...more recent posts
Getting some good work done today (finally!)
My friend J. convinced me that rewriting my code base wasn't necessarily such a bad idea. Especially if I've done it less than three times. Indeed, this will be the third time, so let's see if it's a charm like he suggests.
I'm not doing a complete from scratch rewrite. But I am going through every line of every script. Plus I have changed the database structure slightly to get rid of the scaling problem that threaded comments was going to cause.
I'm trying to add lots of documentation in-line this time. And of course clean up all the glaringly crappy code (at least to a regular crappy level.) But the real focus is on making the whole thing much easier to move from machine to machine. That means abstracting all the machine specific information out of the main code into configuration files. I'm also trying to abstract out as much HTML code as possible so that if I ever come to really care about standard compliance I can fix my good-enough HTML without going into every single script.
This new improved code base will be running on my home (production) server. When it stabilizes I will get the new colo server and move this new code to that machine. Then I'll move some other people to that machine and see what happens. Then if everything seems good I'll move digitalmediatree to the new machine and run things in parallel for awhile. Then finally I'll close this account and move digitalmediatree.com to the new server. Probably that is not too close to happening.
I haven't fully figured this out yet, but I will also try along the way to write something that will sync the contents of the production server database with the digitalmediatree database. I've never done anything like that before. I don't think it will be easy, but I think I can do it. If that works then I will provide a local copy of the system to anyone here who is running OS X. That might turn out to be pretty cool.
Christopher Locke is at it again. Burning down the world, that is. Inspirational.
Mozilla is getting aquafied (screenshot.)
AOL/TimeWarner is apparently in negotiations to buy Red Hat.
That would sure be interesting. But why would they buy a linux distro? A content company? Doesn't make any sense. They should buy a BSD distro (or just make their own) and then lock everything down. Of course I'd be happy if they went with Linux.
I'm discovering that my browser (Mozilla 0.97 on OS X 10.1.2) doesn't show up in referer logs. That is very strange.
Bruce Schneier on national ID cards:
I am not saying that national IDs are completely ineffective, or that they are useless. That's not the question. But given the effectiveness and the costs, are IDs worth it? Hell, no.
I've been busy. Had one interesting meeting I'll hopefully be saying something more about in the near future. The new restaurant opening keeps slipping slightly. Second week in February now. Oh well. Just lots of little problems; no show stoppers.
Not much time to write. Maybe you want to check out some new finds: quantumslip, and environy for some unusually high quality general purpose bloggage, and the all star team at satn for something a little more geeky.
Pretzel. Right.
I think maybe W. forgot his role, spoke up at some meeting, and Cheney had to give him a little smack down. "Remember George, you fell and hit your head while choking on a pretzel."
"Aw, jeez Dick, can't we make up something better than that?"
"You want some more frat boy?"
I saw The Fellowship of the Ring yesterday. I don't have too much to say about it. I thought it was a great if somewhat impossible film. Of course I wasn't going to really like it. Not like I really liked the books the first time through when I was young. But given what it was up against, the film did quite well. I just have no idea how it would go over if you don't know the books. Good cave troll anyway.
Gandalf was perfect. I thought Galadriel was too, although Alex thought she was stiff. I guess I can see what he means, but still...
Couldn't they have done it in 6 episodes but released 2 at a time in December for three years? The first could have been just up to Rivendell - with all the Tom Bombadil scenes added back in. The second would continue to the end of The Fellowship - but with a much more expanded opening council at Rivendel.
Probably The Return of the King could just be one movie.
I guess that's too risky (or expensive,) but there was a lot of material that had to be skipped. Still, given the actual time constraints, I generally agree with all the choices.
Sure makes me want to go to New Zealand.
Google is now indexing up to the minute news from over 70 sources. While traditional publishers, especially the New York Times, keep getting it wrong, Google leaps straight to the top of the on line news world. This is the front page of the news web. Thanks again Google. [via joho]