2005

Tuesday April 5, 2005, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

It's shaping up to be a long, but productive week.

PyBlosxom

We're working through the problems a bunch of problems with the contributed plugins that have been sitting around for some time. This includes assigning licenses to all the plugins, adding version/author information, making sure they have some modicum of documentation, and at some point (hopefully) testing them all out in PyBlosxom 1.2. Hopefully this will put the contributed plugin pack in a much better state of being.

Steven, Bill, Wari, and Doug decided that it was high time we started using various features of CVS to make development better. I've had some growing pains with this and kind of wished people had figured things out and written up a process before making the changes. Even though I'm grumbling about the way it's happened, it is a good thing it is happening and it will make it a lot easier to do some of the things we've been doing for a while now. It'll also help a huge amount now that we've got more than one or two active developers.

I have a lot of plans for the PyBlosxom manual, but haven't had time to execute on any of them yet. The wiki we were storing documentation in was taken down since the jackass ISP that Wari had got all befuddled and confused and terminated his account with them. The problem here is that I had documentation in the wiki I hadn't had time to port to the manual yet. Fortunately, Wari sent me the contents of the wiki. I had documentation in there that I hadn't had time to port to the manual yet.

I'm 90% sure I know how to restructure what we've got right now to allow for Bill's index caching and also other storage systems. Depending on how things go with everyone else's PyBlosxom projects, I'll prototype this, write up a specification, send it round, and then implement the resulting modifications all before the next version of PyBlosxom.

Since Ted's PyBlosxom presentation at PyCon 2005, we've had 10-20x as much PyBlosxom development activity. That's been really exciting but also really daunting. Definitely a lot of growing pains mostly between my style of running things and peoples' vision for how things should be run.

Steven is still working on fixing the PyBlosxom registry to be a bit more user-friendly. We're short on flavour templates and some people really dislike this so I want to spend a week building new flavours at some point in the near future. Maybe I'll toss all the flavours in the contributed plugin pack to replace the existing flavour examples that come with it (I highly doubt anyone uses any of them).

Getting there....

grad school

I was accepted into the masters program at Northeastern University CCS. Starting in September, I'll be a full time grad student. My advisor is Mitch Wand (which is very exciting) and I was awarded a Dean's List Scholarship which reduces the costs assuming I maintain a 3.0 GPA and miscellaneous other things in fine print. All very exciting.

Need to learn Lisp, review all the stuff I learned in college, and attempt to get ahead of the game by covering as many of the things I'm going to be learning as possible.

DarkRifts

I've adjusted the way I'm working on DarkRifts such that I'm limiting myself to one coding goal every week. This will reduce the amount of stuff I'm doing there, but more importantly, it makes it easier to schedule things and gives me time to work on all the other non-DarkRifts stuff out there.

My book(s)

I'm in the process of looking at Lulu to do some self-publishing. S and I wrote a children's book last year which might be a good candidate for Lulu. The problem being that we'd need to redo the layout.

On top of that, I'm novel-izing the D&D campaign that I've been in for a year and a half. That's been going really well so far. I'm done the first couple of chapters. If anyone else plans to do something like this, it helps to take really good session notes and maintain a public set of summaries that other people in the campaign can fix.

On top of that, S and I have some ideas on the next children's book, but we still need to sit down and flesh them out a bit.

Other

Work has been super busy the last couple of weeks on top of everything else.

And I started running again and I finally got around to cutting my hair, too.

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