Category: Uncategorized

I spent 5+ hours on Saturday outside on our driveway repairing our van. Actually I assisted in the repairs, a friend of ours did the hard work. And hard work it was. We replaced the fuel pump. This involves removing the gas tank, which happened to be full of gas, and then removing the old pump, insering the new pump, and putting the gas tank back in place. I, like most people, complan about the cost of auto repairs (actually, I complain about the cost of just about anything…) but the guys who work on cars and know what they’re doing get a tip of the hat from me.

I still hate cars though…

Things to do, things to do! This is what I recommend doing, as this is what I will be doing.

Make backups of your data from 2002. I mean, backups are a good idea, but since it’s a whole new year, it’s the perfect time. I plan on making backups of my digital photos and email from 2002. With Mac OS X, Mail.app, and iPhoto this is pretty easy, it’s mainly just a matter of copying the right directories to the right place, and then burning them to CD-ROM‘s. Of course you’ll want to remember to make two copies of each disc, and store one set of copies offsite. As for what ‘offsite’ means to you, you’ll have to decide that on your own.

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 provider 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?