Category: development

One of the banes of my existence is that people never upgrade IE. From past experience, and the fact that a good portion of the surfing audience is still running Windows 95, I hope IE 6 SP1 is a perfect browser, because it’s the last one people will ever use. People don’t upgrade their OS as long as it still works. People don’t upgrade their browser unless they’re geeks (like me) or forced, usually when they buy new computers.

Happy freakin’ Friday.

I tweaked the rss files (.91 and 1.0) so they only contain the last five complete posts. So, if you get all of the last five posts in your newsreader instead of just this one, I apologize. I should be done playing for now.

Why did I do it? Well, fifteen complete posts is a lot of crap to download just to read the most recent post. That was just plain inconsiderate of me, and I’m sorry. Second, it means shorter rebuild times for me. Third… I can’t think of a third reason.

I also added a favicon (I used to have one… I removed it accidentally at some point). If you don’t see it, or have problems seeing it, please let me know (should show up in the address bar of modern browsers).

I’m watching the Spurs/Mavs game, so this may end up chock full of basketball metaphors. Last week, I watched Revolution OS. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a documentary about the birth and rise of the free software movement and Linux. The film is full of interviews of such open source/free software luminaries as Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Eric Reynolds, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin and others. It’s an amazing story, and done so well, and made so interesting that I think even non-geeks can understand it and be at least entertained by it.

Why should you watch it? It’s a great example of geeks filling their own needs and everyone benefitting from it. It’s a story about the search for community, and real-world idealism. It’s a story about the extremes driving the middle, and how we can all affect change in our world. Yeah, it’s a big story, and I think the film did a great job giving an overview and providing an even-handed view of the players.

Richard Stallman can be viewed as an extremist. He thinks all software should be free, and is decidedly anti-Intellectual Property. He’s an idealist. I can respect that, and I see the need for Richard and people like him. Without Richard, we may never have had the free software movement, all the great GNU software that drives a large percentage of the internet, and Linux may have never gotten off Linus’ hard drive and into the public imagination. His work on the GNU Project gave the Linux kernel something to run. The GNU Project provided the compiler for people to start porting other software to Linux. It just amazes me that things happened in the order they did. If Stallman had chosen to start on the kernel first, then Linux may never have happened.

If you get a chance to watch it, please do. It’s informative and entertaining, and you’ll see what all the fuss is about. Heck, you may even jump on board and start using Linux yourself. Ok, maybe you won’t go that far, but you might start to see that there are alternatives to Windows, and that’s good enough for me.

I read about mtaste a while ago, and thought it was an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I was really busy when it first came up and I promptly forgot all about it. Then, Mr. Frank wondered aloud about what the best way to implement it in a database, and that got me to thinking. How would I do it?

Well, there are a couple ways to do it, but if you’re going to have a never-ending list of artists that people can vote on, then you need several tables. This also leaves it open to add things other than music to the list (which is what intrigues me about this all). As you can see, I design overly complex schemas. They’re way more fun than simple ones. Honestly, they’re sometimes hard to manage, but they’re a lot easier to extend and add to, especially in this case where you have an ever-growing list of ratings linked to an ever-changing/growing list of artists and genres. The item_types table could grow as well, to add authors, books, movies, actors, etc. I have some idea that you could use the ODP to cut down on the confusion of artist names, and to add to it (so you could end up basically rating ODP categories). Also, this is a first stab at this. I usually way overdo this in the first draft and then trim it down once I start building it. I think I’ll try to learn PHP and MySQL and actually build this (maybe using Movies instead, but you never know). With this schema, a lot of the logic will be held in application logic instead of the database, which I think could be mitigated some with secondary id’s and a simple API (so no one gets access to the db – just the API).

Here’s the schema that comes to mind:

users:

• user\_id int primary key

• user\_fname varchar(255)

• user\_lname varchar(255)

• user\_email varchar(255)

• user\_zip varchar(24)

user_taste::

• user\_id int

• item\_id int

• rating int

• timestamp int

items:

• item\_id int primary key

• item\_type int

item_types:

• item\_type int primary key

• type\_title varchar(255)

• type\_desc text null

• type\_public int

• type\_table varchar(64)

music_artists:

• item\_id int

• martist\_id int primary key

• martist\_title varchar(255)

• martist\_genre int

This site had over ten thousand unique visitors in April, up from 9400 in March, and way up from the 758 in June of 2002. Not bad for a site where I don’t say much and there’s no nudity, huh? I never thought anyone but friends and family would read this crap. No, really. I don’t want to be the next DaveZilla or Zeldman. I don’t have the time or commitment to it. And when you think about it, the other site I spend 99% of my time on can get ten thousand hits in an hour (I’m guessing, it might be more, I’m not going to actually do the math), my stats aren’t that impressive.

But, all of that BS aside – ten thousand!! It’s something to look at and marvel at the zeroes. Mmmm, zeroes. (and for crying out loud, is there a happier song in the world than Phish’s Mango Song?)

I now have 110 subscriptions in NetNewsWire, and am now included in the sites list that ships with the software (as of the latest beta, and hopefully in 1.0.2). 110 subscriptions… is that too many? Am I nuts?

I neeeed this t-shirt. I need it worse than their coding ninja monkeys one. No really, I’m not kidding. I’m sitting here looking at it trying not to click Add to Cart.

UPDATE: I am weak. The shirt has been ordered and is wending its way down the toll road to me (ThinkGeek’s right down the road from us). Shame on me… uncontrollable urges….

I haven’t received anymore nominations, and the non-winners have been notified (they’re not losers because their blogs weren’t ugly or “default template-y” enough to warrant awarding the prize to – get it?). Now, I know you’re all wondering who the big winner is… Is the suspense killing you? I know it’s killing me, so here you go:

Both Marty and Michelle win!! I only got three entrants. Alisha’s blog is definitely not ugly, so she doesn’t qualify. Both Michelle and Marty’s blogs are both using default MT templates and well, they need help. Not because they’re ugly – but because they’re default, and that’s sad to me. Michelle’s will be done first because she entered first, but they’ll both be getting e-mail from me shortly asking them all sorts of personal designery questions so I can get started. Congratulations to you both! Prepare to get un-default-ified!!!

Yes, it’s back. I have a horrible case of redesignitis, and this site will probably be the unwilling victim. In the past week, I’ve been tempted no fewer than five times to offer to redesign blogs for people. Why? I have no idea. I need the pain of wrangling more CSS, I guess. I didn’t get enough wrangling miles and miles of it for work this week. What’s wrong with me?

Maybe I’ll start a charity… Redesigns For Ugly Sites. Maybe it should be: Redesigns For Sites Who Still Use MT’s Default Templates. Yes, I know the templates are fine and it’s the content that counts, but I’m not in a particularly sensative mood – so, come on people!! At least try to make your site look different/special. And adding that little gif that has the girl and the weather on it doesn’t count.

So, here’s the deal. I’m feeling weird and generous. Post a link to your ugly blog in the comments, and I’ll pick the ugliest one to redesign. Of course, you don’t have to use the new design. You also aren’t allowed to whine about it either. You get what you get. It’ll be fine and work and be reasonably standards compliant. No, it will not support Netscape 4.x or any other ancient piece of browser trash you have laying around your computer. It will work well in modern version of IE, Mozilla, Safari and any browser based on one of the above.

Oh, and it may not be fast. I may take a month to redesign the winning abomination. And you may get some unexpected features and could end up being a guinea pig for some new weirdness I want to try. Oh, and no stupid weathergirls! Is that enough rules?

UPDATE: I’ll be making my decision tomorrow (5/7) and posting the winner tomorrow night. May the ugliest / most default templatey blog win!

Ok, I registered for blogshares. I’m probably not going to actually play, but it’ll be interesting to see what my “blogging value” is.