tbradshaw.net

I’m making a little bit of progress with the blog. As you can see by this (mis)styled page, the theme is starting to get converted. It will probably remain partially broken for a while, as I tweak things as time allows.

I’ve been holding back some posts about books I’ve been reading, mainly because I wasn’t sure how to handle images with the new blog. However, I noticed today that WordPress has a file upload system integrated in. I think I’ll give that a shot.

Looking over the archive of entries, the metadata is just so sloppy. I’m going to be going back through my archives, pruning sparsely used categories and generally organizing things. For the most part this is completely inconsequential, but just in case you managed to subscribe to an RSS feed for a specific category, and you managed to follow it to the new URI, it might disappear anyway.

Now that the week is over I’ve finally had some time to look back and try to soak it all in. And with it over, I can say that it was too much.

The annual Jager Olympic party at The Bunker was this last weekend and it was truely epic. But, of course, in order to get that epic scale it was necessary to do an unprecidented amount of work. That work began last week with the eBay purchase of a new direct draw beer dispenser. It spiraled out of control from there.

The new draft system is a TDD-3 from True Food Service USA, and looks a little something like this:

In fact, it looks very similar, except that our draft system actually has two taps per tower rather than one tap per tower as shown in the photo. Of critical interest to the story is the following two facts: the system is 70″ x 28″ x 37″ in size (without towers) and has a crated weight of 335 pounds. Not really affordable to ship and not easy to move.

The shipping problem was “solved” by Dave and I leaving at 6:00am on Tuesday morning for the distant town of Springdale, Arkansas to pick up the draft system ourselves. We made a solid trip there and just ended up shoving the draft system into the back of his Explorer with a forklift and then heading back to Manhattan (all in one day/night.)

But this was not before making a couple stops in Olathe, KS. With the initial goal of getting some tips from our good friend “Tard” who is a “Beer Man” in Olathe, we also needed to stop by JD Hillen’s parent’s place in order to use their table saw for a few choice cuts. This is because the arrival of the new draft system brought another major project into the fold: the bar was to be expanded.

Another 3 feet of bar was added to the inside edge of the Bunker Bar, no minor feat. In the course of one week, we built a new subfloor, bar support, and bar surface for the Bunker Bar. This included a dismanteling of the existing bar in order to fit the beer draft system in and relocate the mixed drink station’s ice basin and soda gun manifold.

While that would have been more than enough to fill an entire week of labor, there was still vinyl to be made and cut for the Beer Pong and Beer Bong tournaments along with 90 gallons of gelatin to cook for the Jello Wrestling event.

We ran it right up to the wire when the Jager Olympics finally kicked into gear. We were ran absolutely ragged when the event started and continued to do well and scrape by until it was over. The popular consensus is that this year’s Jager Olympics was the most amazing party anyone had ever seen. Which is awesome, that’s what we were going for.

The events were great. The crowd was massive. We managed to down the pallete of Keystone kegs that were purchased (a pallete is 5) and much of the stock of mixed drinks. The bar was ran in part by residents and in part by a crack team of professional bartenders that came in from Aggieville (including the amazing Kate Collins and followed later by Cheri Freund). But when it was all over, we were mostly just tired. Estimations collected by door guards were aggregated and initial numbers suggest that over 800 people crossed the threshhold to the Jager Olympics with a peak of about 275 at any one time. Over 30 rounds of Jello Wrestling took place with every possible combination of male and female contestants in groups of two or three.

As a house, we were a little bit less estatic. The party was great, the numbers speak for themselves, but there were a few things lacking for us. We did way too much work in the week leading up to the party, and as a result the fatigue crept in now and then. The Jello Wrestling was a little ‘out of hand’ as all of the floor surfaces of the house were completely covered. An emergency scrubbing session started at 5:00am and went for a couple hours after we managed to get everyone out of the house.

But most of all, while we had over 800 people at the house, it was surprising to us how many of those people were complete strangers. I worked the front door for about two and a half hours that fell around the time that Aggieville closed. In that entire time one friend from the CS curriculum showed up that I chatted with. Besides that everyone was a blank.

It’s not that we regret having the party, that’s not it at all. It was truely a legendary event. But we are certainly looking forward to limiting the size of future events in some fashion. I long for relatively tame after-parties from Copus concerts and a return of the Beer Pong League that provided great times every single weekend for months without getting a thousand people we don’t know attending.

Of course, during this week there were still work and classes to be handled by all of the residents, so this is just kind of the bulk of the iceburg. I know I’m really happy that it’s over, and I look forward to many more gatherings–of a more controlled nature–at The Bunker.

Now I just want to rest…

Sweet action. I just submitted my first (barely) significant patch to an open source project. The patch for Banshee should take care of bug 333893, adding “fuzzy” searching and the ‘-’ (NOT) operator to the search widget thingie.

It’s funny, but I’m a little bit nervous about submitting the patch. While my code is typically quite good, I’m sure that’s at least partially due to the “big fish, little pond” situation here at K-State. So I can’t help but be nervous if my patch will be good enough for the project, and if not I hope that someone will help me get it up to an acceptable quality.

Anyway, this is a big deal for me and I’m pretty happy about it.

First, an advertisement:

LAN Party, October 28th, 7:30pm till Whenever, Nichols 122

Once again I’ve been asked to run a semester LAN party for the department chapter of ACM.

This is always an interesting task for me for a few reasons. First, I don’t really game anymore so I feel a little “out of touch” at LAN parties. Second, I have no affiliation at all with ACM. Third, it’s always so amazingly unorganized, heh heh.

Today I had my first real meeting regarding the LAN party (yeah… it’s tomorrow), and it went really well. Present for the meeting were Ryan Summerskill (ACM President), Jeremy Mason (VP), Adam Jundt (Sec), Ryan Feldkamp (Co-Treas), and Roland Craddolph (Co-Tres), or pretty much every one of the officers from ACM and myself.

The plans so far were pretty much non-existent and Ryan let me know in no uncertain terms that the last one was a big cluster and that it was all me. He gets massive points for being blunt and to the point, and that enabled us to get right to business.

The primary challenges in this situation are unknowns due to lack of planning, but nothing that I don’t think is handleable. The two big questions marks are number of people coming and power distribution and layout. There wasn’t anything cohesive put together for a website, and therefore there wasn’t any preregistration of any kind. (In fact, it appears that all of their limited marketing has an URL for the original site that I made about a year ago. ouch!) We’re also not entirely sure where the power distribution break points are in the building for spreading our load.

However, the last two LAN parties that took place the head count was pretty consistent at around 40, so we expect a similar turnout. We also have all noticed some first hand interest in the LAN spreading by word of mouth, so the turn out shouldn’t be any less than expected. On the power distribution issue, it seems that the easy work around is to use extension cords to spread out physically as much as possible… and that appears to work for the most part.

Then we divided up the tasks remaining, especially server preconfiguration, and prepared to make things happen.

As a result, I’m actually kind of looking forward to the LAN party. I think that it’s going to be better than it was last time I showed up, and I had a pretty damn good time then too.

So if you’re in Manhattan and don’t have something to do on a homecoming Friday night (yeah, I know, everyone’s busy), come by and hangout with me.

Before departing from Swainie’s house, I made sure to spend a little bit of time on the ‘net downloading drivers for the on-board sound card for the computer in the Mobile Bunker.

Much to my pleasure I was able to get fully actualize the epiphany that I had just before leaving for the show. On the way home we had a fully operational Mobile Bunker complete with DVD theater setup (we watched Old School and Nine Inch Nails’ And All That Could Have Been concert DVD), video games (the passengers played You Don’t Know Jack Vol 3), and music (iTunes rocking out with visualizations and a gracious donation of audio bits from JD’s iPod).

The ride home was otherwise pretty tame. We didn’t have any side adventures–since everything was working–and I didn’t speed nearly as much since we didn’t need to be anywhere in a big hurry. After arriving in Kansas City we took our first stop. Thankfully I got in a (relatively) quick shower and a change of clothes before we headed over to Kari’s house. It’s always a pleasure to see the Plumbs, even if it was a little too briefly.

Stopping at Kari’s house (JD’s fiancee) was a real treat. She cooked us up a fantastic enchilada dinner and we were joined by Kippy for what was one of the best “family meals” we’ve had in a long time.

After departing Kari’s… stuffed… we headed back home to The Bunker. In whole the first official Bunker Road trip was better that I could have imagined. While the ride home was a slightly less joyous than the ride there, it was still full of remarkably good spirits–excellent even–for four guys that hadn’t left more than 20 feet from each other in four days.

No doubt about it, we will have to do something like this again. It was so fun it’s hard to imagine a better little vacation.

For months now I’ve been lamenting that I need another amp in order to bring my Jeep modification project to full fruition. The problem set was clear, the stock amplifier isn’t going to work when I move the sound system to a completely computer based sound system. It’s just not “standard” enough.

So this morning I’m starting to clean out the Mobile Bunker, and it dawns on me! I can set up the Mobile Bunker fully, then just put one of those headphone jack to tape deck adapters between the computer and the stereo! It won’t be in surround sound, it will only be stereo, but holy crap… that’s all it takes!

So my morning just got a lot busier.

While my first large attempt at getting stuff done on the Jeep project was a big waste of time, after I gave up on the touch screen and just continued with the installation, things got much much better.

First through careful observation and measurement, Dad and I were really able to improve on the original design. Rather than removing the airbag and relocating the door/light/computer display to the passenger side dash, we manage to fit the HVAC just below the door/light/computer display and instead just cut out the ash tray, lighter, and power outlet.

Then it was realized that the screen could, indeed, fit into the center dash without having to modify the vinyl dashboard cover at all. This was a huge update to the quality of the modification because it meant a lot less custom work for us.

Dad created a great housing for the LCD components out of some oak boards he ripped and assembled into a self contained unit that contained the LCD, lcd/touch controller, and backlight power module. Then he created a great mock-up of the screen out of scrap lumber that matched the dimensions great so that we wouldn’t have to risk the safety of the expensive screen while doing our preliminary test fits.

I then used the drimel tool to hollow out a huge region in the center of the dash for the screen to fit, and then I built some mounts on the LCD module and the interior of the dash out of oak and 2×4 to do the final mounting. There were a lot of last second small alterations to get everything finished, but it looked great.

By far the dash modification process was the vast majority of the labor. Then while I was finishing that up, Dad started working on the computer housing to fit into the console. It was a tight fit, but he fabricated another oak housing to hold all of the components that belong to the center console, including the motherboard, hard drive, regulator, and Morex dc-dc converter. I ran some power back from the power outlet cables to the rear portion of the console.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I was unable to get the computer to boot from the Morex power supply kit that I purchased. I recalculated all of the math and I can’t see why it didn’t boot, it was well under spec for both voltage and amperage. So I went into a backup plan and fell back to an inverter and a 250 watt power supply and installed those. The inverter is below my back seat, spliced into my sub amp power run with a distribution block and some 6 gauge cable. Then the regular “computer power” cable runs from under the seats to a power supply that’s just sitting behind my driver seat on the floor.

After that was handled, the cdrom was installed into the “flip up” door on the console, which was absolutely perfect.

My goal going into the weekend was to have a working system, with GPS navigation operational for the drive home. While I didn’t finish until about 4:30am on Monday morning, that goal was reached. Looking at all of the difficulties had during the installation and the general difficulty level of the entire installation, I’m really pleased with how this has turned out so far.

The sheer ingenuity of the installation just reconfirmed my believe that there are two people that I could do absolutely any project with. Between myself, Dave Plumb, and my Dad, just about any project is do-able and will probably turn out great.

I’ll get some pictures and more updates up soon.

Using the Copus concert at the Port of Wichita just last Wednesday as an excuse to come to El Dorado to visit my parents, I decided that I would double up on the getting-things-done ratio and spend the rest of the week here in El Dorado visiting the parents and, importantly, working on my Jeep.

The Mobile Bunker project has been a long time coming, with most of the money spent already and none of the actual labor put into the vehicle. These four days of dedicated were to change all that. Of course, I say were.

Because after all the work that I’ve put in in the last two days, I just spent–literally–ten solid hours trying to get the touchscreen controller that I purchase as part of the Touch LCD Kit that I purchased from EarthLCD. I couldn’t be more frustrated and less impressed.

It’s sick, just to start with, because I’ve already had the setup working, in it’s entirety, when I first purchased all of these components a little under a year ago. I just wanted to try all of them to make sure that they worked. And they did. But now that it’s time for the rubber to meet the road, I can’t do anything to get the integrated touch controller on the LCD controller card to generate one freaking bit of data to the computer’s eagerly awaiting serial port. I can’t begin to express my frustration as I suffer over this one component, hour after hour, trying to find anything that could be the problem.

I’ve installed every driver, reinstalled, and tried different versions of everything. Even expanding the attempts into realms that don’t even really apply. So while now the computer has all kinds of great manufacturer provided suped up drivers for the video card or whatever, still not a single thing from the COM port. Every iteration of service packs have been tried. There were sixteen pins arranged in two rows for a four pin plug, and just in case I was somehow mistaken when I aligned the arrow with the pin obviously labeled as 1, I went ahead and tried connecting the resistive touch screen to each of the 10 possible arrangements, then reversed the plug and went for the other 10 possible arrangements. (Of course, a multimeter confirmed that it was in the right spot in the first place anyway.)

I’ve been in and out of hyperterminal, just trying to get some kind of noise from the port, and nothing. Now I’m trying to find some way that I can get ahold of a serial mouse to try that, but I don’t really know where I’m going to find something like that without spending any money to try things. I’m going to drive over to my Mom’s house and pray that her mouse is a serial mouse so that I can do some more testing. Though if the serial mouse works, then I’m just screwed. And if it doesn’t work… well then I’m still screwed. So I’m not sure what good it’s going to do me. Other than let me know if my $300 motherboard is messed up or my $200 touch screen is messed up. Both of which are more money than I can handle right now.

If I can’t figure something out soon, I think I’m just going to say “the hell with it” and install it anyway. Then I can just take it back apart when I get home sometime and try to work on it some more, perhaps when I have some money to replace some components if anything is busted.

This had the potential to be a very productive weekend… it’s getting ruined quick.

The last post that I made regarding the ultimate frisbee tournament, was totally done with Drivel… and it rules.

Of my desired features, this application really does all most all of them. It has great support for WordPress, does syntax highlighting for HTML, does on the fly spell check, saves drafts… I mean this is great.

There are some places that it is lacking, but at this point this application is so close, it has to be a better idea to contribute to this project than it would be to write my own. Specifically, I want to be able to select multiple categories, a better image dialog (I think the default use case is almost always–or should be–a link to the full sized image and a thumbnail in it), and an autosave… in case I screw something up.

All of these features seem very reasonable for me to make some patches and submit them to the author(s). And it would be my first opportunity to contribute to an open source software product, which makes me doubly excited.

I think this is probably goodbye to Boof and hello to Drivel.

(But I’m definitely going to have to reuse the name “boof”, it’s just too good to let go away.)

While it’s taken me ages to actually start coding on my desktop blogging software application, Boof, I’m constantly on the lookout for alternative software applications. I’m always hoping to find one out there that already scratches my itch so that me duplicating the effort of all those other blogging applications wouldn’t be necessary.

But at least I figure if I don’t find a good stand-in application, I can learn the elements I like and dislike from the major (and minor) contenders. Just recently I stumbled across Drivel from a posting on Planet GNOME. This baby looks dangerously close to what I’m going for and has recently added support for blogs other than LiveJournal. I see in the feature list that they have support for Atom (which implies WordPress), spell check, and html syntax highlighting. A quick check on previous versions indicates that they already have the ability to save blogs offline.

I’m going to have to seek out an ebuild somewhere so that I can try out the new 2.x tree and see if this fills my niche. (Oh, it’s probably not going to succeed in the cross platform aspect, since it looks like it’s C heavy embedded into GNOME… but we’ll see.)

I’m excited to try it out sometime.

It’s been ages since I initially recognized that the widget that I want to use for Boof is gtksourceview. However, the long standing problem has been a lack of an easily accessible package for the python bindings to gtksourceview in the portage tree.

Quite some time ago, gtksourceview went from being a fairly accepted gtk widget to a pretty prime-time widget used in not only widely used applications like gedit, the GNOME text editor, but now in the up-and-coming MonoDevelop. Gtksourceview was clearly moved into the standard set of gnome packages, and I thought that surely the python bindings for gtksourceview would enter into the standard gnome-python bindings in short order.

Well, it kind of did. But the portage tree for Gentoo didn’t keep up. However, there is a tried at true method for getting the “cutting edge” GNOME stuff for Gentoo in the form of Break My Gentoo. Though, I should say that there used to be a tried and true method for getting the latest and greatest stuff from GNOME on Gentoo. Apparently that project has all but died. So I’ve been patiently watching the portage tree for that day when my next emerge sync would bring me a build for a newer that 2.6 version of gnome-python.

To make things just a little more complicated, the gnome-python package was split upstream into gnome-python, with the core developer API bindings, and gnome-python-extras, with the not-so-essential dohickies like my beloved gtksourceview and other nicities like nautilus cd burning. So I was waiting not only for a new gnome-python, but also a gnome-python-extras package to be added to the portage tree.

Well last night one of those became a reality when gnome-python 2.10 hit the portage tree. Stunned by the potential progress, I decided to hop around and look for a gnome-python-extras ebuild that would be handy. Low and behold, I found one! A developer on Gentoo by the name of spyderous has an overlay that contains just what the doctor ordered.

I now have gnome-python version 2.10 and gnome-python-extras version 2.11 installed on my home pc, and I haven’t been this excited for a new piece of software in a long long time. Hopefully I’ll have some time to play with it soon!

I just had another great inspiration for actually doing something with the Boof project that I have been putting off for quite some time now.

After nearly completing a great weekend summary blog, I lost it when I accidently closed the tab.

/* Insert lots of cussing here */

I need that auto-save feature.

Over the last couple weeks, my Dad spent a lot of time coming up here to visit me. While we really didn’t get to hang out enough (primarily because I was busy almost the whole time), we did spend a lot of time working on getting a speaker box built followed by a sub and amp installation for my Jeep.

It thumps… in a big way, heh heh. This still isn’t the perfect installation, mainly because the head unit didn’t have RCA pre-amp outs for a subwoofer. So I’m using a small passive device to take speaker level input down to pre-amp input levels. In general, there are just a ton of possible configuration tweaks that can be made, and I just haven’t had the time (or maybe even the talent/skill) to tweak the thing to perfection.

But after Dave gave it a little TLC, even with the levels on the speaker/pre-amp converter too high, it sounds really amazing. Previously I had a couple old paper cone Lanzar 10’s in a sealed box. It didn’t hit amazingly hard, but it was nice and punchy the way that I like it. Amazingly I found a copy of the ol’ MAIA X cd that I used to play on my old subs a bunch and I have been really pleased with the new sub. Not only does it hit lower bass with a solid hit (as I would expect from a 12 rather than 10’s), but it’s just as punchy in the sealed box as the old 10’s were. It’s really just plain better in every way.

Hopefully I’ll see Dad again soon so that he can hear what it sounds like after he did all of the work on the kick ass speaker box, and hopefully we can play more pool than we did last time.

Once again I found myself wandering around the net when I stumbled upon BloGTK another blogging client. This particular client seems to be even closer to what I had in mind when I started to consider writing Boof.

This time I’ve (thankfully) found less of a WYSIWYG interface and instead found something much more “geek like” that I can edit the source code directly. BloGTK has spell checking, is able to save and open blog entries, can edit entries that are already submitted, has some basic preview functionality, and generally looks pretty good.

Looking at the goals and constraints that I have written on the Boof project page BloGTK is only short in a couple areas:

• Syntax Highlighting
• Gallery Support
• Plug-in System?
• Support for multiple categories on a single post.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the codebase is completely modular already because I haven’t really looked. Syntax highlighting is a matter of getting a gtksourceview element in there. Gallery support would be much more of a doosey.

At this point I’m quite curious if I should be looking at starting a new desktop blogging project, or if I should be contributing to someone else’s project to get the functionality that I want.

Right now I’m undecided. This program is very close to what I’m going for.

Update: This entire post, including this after-the-fact update, have all been submitted with BloGTK. I’m quite impressed. This would definitely be the first one of the desktop blogging applications that has behaved as-desired on the first try!

I’m definitely going to be downloading the source to this application and checking it out.

Finally! The subwoofer that I purchased on eBay from CarStereo2000 over two months ago has arrived!

I have to say, I was getting genuinely worried about this one. It looked like I was just going to lose the money and never see the speaker. However, when it was all said and done, it appears that there were just some kind of oversight on their part (over and over again) that kept the subwoofer from getting sent to me.

I’m a little tied up about feedback I wanted to leave on eBay. I mean, it took way too freaking long to get the subwoofer, especially since they took the money from me two months ago. But I did end up with the subwoofer, safe and sound, and that’s the most important thing. I think I’ll probably leave them a “neutral” feedback or something.

I guess it’s time to update my Jeep project page with the latest information.

It’s been quite some time since my last Boof post, mainly just because I’ve been crazy busy with classwork. But tonight I was taking a leisurely reading session of just whatever felt cool at the time to relax–drooling over the latest gnome goodies mentioned on Seth Nickell’s blog, when I stumbled again on gnome-blog. Which is now up to version 0.8.

You know, it’s getting even nicer. My project expectations for Boof really aren’t that advanced, and it seems that gnome-blog has just about everything I was looking for.

I’m posting from gnome-blog right now, and it’s definitely not what I’m looking for, for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s WYSIWYG. It’s nice, but it’s tons faster for me to actually just type Boof than it is for me to use an “Add Link” button. (In Seth’s defense though, he did make keyboard shortcuts for the Add Link… button that makes things pretty damned intuitive if you practice it.) I also like being able to make my own lists and stuff. But I don’t do anything fancy in any blog post, so maybe I could get used to WYSIWYG. I don’t know… jury is out.

Second, no category selections. I don’t know if this is something that’s difficult, but I just can’t live without categorizing my blog posts.

Finally, while it does have image support, it doesn’t appear that the image functionality is modularized away from the blog integration. I would really rather have an image upload system that would work with my Gallery2 based image gallery than to use any blog software based image storage system.

However… these are relatively minor things overall, which makes me wonder if maybe I should be looking at gnome-blog as an application that I might want to start hacking on. It’s done in python, it’s GTK, it’s got spell check (or at least he claims it does, I haven’t seen it work on this post yet), it has a modular blog software backend (already supporting BloggerAPI and WordPress). This really close to what I want.

It makes me wonder if maybe I could graft source based editing on as an option, using GtkSourceView for source editing. Then support for categories… then gnome-blog could be right up my alley for day to day blogging use.

Anyway, I’m excited to check it out. I’m always a big advocate of not reinventing the wheel, and it would be exciting to be a contributer to a gnome project. (Even something as small and trivial as a gnome applet for blog posting). Without getting the contributer angle all blown out of proportion, if Seth wouldn’t be interested in my changes, I’d be fine with that. I know I’d still love having my “perfect” blogging application.

Update: The majority of this post was done with gnome-blog 0.8, this update is me editing the entry in WordPress. First some irregularities:

• Empty Title — Yeah, I have no idea. For some reason the title of the blog was just the first line in the body, not a title at all. It was a simple cut and paste to fix… but wtf?
• Kind of gross HTML generation — I suppose this is to be expected from a WYSIWYG editor, but I had high hopes, especially when the widget doing the post rendering during the editing process seemed to be rigorously HTML anyway. Alas, each paragraph ended with </p><p> all on the last line of the paragraph, followed by a single line break, followed by the next paragraph text. Almost like a whitespace removal of \n\n with </p><p>\n. I think should be </p>\n\n<p> so that the post still looks damn good when one goes into the web interface to edit it.

These are little things, of course, so I don’t think there’s anything so far that would keep me from hacking on gnome-blog a little bit to see what’s up. It’s just definitely not ready for me to be using it as my primary blogging application.

So the thing that I need to be doing most right now is my math551 homework, no doubt about it. However, in my constant plight of procrastination, I’ve managed to stay quite busy doing less urgent work. In this case, I have been layout out project pages for a lot of the things that I have going on.

Most of the projects are on some sort of temporary hold as I take care of school stuff *cough*yeah*cough*, but it couldn’t hurt to have a project page to aggregate information regarding them. So if you’re interested in any of the open projects that I have going right now, feel free to check out the project pages for Boof, My Jeep, QuakeCon Volunteer System, the Bunker Bar Software, Chase’s Wicked Guitar, or the Bar Computer.

(The title deals with the story at the end.)

This has been some time in the works, but I’ve now completely changed my blogging software to WordPress. I’ve migrated all of my previous blog posts to this blog, but none of the comments.

While I’m sorry to have lost those comments that were actually worthwhile, there were just so many spam comments that it would have been like finding needles in haystacks to save the good ones. So this is a new start for comments on the blog, and I’ll be sure to be more protective of the possibility of abuse when it comes to comments in the future.

One interesting aspect of this process was writing the software to migrate the blog posts from drupal to wordpress. There really wasn’t a tool that existed at the time, so one had to be written. I went about hacking together a Python script, and I have to say that I’m very pleased with the results. I’ve migrated all of the data over in a process that involved a little bit convoluted process of datatype transformations and database relationship mappings.

Tonight, when it all came together, I found myself in a particularly geeky moment. I had just ran the database insert that took all of the testing and coding and in one big climatic shot, shoved all of the data perfectly into the database. No corruption, no mistakes, it just worked. I was elated, to say the least. So I’m pumped, I’m getting up and walking around the room, I go out into the hallway to pace a little more. Then it dawns on me. There isn’t a single person right now that I can go tell what I just did that could possibly give a shit. Or, as Pat put it, “It’s not that I don’t give a shit, I just don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about. But it was damn funny to have someone come down the stairs” and start glowing about a “database translation”.

Eh, what can a geek do? I’m still pretty pleased with myself. In fact, I think I’m going to make several blog posts in my newly minted but excellently occupied database, just to revel in it.

So I’m still giving thought to the entire blogging software situation. I was specifically considering the deficiencies of drupal compared to blogger and wordpress in my previous blog on the topic.

So now instead, some thoughts on a philosophy of site building. Right now I’m using drupal for pretty much every site that I’m currently maintaining. And if there’s one thing for sure, it’s that drupal is a great “all in one” framework for content management. Compared to the other CMS’s out there, I really think it offers the best when it comes to managing content, especially with a workflow. (This excludes Plone or any other Zope offering, since I’ve never tried any of them and instead I’ve pretty much tried every single php/mysql offering.)

But, there are lots of little deficiencies when it comes to drupal that just bug me. Like the crappy formatting on the news aggregator, lack of cool new trendy blogging features, etc. In fact, the main perk–sweet ass framework–isn’t even really necessary on a personal site like tbradshaw.net.

On the other hand, there are some quite specialized tools that do only one aspect of drupal’s functionality (like say Planet for feed aggregation, WordPress for blogging) and they tend to do it really freaking well.

So it begs the question. Could I create a better site if, instead of working the kinks out of a full featured (but polish lacking) framework like drupal, I chose to graft together a smattering of smaller applications that each do their respective jobs better?

I’m not sure yet, but I’m leaning towards giving it a shot on tbradshaw.net as soon as I get a little extra time (ha!).