tbradshaw.net

The majority of my day has been spent watching the national coverage of the Libertarian Party National Convention on C-SPAN. It was an interesting process, watching a good portion of the event unfold Live on television, and it wasn’t without it’s ups and downs.

The first and overwhelming feeling that the television coverage left me was a lack of polish. I realize that one of the fundamental differences between the Libertarian Party National Convention and the Democrat or Republican national conventions is that the LP actually does work at their convention and the D’s and R’s use it as a PR machine/coronation. But if there’s anything that I think that liberty could use, it’s a PR machine. What I would really like to see would be a producer for the LPNC, so that all of the incredibly valuable national television time could have been better utilized.

We spent a lot of time watching down time, or worse, watching the chairperson somewhat arrogantly running the assembly. It’s not that he didn’t do a good job, he just had this attitude about it… it was… self-important. To be nice about it.

The candidate race was very exciting. The primary candidates were Gary Nolan and Aaron Russo with Michael Badnarick as an underdog candidate. However, when the dust settled after the presidential debate on Saturday, Badnarick had really proved himself as a great speaker. Most people in attendance seemed to consider him the winner of the presidential candidate debate.

Bright and early on Saturday morning the delegation election to select the party candidate began, and Matt and I were on the couch ready to start the day. After a somewhat long series of nomination speeches, the voting began in earnest. In what was probably the most entertaining portion of the day, each state nominated a member of their delegation to come forward and announce their respective votes for each nominee and deliver a little sound bite regarding their state.

The most humorous state announcement by far was from Missouri. The setup was perfect. Most of the states that had announced themselves mentioned something that they wished to take credit for, or some accomplishment that they had. Missouri came up in normal fashion, and then sincerely apologized for Ashcroft! The crowd was rolling, laughing it up. And then right when the laughter started to taper, he delivered the punch. “Now you know why we voted for the dead guy!”

Oh man, I was laughing out loud for several minutes right along with the delegates that were actually in Atlanta at the National Convention. For those that didn’t know, Ashcroft ran for a Senate office in Missouri where his opponent died before the election took place. The state of Missouri voted the dead man into office (and in effect his wife) rather than have Ashcroft as a representative of their state. Who can blame them?

After the first round of voting, there was literally no more than 2 to 4 votes separating the three candidates. Unfortunately after this round of voting, a suspension of the rules was necessary to expedite the process. You would think that the rules handling the election would already have been crafted to avoid this kind of junk, but it still took about 45 minutes to wade through it all.

The second vote was just about as tight, with Badnarik and Russo taking the first and second spots, with Gary Nolan falling into the third position. Another little controversy came to focus when the rules were suspended to allow Nolan to make a small speech addressing the body. It was clear that Nolan was going to point his supporters to one of the two remaining candidates, but neither Matt nor I had any idea what the internal politics were taking place. I had assumed that Nolan would throw his support to Russo, since they were both from California.

Oh how wrong I was. It seems that there is no love lost between Nolan and Russo, because Nolan left no question as to who his delegates should vote for, Badnarik. The next vote happened after some shinanigans over exactly what the states would say (to save time) when they announced their results (which of course was accompanied by more self-important “I know that” commentary from the presiding officer). Badnarik had received the majority and was going to represent the LP as the presidential candidate.

Next, Russo talked to the body after his loss. After his presentation, I’m happy that he didn’t get the nomination. His nicety was clearly superficial, and Russo definitely seemed to be making a point of how poor Badnarick was… and how he wasn’t a man of wealth… and how everyone better give him money… and how he didn’t have much money… and how he worked his campaign on a “shoestring budget”. I’m sure that it was all true, but it seemed that this self-made wealthy man was just trying to make some kind of point. He also definitely didn’t have anything nice to say about Nolan, and made a point to say that he was happy that Nolan wasn’t leading the fight. Honest? Definitely. Professional? No, not really.

Finally Badnarick gave his acceptance speech, which was very good. After everything was said and done, I’m glad he got the ticket. He’s definitely worth the vote. I think I need some flyers for my office door.

The cleaning bug is really hitting me. Or perhaps I should say, the annoyance from my cluttered up room and apartment has reached a breaking point. While I did the required amount of cleaning after the party on Monday night, but it still didn’t really get ‘clean’ like it usually does. And my room (as my designated place to throw crap that needs to be out of the way, but doesn’t have a home) is scary beyond all reason.

The apartment is also a little bit more of a wreck than usual since Cole and Llama have moved in. They haven’t done anything to make the place a mess, but previously JD and I had all kinds of crap stuck in those spare bedrooms. (We called them the storage bedrooms.) Now that the space we were using is converted to living quarters, that crap was just thrust into the living room.

Well, something has to be done. I have a lot of projects lined up for this summer, and I’m chomping at the bit to get thing started. Unfortunately the state of the apartment is holding me back, whether it be the clutter in my room putting pennies on the tracks of my train of thought, or the living room unprepared for a gathering of developers (pun intended).

So today, mark my words, the cleaning shall commence.

More good news from my Microsoft Security Training this weekend. Following my blog about CNS blocking peer-to-peer applications, I accidently feel headlong into a steamy debate in #ksu on undernet regarding the subject. Most of it was a bunch of hot air, but this bit of log is valuable…

[...]
16:27 <@tarLT> the p2p prohibition wasn't cns's idea
16:28 <@tarLT> it was anderson hall
16:28 <@tarLT> after anderson  hall, student senate, AND faculty senate all said 'block
               p2p' we/josh did so
16:28 <@ash__> I see
[...]
16:29 <@tarLT> credit where credit is due

I’m done blaming CNS. I think the next place to go is Student Senate.

Whelp, the two days of seminar are complete, so I figured I would collect some of my thoughts. Overall I’ve decided that I think the seminar was good, but probably not for the expected reasons. While the information provided was definitely still on the “propaganda” level more than the “useful” it did acheive what the seminar was supposed to acheive, increase “awareness”. It started a pretty nice discourse between the systems team here, and an even more scarce discourse between other departments.

I was particularly pleased with the responses that I heard from the CNS lead security tech. After learning of the nafarious nazi-ware (as I call it) that Ballard designed to stifle all peer to peer applications, I had a mental image of CNS as a evil entity with scarce regard for the privacy of the users on the network. Comments from Tim at this seminar during the last two days has restored my faith that there are some good people over in CNS trying to look out for the rights of the network users. Security is important, and I can acknowledge that, but I always choose freedom over security. With the exception of peer-to-peer applications, it seems like CNS has an excellent regard for the sanctity of things like Instant Messages and IRC and personal communcations in general. I think that little bit of “piece of mind” was the best single thing I received from the seminar.

Second, it was nice to get our unix guys and our hardware guy over here to hear about the latest junk from Microsoft for securit. While I didn’t get much out of it (it was pretty high level and almost obvious at times), at least now the unix guys will have a general idea of what I’m talking about when I try to tighten things up around here. And while I didn’t get much from the speaker–as most MCT’s, he had little real world experience–I did enjoy the tid bits of information that I was able to absorb from other administrators from around campus. Some good stuff. And I have to think that it wasn’t completely a waste. I’ve been disenchanted with the Microsoft PR machine enough that I hadn’t followed the propaganda too much lately, so it was nice to get a little update handed to me on a platter.

Would I have gotten more work done if I would have just stayed in my office and cranked out more scripts or worked on the upcoming faculty survey. Yeah, maybe. But maybe this will help shape our future deployments for the better, and I’m always game for systemic improvements.

The title says it all. PJ’s has betrayed me. Last Monday I attended yet another kick ass Copus concert at PJ’s. I was short on cash, so I just started a tab. It wasn’t a big night, because I had to be relatively sober to kick off my bartending shift at the After Party. I estimate that I had maybe 5 Jack and Cokes, bought a Jack and Coke and a couple beers for Pat while he was rockin’ out on stage. At $3 each for the Jack and Cokes, that’s $17, add a couple domestic bottles at $2.50, that’s a whopping total of… $22. With tip, that’s $30… TOPS.

My alleged tab at PJ’s for Monday night? $53, plus a $20 tip. My dying ass.

At first, I just took the bill. However, it bothered me enough that I started text messaging around to people, to see if maybe anyone knew what the hell happened. While I got some great sympathy, no one had any information as to why my tab could have more than doubled. (The best response was from Chase: “burn the fucker down”.)

After I was certain that there wasn’t mistake on my part, I talked to the manager to tell her that there was no way that my tab should have been that high. We talk for a while, and long story short, she talks about how some of the current help isn’t trustworthy–and get this–she offers me a job bartending. While I’m flattered that she recognized I knew what I was talking about, what I really wanted was to not have the huge bill.

Anyway, I’m crushed that I ended up losing fifty dollars from a bar that I was really starting to enjoy. Experiences like that just ruin an otherwise great venue. I’ll definitely be back to PJ’s when Copus is playing, but I might have to think twice before I patronize that venue again without Copus around.

It’s 9:30am in the morning and the entire systems team is here in the student union listening to a speaker brought here from Microsoft to discuss “security”.

Yeah, I think this is just about as much of a joke as you think. At first I was hopeful, and then the introduction came. “This is going to be an ‘awareness’ seminar, more than a technical or in-depth discussion.” Which of course means, “This is propeganda. We’re going to try and convince you that security for windows exists, but we’re not going to show any of it in action, otherwise it might not work!”

I’ve been through this before. After a couple years of Microsoft-centric training at Butler, I’ve become pretty aclimated to the standard dogma and delivery style of Microsoft’s PR machine (MSCE cert, yadda yadda). A good portion of the content is right on the money, but as they say, the proof is in the pudding… and there is no pudding in a preliminary Microsoft curriculum. And whatever pudding they provide, is only going to be shown in the absolute ideal situation. You know, exactly what everyone doesn’t have.

I’ll probably give some more updates as the next two days of seminars continue, but that’s all for now.

So I ran across an interesting delima today. As blogging has become more and more a part of my typical daily routine, I kind of found myself today wanting to use it as a personal outlet.

Nothing too important really, but I was having mixed thoughts about some girl-related stuff, and I found myself migrating towards the create content link on tbradshaw.net

This is clearly at odds with my typical way of handling things. I’m a pretty introspective person, but my private concerns are almost always my concerns and mine alone. I just don’t have a need to share my personal feelings most of the time, unless it comes up in such a fashion that the exchange would be useful to someone else.
Interestingly enough, the blog provides a strange new experience for handling this kind of thing. While the blog is definitely a public forum, writing blog entries in an informal manner makes them “feel” somewhat private. Especially since writing can be so theraputic.

I’ve already pretty much decided that “girl thoughts” and the like are not going to be a part of my blogging–since I’m writing this blog instead of writing one about the girl–but I think that this is some interesting food for thought, even if I’ve already somewhat made up my mind.

Of course, blogging is a completely unique experience for each individual that partakes in the activity (which is a huge part of what makes blogging so damn cool). I think that there might be some value to having a more “diary” kind of blog, but I’m thinking that I’m looking for something more of a journal that is a collection of my thoughts and experiences but not a collection of my “deep secrets” or anything like that.

Anyone else out there have thoughts on the subject?

Copus came down on Manhattan, Kansas like thundering storm clouds that poured Jack Daniel’s instead of rain.

It was another Metal Monday at PJ’s, but this time the one and only Copus was starting the show. As I expected, they rocked long and hard, pulling out a new cover in the middle of the set: Sober by Tool. Man it was awesome, though I still think that Defaced might be my favorite Copus song so far. I’m not completely sure though, I think I’ll have to go to 5 or 6 hundred more shows.

For a summer Monday, we had a great turnout of fans. Christi, Erin, Booze, Katie, Laura, Mo, Mo’s Sister (forgot the name), Llama, Dan, Tard, Miles, Tyson, and some more all showed up at PJ’s to enjoy some Copus. Thanks to everybody for coming, always appreciated.

Then, just as a concert should be, we came back to apt7 for the After Party. Man, oh man, oh man, did it get crazy up in heeya. I did my best to stay relatively sober while at PJ’s so I could come back and bartend for the party, and I would say that my efforts did not go unrewarded. We went through buttloads of shots and drinks as the night wore on, and on, and on. By the end of the night there were no less than nine girls sleeping in my apartment… two of which in my bed. Now that’s what I’m talking about!

One of the highlights of getting up every morning after a party here at apt7 are all of the awesome messages that are left for me on the whiteboard in my living room. It seems that no one leaves in a bad mood, that’s for sure, because it’s always some of the nicest, ego boosting shit. Normally I leave them up for a day or so, just for the sheer enjoyment–and it really helps the pain from the massive alcohol bills, heh heh. But now that I’ve got a blog, I’m going to save this for posterity, in both searchable format (text) and as an image. How’s that for some geeky tech love?!?

And this one goes out to the search engines out there:

Travis ->
We decided to go ahead and take off, your the Fucking man!
-J.D. Nate Chase
Time: 6:38
PS - I’ll give ya a call about shit later

Affinal love for all living creatures -
- Nate
the Dizzle–
P.S. Travis — I Love U!

Travis -
Thanks for the drinks, the 5 * hospitality, & the futon!
You rock!
Laura

CJ is a Champ

Travis ->
We had 2 go, I know that makes you Sad! I’m sorry! But youR the most amazing man EVER!
Katie

love is Drunk
Chase

So after reading the whiteboard and smiling to myself (it was the Job Well Done Smile, I love throwing parties), I blitzed off to work just in time to make it to a 12:00pm meeting. I’m almost 80% sure that I was still drunk when I showed up. Which really sucked, because it made the motorcycle ride quite nervous. However, by the time I had some sweet bbq buffalo wings in me from Buffalo Wild Wings, I had sobered up and was ready to start the meeting on the top of my game.

After the meeting, I have returned to start cleaning. And that’s about right where we are now. It may take twenty-five drunks to make this mess, but it only takes one guy and the new Slipknot album to clean it up.

And that’s rock star baby, rock star.

To start off the summer, Cole, Matt, Jesse, Woody, Dave, and I had grilled hamburgers, baked beans, and beer, followed by a trip to the movies.

I was already in a good mood, since I had just finished my final, final project, but Shrek 2 really seemed to kick ass. The beginning was kind of slow, but then when it started rolling it really picked up steam. The show was a little different kind of comedy this time, with many more pop culture references and action. But I was okay with that. I’m a pretty easy going movie go-er. I show up with the intention of being entertained, so they don’t usually have to convince me to laugh. Hell, I’m usually laughing before the movie starts.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen Shrek 2 yet, go see it in a good mood. Great fun. (How’s that for movie review number one?)

Today I finished up my last project for class this semester. It’s a little hangman game written in Java. Nothing amazing, but it doesn’t suck. The stickman is pretty damn good, especially with the gallows that I borrowed from khangman. (The stickman is all me though). For three minutes of work, he looks a lot like he wants to wiggle away.

And yes, finals week was last week. Mrs. Forgie allowed me to do an extra “difficult” assignment for the final project of cis200 to make up for my abysmal attendance. I have no one to blame but myself, but after my previous experiences with instructors, it’s awesome to have an instructor willing to put the uppity shinanigans aside and allow a student to just demonstrate that they have mastered the material. I messed up, she cut me some slack and let me make up the difference, and I’m hugely grateful.

In other news, I was thinking of taking Discrete (math510) this summer. But did you know that summer classes start tomorrow? Yeah! Not a single break between finals and the next session of classes. Forget that! I want at least a little break!

Cole has officially moved in. Things were a little hectic at first. When Cole said that he was going to be moving in this weekend, he forgot to mention that his mom was going to be helping him move in.

So for about two hours I was cleaning the apartment as fast as I could move, trying to make the place nice enough that it wasn’t embarassing. I’m still cleaning today, but I think that I’ve made quite a bit of progress, and I wasn’t completely embarassed when she came in.

Today we spent some time doing that time honored of new roommate activities: we went to Walmart. One hundred dollars later, I’ve got everything on my list… and a new bathroom set. (Walmart always does that to me.)

We’ll be using Cole’s little grill to make some big hamburgers tomorrow. If you want in, you should let me know.

Pat messaged me last night that Copus will be playing this Monday night at PJ’s here in Manhattan, KS. Everyone that’s still in Manhattan (or could be in Manhattan) on Monday night should definitely attend.

Copus consistantly kicks ass with JD delivering melodic lyrics that transition into ripping vocals, vicious but soulful riffs from the dexterous Chase, crazy phat basslines from Pat, and artful, skilled pounding on the skins from Nate. This is a new band of old friends with great potential, and it’s always a damn good show that leaves me singing along for days afterwards.

If you like metal, don’t miss it. If you don’t like metal, then come anyway and support my roommate and friends. I’ll buy you a drink.

Jesse and I went down to the DMV today to take our motorcycle driving exam and finally get our Class M licenses. We thought ahead and even brought an escort, Mike from the K-State Sport Bike Club, to keep everything on the up and up.

We get to the DMV, practice the course a couple times, and then go to get in line. On top of the ghetto hand scribbled “take a number” pages is an even more ghetto ball-point pen scribbled sign–on half of a manilla envelope–that says “No Driving Tests Today”. I asked the lady if that included motorcycle tests, and when the next time they would be administering “driving tests”.

“Tuesday, if we have enough people.”

Well… they can’t say we didn’t try to be legal.

The latest Laissez Faire Books catalog came in the mail yesterday, and it is just full of books that I want to read. The featured work this season is a new book by P.J. O’Rourke, Peace Kills, where O’Rourke “takes a sardonic look at the post-9/11 world”. I have a couple of O’Rourke’s previous books and they are both hilarious and insightful.

Another book that caught my eye in the catalog was a book by Thomas Szasz called Faith in Freedom, Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices. While the mental health controversy is not something that I typically read about, in this text Szasz takes a very critical look at great libertarian thinkers past and present and their opinions on psychiatry. This list of “targets” includes Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Murray N. Rothbard. This isn’t really my standard issue for reading, but Matt and I have talked about reading works on particular applications of Libertarianism and this appears to be an application that’s going to cause a stir.

Speaking of particular applications of libertarianism, they have a bargin bin book titled Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand edited by Mimi Gladstein and Chris Sciabarra. Of course, I instantly thought of Amber and her plans to start an iFeminist group on campus. If I end up ordering books out of this catalog, I’m definitely going to that one up. It’s only $9. They have a book called Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation that I think Amber would enjoy as well. It’s not on sale, but it’s also only around $10.

On the same anthropology track of thinking, I see that the hardcover of Charles Murry’s Human Accomplishment, The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences is on sale for $20.95. Ever since I watched Charles Murray on BookTV late one night on CSPAN2 I’ve wanted to read his book. His selection of libertarian values from an anthropological angle makes him a prime candidate for “wisdom mining”. (I just made that up, and I’m keeping it.)

Man, I could just go on and on about books that I want to buy and read. I see that FDR’s Folly is in this catalog. Matt just picked that up and should be crusing through it by now (let’s all hope his blogging starts soon). More in the history section: The Illusion of Victory by Thomas Fleming takes a huge stand against the establishment’s view on America’s involvement in WWI and The Real Lincoln by Thomas J. DiLorenzo where DiLorenzo charges that Lincoln was no less than a dictator during the Civil War and that the entire Civil War was an unjustified atrocity.

I see that Socialism by Ludwig von Mises as returned to the catalog. I searched for a copy of this book to purchase for the longest time back when there were still promises of a socialist vs. libertarian debate. I ended up reading the majority of it online on mises.org.

Regarding the environment, Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite seems to be quite the bold statement, and Individual Rights Reconsidered, Are the Truths of the U.S. Declaration of Independence Lasting? seems to be that non-Randish philosophical proof of Rights that I’ve been looking for for quite some time.

Anyway, I think the point has been made. There are tons of great books I want to read, and if I were rich, I’d live in a library.

Tonight Tyson and I were instant messaging back and forth trying to speculate what our grade in cis501 will be after all is said and done.

We both did a kick ass job on the final project, completing what was by far the most difficult final project done in the class. (Although some of the other student groups did some really cool shit, it didn’t have the same difficulty factor.) And we also both missed one of the two assignments that were given over the semester, and I didn’t complete the paper that was assigned (as pure busy-work).

One would think that we could have just looked at the potential points available for each of the assignments and then prioritized which was more important based on those facts. But with Dr. Hankley, there are no facts. At the beginning of the semester we turn in a note card with our contact information and a picture that must be glued or taped (no staples!) to the card. At the end of the semester, Dr. Hankley flips… through the cards, looks at our faces, glances at the scorebook, looks at our pictures again, and then just assigns a grade. Absolutely everything is subjective. No solid point values for anything. In fact, when anything has a point value on the paper when it is handed back, we are reaffirmed that the point value is insignificant. He just uses those point values as a general barometer for how he feels we did in the class.

This provides an immediate difficulty for a student in the class. Should I have finished my paper or worked harder on the homework. Should I have finished the homework or worked harder on the final project. How much is the final project worth? How much is the paper worth? There are no absolutes. I chose to work my ass off and do a really good job on the final project. I can only assume that a professor would value the final project of a class more than some busy-work (the paper) that was assigned just to fill a recommendation of curriculum by an accredidation board. But there is no way to know!

What do I deserve in the class? An “A”, no doubt. I learned everything that there was to learn the in class, applied that knowledge, and created a high quality final project that demonstrated all of those abilities. Tyson deserves the same. We both worked hard and make a kick ass final project for a couple undergrads that have barely even scratched the surface of the curriculum.

What will we get? It’s really hard to say. Dr. Hankley is the kind of guy that likes pretty GUI’s, and we did a daemon-like server (no gui at all). Dr. Hankley really likes visual communication, and our server is completely linguistic (all XML over sockets). If I were to guess, I would say that we picked a project that didn’t have much to offer in the form of “professor appeasement”. But I wanted to do a project that I would learn a lot and enjoy creating, and that’s exactly what I did. I learned a metric buttload about everything from XML, XSD, JAXB, CVS, and even just simple things like interfaces and workin with a team.

Will all of that learning and growth be represented in my grade? It’s impossible to know. If I were to just take a guess, I would guess a “B”. Less than deserved, but adequate. If the grade comes back as less than a “B”, I will be very upset. And there come the conclusion:

You can’t earn a grade in cis501, you can only have one given to you. With no objective criteria, no concrete examples of output, no barometer of priority or importance of various tasks, you can only guess what Dr. Hankley wants. In the end, Dr. Hankley will give you whatever grade he feels like giving you. It could be the color of your hat, his mood that evening, his opinion of your beliefs, his attitude towards you project, or his gradebook. You’ll never know, and no one could say any different.

In a way, it’s a relief. I know what I deserve in the class (an “A”). If I, or my partner, get anything less in the class, then it’s not our fault. It was the subjective nature of the Professor, and his inability to recognize the incredible growth that both of us have had as computer scientists this semester. Our grade cannot be our responsibility good or bad, because we didn’t even know what went into making it.

Yup, you can’t earn a grade in cis501. You can only hope that Dr. Hankley can recognize the hard work and education that you have recieved over the semester. And I don’t know whether to hope or to dispair.

It’s becoming more like Summer every day. Life on campus is winding down. The streets are sparsely occupied. The last remnants of our crazy college town are guys tailgating in their driveway while loading furniture up to move off. (It takes about eight guys to move a couch, two to lift, four to drink, and two to hold the lifters’ beer while drinking).

Life at the office has shifted gears. Now instead of dealing with emergency after emergency with students and faculty approaching year end deadlines, we’ve dropped into a lull. Next week we’ll start planning those more grandiose moves to try and make our job easier next school year.

JD has officially left the building. He moved out this afternoon, though he said he’s going to be coming back to Manhattan with Kari now and then to hang out. I’m going to miss his random outbursts of explosive laughter that I could hear from clear across the apartment. (You love the ATM, JD. You love it and you know it!) But it’s only for a summer, so I’ll deal. On the plus side, he said that I can “have at” all of the food that he had stored up. Score!

I can already tell that this summer is going to be a lot different. To start with, I’m not going to be in the apartment alone this summer; Cole and Llama are going to be moving in soon. Along with living with those two crazy cats, Dan, Mo, Amber, Matt, Dave, Jesse, and Tyson are all going to be here for a good portion of the summer.

Meanwhile, instead of feeling like I’ve got tons of time and nothing to do, I have more projects that I want to accomplish this summer than I can imagine. From programming and building small electronics, to motorcycle maintenance, small home construction, personal writing, flair bartending practice, lifting, research, travel, and more, I really feel like there is an entire world out there that I want to learn about.

I think this is really what it’s like to be a college kid. Endless opportunities, and the only real chore is figuring out how you’re going to fit them all in one life (or for now, just fit everything I’ve already planned into one summer!)

The preparation for next year begins now. The Bunker, classes, work, Liberty Advocates, next year is going to be an amazing adventure… and I haven’t even made it through this one yet. Damn it’s good to be a here!

Awesome. I have the networked logging and configuration portion of driveClean working. It much more “hackish” than I want it to be, so there is definitely some reworking to be done on the FileHandler object that handles the network access.

Currently I’m mapping a drive to do all of the network access, and I’d really really like to not do that. Previously I was struggling with the lack of support for UNC paths in most of the standard library. However, since I’m now using the win32net module anyway, I know there is an elegant way to handle UNC paths such that the network subsystem handles all of the dirty work and I just specify the remote files.

This week has kind of a lazy vibe. Most of the students are gone, or at least done asking for things to be done by the systems team here, but the summer isn’t quite here yet. This means a somewhat reduced workload until the summer really starts in full swing with big infrastructure projects. The casual atmosphere is nice. Things were getting pretty stressed with final projects, exams, Sterling waiting for news about the permanent position (which is received, much congrats), etc. Everyone puts more demands on the systems (and the systems’ administrators) when they have approaching deadlines.

Of course, the gentle meandering of work will end soon. Twenty five new workstations will be here soon to be imaged and prepared for deployment to replace the computers in n22. Then those computers will be reimaged to be deployed in n128. Then those… well, you get the idea.

For quite some time I’ve been wanting to do something with my web space on CIS, but there’s always been quite an inherent barrier of some kind preventing me from doing so. Sometimes this would be the lack of any design ideas, but usually it was just the idea that building a framework for the content would take more time than I’m willing to give.

Well, since I’m using drupal now as my CMS of choice, the inherent barrier to putting content on my CIS web space has dissolved. Instead, now it was trivial to install drupal (now that I’m pretty practiced at it) and start aggregating feeds from my blog relevant to work.

Now if I could just get that spellcheck.module to function!

Well I’ve just completed my first night of in depth study of the drupal CMS, and so far I’m reasonably pleased. The general conclusion that I’ve came to is that the existing modules are very restrictive, but thankfully creating new modules shouldn’t be too difficult.

I’m not particularly happy with the amount of presentation that I’ve seen mixed in with the modules. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but I thought that less xhtml would be encased via string literals in the modules. And why, oh why, if they were going to hardcode html, did it have to be table* tags; the poster child of the deformation and downfall of html as a structured markup language.

This intertwining of presentation and module code came to a head while I was studying the aggregator.module. Yeah, this thing is kind of messy. I’m reasonably sure that this module is somewhat of a hold over from earlier times, as it doesn’t seem to use the same methodology as the typically taxonomy style code in the rest of drupal. Particularly, I’m wanting to use the functionality of the news aggregator in many locations on my sites as a method for using multiple blogs with similar feeds as “news”-like for sections. As an example, lets say that Dan and I start working on our python/glade blogging application. That app would get it’s own project page, complete with static content describing the application and providing documentation, etc. However, the “news” portion of the project would be handled by simply aggregating the authors’ relevent blog feeds.

Well, the framework isn’t really there for this kind of behavior. The “front page” flags scattered on various nodes and then utilized by the root node module is close, with it’s ability to statically map “pages” to the front page that will show up at the top and then have other nodes promoted to the front page below it. But this isn’t nearly general enough to allow for multiple instances of this exact same behavior throughout the CMS, in fact, the aggregator isn’t even general enough for me to include the main body of the aggregated feed without having to include the entire page (header, footer, sidebar, menu, all duped inside the first set. Think hall of mirrors effect).

I hope that I will be able to find a way to reuse as much of the infrastructure in aggregator.module as possible, but I don’t really want to modify this standard module to provide custom functionality. I guess when I’m writing my projectsite.module here soon, I’ll find out how much I can reuse, and how much I’ll have to copy-paste (barf).

Anyway, that’s a good night’s worth. I think that I’ve seen enough code to dive into the database and see what’s going on.

* Even when using the less-than and greater-than entities to create an accurate table tag, when syndicated to trustamonkey.net, something changed it back into “real” less-than and greater-than characters causing all kinds of format borkage. It’s going to stink if I can never post code using xml entities like less-than and greater-than.

I’ve been poking just a little bit on drupal for the last several days, making good use of the blog, and planning on just what it is I wanted to do with it.

Well tonight the doors have swung open. I’ve gotten all of tbradshaw.net imported into CVS on dreamhost and then checked out to speedy, my local workstation. The mysql database has been exported and then imported on my localhost and apache2 has been set up with mod_php. In fact, that’s my only concern at this point. I have a distinctly different flavor of php and a wholly different version of apache than dreamhost. I don’t expect it to be a problem.

I’ve got several tasks that are high on the agenda for drupal development. In no particular order:

• I want to get theming figured out and start designing.
• I want to be able to encapsulate nodes to provide more than one node per “page” (and perhaps have other applications show up inside of a “page”.)
• I want figure out the module framework.

Lots to do, and so little time. And I’ve still got one more final project to do for cis200! (Yes, yes, this is the third time I’ve taken it. But the instructor is being awesome this time.)