Ok people, I’m outta here. You might not hear from me again until next year. Or you might hear from me tomorrow, I’m not sure yet.

These are some of the projects I plan to work on in the next two weeks:

• Hack Drupal to do what I want
• Dig into PHP a bit more
• Built a site for a client using valid XHTML and CSS… that looks good and is accessible!
• Check out a web hosting company and their capabilities
• Check out a broadband provide and their capabilities
• Fix up and old PowerMac 8500/180 for Milt
• Have fun with the family
• Eat lots of cookies

Have a nice holiday, or whatever it is you might have in the next two weeks…

Today we used Net::IMAP::Simple to make perl talk to an Exchange server. We normally make Mozilla do most of the talking to the Exchange server, but today someone wanted perl to talk to it. Net::IMAP::Simple is pretty similar to Net::POP3, which we’ve used before.

I’m tempted to really wire up perl to do some crazy IMAP related stuff to see how much I can confuse the IT guys with what’s possible.

I started looking at the PHP Developer’s Cookbook, and it’ll probably be more useful to me that the other PHP book I tried to read. I think one problem with the other book is that they presented completely invalid HTML throughout the book, which really bothered me. It was also too much of a beginners book, and while I might be a beginner of PHP, I’m not a beginner programmer. The Developer’s Cookbook is more like the Perl Cookbook which is an incredibly useful reference.

Beyond all that, I need to get away from the fact that so much PHP I see is poorly done. There’s a lot of poorly done perl out there as well. It’s not the fault of the language. Still, when I look at how things are done in PHP I can’t help but think, “it takes all that code to do that? I could do that in one line of perl!” And the fact that so many PHP programmers tend to mix HTML and logic rather than use a templating system doesn’t help. I don’t even like to consider writing something web-based in perl nowadays without using something like HTML::Template.

I think the biggest strength of a system like Movable Type is that the templating system is so powerful and easy to use. Is there any PHP based CMS/weblogging tool that uses templates in a way even close to how Movable Type does?

I never really liked Bill Gates. A few years back one of my bosses asked me if I read his latest book, I said no. What I really wanted to say couldn’t be said in the office. Anyway, at the library last week I checked out his book Business @ the Speed of Thought. (Actually, I checked out the book on tape, since my reading time is precious, but my driving time is largely wasted.) I’m about half way through with it, and it actually has some interesting stuff in it. I’m surprised. I’m not sure if I’ll get to hear it all before it’s due, but this is the most interesting thing I’ve gotten out of it so far:

Make sure any system you build or buy supports PC and internet standards…

Yup. That’s what Bill said. Now I don’t know what ‘PC’ standards’ are, but internet standards I’m familiar with. So by Bill saying this, it almost seems as though he’s telling you not to use Microsoft products, at least the ones that don’t support internet standards, like Microsoft Internet Explorer. I wonder if the ‘build or buy’ part was carefully worded. I not attempting to sound like a conspiracy nut, but I notice that it says ‘build or buy’ and not implement. It seems to imply that you can create your own system, or purchase one, but what about implementing what already exists and is freely available. Ok, my open source advocate badge is starting to show, I’ll stop now.

I’ll end with this: Dear local library, please get more decent books on tape for me to listen to. Thank you…

Drupal supports RSD, thanks to breyten. RSD is Really Simple Discovery, and is a way to help client software find the services needed to read, edit, or work with weblogging software…

Is Mozilla more popular outside the US? See what mozillaZine has to say about it. I know in my household we prefer gecko-based browsers, and only resort to IE when clueless developers of required sites force it upon us. These sites are always send a nice little email complaining about the requirements to use said site. I’d encourage all users of sites that someone ‘require’ IE to complain about it.

A contest to redesign the W3C homepage? Sure… WThRemix! Sounds like a good idea to me.

I’ve been working quite a bit on Drupal lately. The developers are hungry for users to give feedback, and at least a few people are starting to work on usability issues, myself included. I think Drupal’s got a lot of potential, and I can see using it for a few projects of mine. It’s still not at the point of being as polished as Movable Type, but it’s got it’s own advantages with the way it’s designed and implemented.

I always find this amusing, the standard operating procedure at work for distributing some important memo works like this:

1. Email Word document to everyone
2. Wait about 20 minutes
3. Email plain text message to everyone with the following added to the subject: (For those unable to open Word document…)

I’m pretty sure that by skipping the first two steps, we could save bandwidth and time, and in the process get information out cheaper, and in a more expedient manner.

That’ll be $5,000 for the process analysis please…

From the PenguinREPORT:

As you may know, I’m using Movable Type as the tool for Frankly. Digging through the code is clearly a lesson in clean and functional programming. It’s also a perfect example of the wonder of open source. This wonderfully functional tool is provided at no cost to anyone who wants to use it. In a commercial form, this is a package that could easily sell for upwards of a hundred dollars…

Now, we all know Movable Type is not open source. Ok, maybe we don’t all know that. Do we all know that Movable Type is not provided at no cost to anyone who wants to use it?

Once again, I’ll add my disclaimer. I like Movable Type, it’s a great piece of software. I like the Trotts and Six Apart. The only thing I don’t like is the license for Movable Type. Usually I just choose not to use the software, rather than complain about it. Instead I complain when others disregard or don’t understand the license, as above.

I don’t expect Six Apart to change their licensing or business model to please me, I think they’re doing things right over 90% of the time. (Which is pretty good!) I probably wouldn’t care if Movable Type wasn’t such an awesome application.

Could AOL be getting into weblogs? See the interview with Rick Robinson, VP of Community Products at AOL.

From The Linux Journal: A new book that explains OSS on an executive level can help open a dialogue between hackers and suits: The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source.

4 out of 5 Hobbits perfer the iMac…

It’s here… I wrote about this a while ago, a tabbed terminal app for Mac OS X - here’s iTerm. (If I can get my Mac to mount .dmg files today I’ll give it a try…)

Ok, I’ve implemented the following into the head of this document: <link rel="publickey" type="text/plain" title="Public Key" href="http://rasterweb.net/raster/pgpkey.txt" /> Which means if there is an agent smart enough to do auto-discovery of a public key via the url of this site, well, then we may be on our way to verification of commentation… or something like that…

I ended up using HTML::Template in a project at work, but I had to actually create a template as well. A filty, dirty, ugly, invalid template with nasty font tags and tables for layout. While I did managed to match the look of the site (and only had 4 lines of HTML in the code) it felt like quite a step backwards… I’m so used to writing XHTML and CSS that going back to the old methods actually hurt my brain a bit. Not to mention the fact that it was a mess to deal with. Please people, make the move to clean, structural markup using XHTML and CSS. You won’t be sorry…

(Note to self: Remember to set die_on_bad_params = 0)

I like good ideas.

As mentioned previously here, pb implemented PGP/GPG signing into his commenting system. I thought this was a good idea. My idea, following up on that idea, was an easy way to sort of auto-discover someone’s public key. While I’ve got a pretty prominent link on my site to my public key, most people don’t. I suggested a <link rel="publickey"…> type of tag, so that given a person’s URL, you could get their key. I thought that was a good idea. Ben then followed up with Verifying PGP Signatures which talks about a web-based verification service with a trust web.

This seems to be the way to get things done nowadays… What’s next?

Oh, pb also has a nice little explanation of how to use PGP/GPG in a commenting system.

Well, it looks like Jaguar (aka Mac OS X 10.2) on the PowerBook won’t happen. I tried to install last week, and got the dimmed screen effect. So actually I might be able to install it, I just won’t be able to see anything. I’ve searched and searched and it seems that Wallstreet users can either get it to work, or not get it to work, but there doesn’t seem to be a fix for the ones it doesn’t work on. On the upside, looks like I’ll be getting a working battery soon, so even though I can’t currently put it to sleep, it shouldn’t think it’s the 1970’s every now and then.

So it looks like we’re stuck at Mac OS X 10.1.5, which isn’t so bad, considering what I paid for it. Sure, we’d like features like S-Video out to work, but we can’t afford to be picky right now…

You should know, that without a doubt, the adult female member of our household makes the best chocolate chip cookies on the planet known as Earth. This I am sure of…

The Slashdot Interview with Joe Clark is a good read. We also learn that Joe is a vegan… (Just don’t try to validate any Slashdot pages!)

pb implemented PGP/GPG signing into his commenting system. I had mentioned doing this before, somewhere, on somebody’s site, not that I can remember where, but I think it’s a good idea. Perhaps at some point in the future when using public key encryption is easy enough for Mom do to, this will catch on.

As it is though, his system is well done, and not at all intrusive to people who don’t know squat about digital signatures. Does anyone besides me want to see a <link rel="publickey"…> tag?

Now, with XHTML/CSS, it’s the World Wide Web Consortium! See the W3C Home Page Table-less Layout: HOWTO and FAQ for more information.

They’re planning a holiday luncheon at the office. The note says they’ll have turkey and roast beef, and you should specify which one you want. What, no Tofurkey?

Sigh, it’s sad, but many parts of the world still aren’t sensitive to the needs of the non-meat eater. Even Google, when queried about Tofurkey asks if you meant to look for ‘Turkey’ argh…

Structured Content: What’s in it for Writers? takes a look at those pesky writers and their relation to Content Management Systems.

Here’s some of the good stuff:

• Writers will use any tool that makes their task easier
• Very few people are willing to change the way they work in order to make somebody else’s life easier
• Writers usually lack the context to understand the structures they are asked to produce
• Some content contributors will be willing to create structured information and other will not

I really need to take a look at HTML Tidy again. I’d like to use it as a CMS add-on, to clean up incoming content…

Yesterday we mentioned SQLite: An Embeddable SQL Database Engine. Here’s today’s thought: Could you take Movable Type (or your CMS of choice) and make it use SQLite instead of MySQL? You could (in theory) then do all the SQL things without access to a MySQL database… It’s nothing I want to attempt to implement, but feel free to take the idea and run with it.

Page count for recent issues of Internet World:

• September 52
• October 52
• November 48
• December 40

As someone involved in the publishing industry, this is a little disturbing…

Spotted on a mailing list, where the author describes how to do something on a *nix based system:

I wish it was that easy under Windows.

Isn’t that the official Windows motto?

SQLite: An Embeddable SQL Database Engine and DBD::SQLite - Self Contained RDBMS in a DBI Driver are a great combination for the perl hacker on your gift giving list this year. It seems like the perfect solution to those problems that don’t quite require MySQL or another RDBMS, but need more than flat files or dbm files…

GnuPG for OS X 1.2.1 is now available. Which is good, since the last GPG update I attempted seemed to hose a few things in the process.