Bear with me, please...

Friday, August 19 2005

Why has it been a month since my last post, you ask? Here's the freeze-dried-crystals version: to conform to the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this blog can only be updated from my PowerBook, an action which became highly problematic a few weeks ago when Lilith's hard drive went 100% failure. Indeed, for an entire week, Lilith was barely capable of being a really keen, style-forward reading light and document stand. The screen lit up, you see, and with the screen open it help up a magazine well enough, but with the startup process frozen on the blue "Okay! I've done a hardware check and loaded up Open Firmware! Just give me a working boot drive and we're good to go!" screen there was hardly enough light to read by.

(I think Apple should throw us all a bone and at least have Open Firmware display the correct time while it searches for a bootable volume. The fact that even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day -- and thus was handily outperforming a $2000 notebook -- was a wholly unnecessary kick straight in the no-I-beg-you-please-kick-me-anywhere-but-theres.)

I've had enough free time to take Lilith apart and swap in a new drive, but not quite enough to rebuild my blogging app yet. Normally I would just restore from backup but to be honest, I couldn't remember the last time I'd rebuilt a hard drive directory completely from scratch, so I determined to re-install brand new copies of everything.

Surely I shall correct this situation very much soon. Though it certainly won't happen tomorrow! I have plans. Indeed, I do. Plans, plans, plans. I'd provide details, but I have to hand code and hand-update everything until I get the blog software up and running again. But do check out my FlickR blog on Saturday, August 20, for I shall be moblogging the fruits of my brilliance as they drop from the vine throughout the morning, afternoon, and evening.

email me | link to this | related websearch

The file "CWOBber" appears to be an application.

Monday, August 22 1:53 AM

This is mic number one, this is mic number one, isn't this a lot of fun...test, test...

CWOBber 1.22 has been installed on the (still under reconstruction) PowerBook, and I think all of the necessary template and support files have been restored into all of the necessary directories. Thank God for documentation. Without it, I'd have never gotten the job done. As I've mentioned, CWOBber is my own creation and as such, no documentation or support forums exist. But I downloaded and read the installation instructions for MovableType, which cheered me greatly. While getting CWOBber up and running would be a bit tricky, the process was considerably less painful than downloading MovableType, burning it onto a CD, and then cracking the disc into several pieces and swallowing them, one by one, a procedure which in turn seemed to be less painful than actually building and installing the thing.

So if you're reading this, then clearly everything worked out OK. If nothing worked, then that's a damned shame because honestly, there just aren't enough blogs out there. I understand that D-Link, Netgear and many other makers of networking hardware are contemplating layoffs, owing largely to the enormous hole in the Intenet created by the absence of my regular postings. What can I say to those employees and their families but "I'm sorry" and that I'll start reporting in on my favorite brand of dental floss ASAP.

It's not just about wasting my time and yours; it's about saving jobs.

email me | link to this | related websearch

It's a rebuilding year.

Tuesday, August 23 7:48 AM

Damn and blast. Well, look, I lied to y'all yesterday when I claimed that the presence of a new post on this here blog could only indicate that my blogging app was working. When I clicked on the "Post" button, I was introduced to an alternative possibility I'd never even considered: that this copy of the app was, in fact, the next-to-latest version of CWOBber and not the latest one. Meaning, it was set up to handle the blog's previous design.

I know I've backed up CWOBber 1.3 somewhere. Even if I hadn't, it would only take me about an hour to make the necessary changes to the code and build me a new copy. So naturally, I'm throwing the project away entirely and rewriting CWOBber all over again, starting from scratch.

This is a bit of a lateral solution to the problem, I acknowledge.

The thing is, CWOBber isn't being written under contract and I don't have any sort of obligation to a massive user base. I write and extend the app because it's, you know, fun. I spent a lot of time building CWOBber and I've been driving it around as a regular commuter vehicle for more than a year now. Like any gearhead, this doesn't instill feelings of quiet pride in having built something useful and reliable. It leaves me with an increasing urge to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it from the frame up.

Plus, I readily admit that under the hood, CWOBber is a mass of duct tape and Bondo and metric bolts jammed into English fittings. It ain't pretty in there. There isn't even any error-handling to speak of; if I believe that I have a connection to the Internet but Airport begs to differ, CWOBber just keeps grinding away like a dog chasing after a ball that was never thrown in the first place. This, to my eye, is a shortcoming that should be addressed.

So yesterday, I spent twenty minutes or so writing AppleScripts that convert text to HTML (except this time, it's written so that any HTML that might change from site design to site design has been tucked inside global constants, and can be changed toot sweet). Today I built a new infrastructure to allow CWOBber to handle special alternative paragraph formats on its own.

At this point, I'm hoping that this little piece about How I'm Overhauling My Blogger App is as interesting as, say, Tom Yang's Ferrari blog, and not as brain-bangingly dull as, say, nearly every other blog in which someone talks about a technical process that's of interest only to the hobbyist himself.

Mmmm...my hopes aren't high.

email me | link to this | related websearch