Well, I’ve been using Moveable Type for about a day now, and I need to say that over all, I’m a lot happier with it than b2evolution. It’s administrative interface is actually functional, it’s templating system makes more sense to me than b2evos did, and the Widget system seems pretty cool.
Still, I have a few gripes. The templates that ship with MT4 don’t actually use the Widget Sets system that they’ve built for it. I’ve gone ahead and ported this blog to using the Widget Sets, but I need to rework the widgets and the template to have different widget sets for different types of pages, and display them correctly still. Having to re-publish my site when I make template changes is different, but I don’t really mind that much since it’s a background process and keeping my blog in HTML files will just make it load faster later. Plus, this is infinitely more indexable by search engines than b2evo was (not that I care too much about that, but it is a potential plus).
As pleased as I am with MT, I would not have paid for this software. There is no way that would have been worthwhile to me. The only reason I allowed MT to be a serious contender in my search for blog software, was that it was going to have an Open Source version soon. I just hope that they don’t fuck it up with a bizarro license and that I can easily migrate to the OSS version when they finally release it.
Well, I got the e-mail today, that apparently my first Patch has been accepted into the Rhythmbox Project, making me a GNOME Contributor (finally). I’m glad to finally be doing some coding in something other than web programming for projects that I use regularly anyway. Unfortunately, the maintainer that applied my patch had a tweak a few things, but it was just an error message that wasn’t very clear and an small organizational issue, so I’m pretty happy with that.
Still, it was pretty exciting to get that e-mail.
Unfortunately, the changes made by the Maintainer who did the commit have made it more difficult for me to merge my development branch for this patch into the master branch on my local git repo. Fortunately, this means that it’s an ideal opportunity to learn how to handle conflict resolution in git.
A couple of days ago, Randy Pausch, a Carnegie-Mellon University Professor in Computer Science and Virtual Reality, who was recently diagnosed with Terminal Cancer, gave a lecture for the CMU Entertainment Technology Center. It was a part of CMU’s old “Last Lecture” series, where a professor is given an opportunity to give a lecture on ANYTHING they want.
We started doing it at Montana State University through Residence Life, and I thought it was a great, great program. Most professors chose to give their own take on Life’s Lessons, which was always interesting, and Dr. Pausch was no exception in this presentation. He talks about Dreams. What his were, how he accomplished them (or didn’t), and how he went on to help others accomplish theirs. His lecture is funny, entertaining, and heartfelt. He doesn’t talk like a man who’s about to die, he talks like a man who intent on living for as long as he possibly can, knowing that it isn’t very long.
I really, really suggest everyone watch this video. It’s nearly two hours, but it’s worth every minute.
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/global_news/?q=node/42
I decided that I need to be doing more programming, so I’ve begun going through the GNOME Bugzilla, and submitting patches for some Bugs I’m running across. So far, I’ve submitted two patches to Rhythmbox (the GNOME iTunes-like player), and am thinking about a few more.
I’ve also used the opportunity to learn git, by linking the Rhythmbox SVN into a local git repository. Git seems pretty cool, but I haven’t really had an opportunity to look at how it handles collisions, which frankly is going to be the most interesting part of git, in my opinion. Still, it’s branching is quite interesting, and I like that I can maintain version control in my local repo without messing with the GNOME SVN.
Well, it’s been 10 months since my last post, and about a year since my last post with anything about me in it, so, I guess it’s time for another update, while I contemplate becoming more active in my blogging.
My work for Cuda-Buffalo Apparel (now CB Apparel) eventually moved away from being an Accouting Clerk, and I became that companies IT Administrator. I left the Company in August to move to Pullman, WA to follow Catherine, who is now studying Zoology and Molecular Phylogenies at Washington State University.
As for my own work, during the day I work for Washington State University’s Office of the Registrar as a Programmer for their RONet, a collection of Applications to support Registrar Office functions. The platform is ASP and MSSQL, which I was unfamiliar with, the Language was VBScript, which I was not fond of. Actually, I really like my job. It’s a lot of work, but I’m programming and designing all day, and it’s really, really nice.
At night I am finally doing some consulting. I’ve registered as a Business in Washington State, doing business as “Craig Consulting”, I’m looking into a domain name for a company website. Currently my only client is CB Apparel, but I hope to push for expansion of that list.
Due to Catherine’s work in Bioinformatics, I’ve because interested in some of the programming side of it, as the field of Molecular Phyogenetics has an intense dependence on computer systems and software. Currently, I have merely been familiarizing myself with the BioPerl suite, and writing a general purpose format converter to change a datafiles format so that other software can use it.
In web work, I really like the look of Catalsyt for Perl, but I haven’t done much with it. After working with several large website that mix all their processing in with their formatting, I’m a strong believer in MVC for web applications now.
