable Type is an incredibly well built application, I really can’t find a single thing wrong with the code or design decisions that went into building it. And as for support and community involvement, the Trotts seem to do an excellent job. So what chord has been struck? I’ve never been comfortable with the licensing. Sure there’s the commercial license, which I believe is $150, and for a business that seems dirt cheap, but for the individual, who hosts a personal site, they won’t get the commercial license in most cases. Should they? Perhaps…

There is personal or non-profit use and there is business or a for-profit site. Now, if you’re a typical weblogging type person, and you start your personal site and later add something like a Donate via PayPay button do you violate the license? What about if you write a book, and mention it on your site? Or write articles and sell them from your site? Or just link to sites that paid you to write articles for their site? If you get a freelance gig from your weblog, do you need to get a commercial license immediately? I didn’t make these examples up. They’re out there. Though I don’t know if people have commercial licenses or are knowingly breaking their licensing agreements. I suppose it’s up to the Trott’s to determine how they would wish to pursue people in violation of the license. IT’s nted in the license that they [the Trott’s] can terminate it at any time, and demand that you delete your installation of Movable Type. Yes, your data is still available, though possibly a little harder to get at.

I honestly am not writing this to stir up trouble, I’m writing it to get my thoughts out there. I don’t expect the Trott’s to start playing hardball tomorrow and going after violators. I don’t expect that because they seem to be good people. Some might say it would be bad for business to start going after the violators, and while that’s probably true, I think in the Trott’s case it really is because they are good people.
As for me, I’ve not implemented Movable Type on this site, partly because of the reasons listed above. I’m 1/2 tempted to write my own system, but honestly I don’t have the time. I’m not even concerned about making it 1/10 as good as Movable Type, I’d be happy with a system that was written in perl, rendered out static files, and had a good templating system - and that I had control over, be it GPL’d or whatever… I’ve written systems like that, though not weblog-centric, and it’s a lot of work to do it right. As for the other systems out there, none really seem to come close enough to what I’d like, with the terms/licensing that I’m comfortable with.

Whew, take a breath…

Don Park has some interesting thoughts on the OSAF, free/open-source software, and the surrounding issues. One thing I didn’t see mentioned (need to dig up a link) is that, if I remember this correctly, most software developers do not develop software for the commercial software industry. Most software developers work on projects that are in-house and specific to their employer, which in most cases is not a software company. You could consider me a ’software developer’ or ‘programmer’ but none of my apps are going to be sold alongside Photoshop or Word. I’d guess that over 50% of the stuff I write is for one-off use. The other 50% might be to fullfill some task that is specific to the company I work for. In fact, I think this is part of the reason open-source/free software flourishes. When you spend all day doing something you like (programming) but not really having anything neato-cool to show for it, it can drive you towards writing apps that you want, in the way you want to write them. Do I want to write an app that loads customer data into a SQL databases? Not really… Do I want to write an RSS aggregator that outputs pages that I can load onto my Palm III? You bet! I think the coverage commercial and open-source software get on the web, in weblogs, or anywhere really, shadows much of the software development that goes on in the world. I’ll write about Apache, or Mozilla, or even about holes in Internet Explorer, but I never really mention Email Lookup, which is an extremely useful app I wrote for the company. And in the case of Email Lookup there’s not much to say. I wrote it in about 20 minutes, it has no known bugs, there are no pending feature requests, it’s not for sale. It’s not outstanding in any way, except that it works properly, which oddly enough, might be the most outstanding feature, especially when compared to much of the software available today.

I’ve been informed by a few people that there are tabbed terminals out there. I thnk KDE’s Konsole is one, and Multi Gnome Terminal is another. Now, where’s the Mac OS X tabbed Terminal? hmmm?