Just a note: I'm writing diaries over at use.perl since it's more interactive and I know many more folks over there. I still read here faithfully (it's like crack!) but I'll almost certainly be read-only from now on.
Take it easy.
Name: Chris Winters
Member since: 2000-03-14 19:19:02
Last Login: N/A
Homepage: http://www.cwinters.com/
Notes:
Back to Java -- fun with JBoss and Tomcat. But at heart I'm just another perl hacker -- best work to date has been OpenInteract, a fairly hefty object-oriented Apache/mod_perl application server and SPOPS, an object-oriented data abstraction layer that includes object-level security.
Just a note: I'm writing diaries over at use.perl since it's more interactive and I know many more folks over there. I still read here faithfully (it's like crack!) but I'll almost certainly be read-only from now on.
Take it easy.
Scoured through old emails, deleting tons of them along the way. Everything is available through google now anyway. Very rewarding experience. Also started using Evolution (from mutt) at both work and home. Very, very impressed.
Moving the database table creating stuff and the data import routines from OpenInteract into SPOPS -- I also added a data exporter to make for decent portability. Also finally going to rewrite the object relationship generation code for SPOPS -- the old stuff will still be supported, but the new methods are much more flexible.
Late, late night -- first in while. I've discovered it's an amazingly effective cure for having too many emails in your box when you wake up.
Upgraded the major site -- which was actually at 1.1 instead of 1.2 -- to OpenInteract 1.36. It went very well, IMO. (Jury's still out I suppose, but I've got a good feeling and those can normally be trusted.) Aside from a stupid error that cost ~30 minutes early on, that is.
I'm also going to be releasing packages that get updated between releases to the Sourceforge site. And now that I've got these extra packages working, they'll be going up as well.
I've been messing about with Dreamweaver at the office (thru VNC of course) to write an extension for the damned image rollovers. DW comes with an extension for this, of course, but it doesn't play nice with XMLC -- since customers may be updating the pages themselves, each page really has to be a drop-in no-brainer. The image tags and javascript generated by the DW default rollover extension makes this impossible.
I've modified an Ant custom taskdef that came out of Enhydra (at some point) to make for flexible URL mappings and such, so these rollovers are (I think) the last hurdle to jump.
Extending DW is pretty nifty, once you get the hang of it. Representing the document being edited is smart, although the method of text replacement is amazingly clunky. Still, I'm impressed.
ishmael: My experience with wrist pain hasn't been too dramatic, I think mainly because I bought a Kinesis Ergo contoured keyboard before it got too bad. Yeah, it's around $225 at one of the distributors, but that's cheap compared to loss of time and medical bills. It took me about a week to get used to it, but now I'm extremely fast and only have a little bit of wrist pain when I work a lot (~70-80 hours a week). I even convinced my employer to get one for me so I don't have to carry it to/from work.
Had to release OpenInteract 1.36 since Randal pointed out a bug in a mkdir() call -- Perl 5.005x requires two arguments, 5.6.1 defaults the second one for you. Doh! (Another, smaller item got fixed as well.)
Upgrade of the major site going well. I'm rewriting all the custom modules to use the new version -- bonus of this is that they'll all be open-sourced, so people will be able to d/l the various packages and have a pretty cool website (event calendar, link database, contact database, news, classifieds, shopping cart, simple product database) out of the box.
Finally got latest versions out. SPOPS 0.53 was a week ago, then a helpful developer pointed out a bug which was promptly fixed by 0.54. OpenInteract 1.35 has a very extensive Changelog, particularly when you consider that most of the interesting stuff happens in the packages, each of which has their own log.
Now that it's released, I need to upgrade a site running (IIRC) 1.2 to 1.35. It will be a little difficult but hopefully not too bad. It will be a chance to create a 'common upgrade experience' type of log, altho I don't know how many people actually upgrade.
In general, I don't hear much from people using OpenInteract. This could be a good thing -- I put a lot of effort into making installation easy, so maybe people just understand it and are working merrily away -- or a bad thing -- they try it for a bit, don't get immediate gratification and throw it on the scrap heap. General feedback is nice every once in a while :-)
Java stuff is going ok. I still get frustrated when easy things aren't easy, but that's just java. I'm trying to keep the attitude that Java is something I want to get very good at -- at least somewhere around my current Perl proficiency.
An idle thought -- why hasn't someone taken the CPAN tools and just created a CJAN from them? Clearly some of the items are different -- there's no standard for building/testing as in Perl, but at least it gives you a powerful registration/browsing/mirroring/distribution system. There's always the canard that the tools should be written in the language they're dealing with. My answer to this is: let's get it working, then you and the other language purists can get right on that for version 2 :-)
Java is in a much different area from Perl in this respect -- Sun acts as a central authority (for APIs, code, etc.) where Perl has none. Hackers abhor a vacuum, so it got filled. It's hard to get motivated to fill something that's already got something (however small) there.
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