chuggnutt.com

Been offline most of the holidays, but I thought I'd post some pictures we took of Bend's big snowfall.

Here's a good idea of how deep the snow got (Bend ended up with 11 or 12 inches overall). Click for full size

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'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my hand, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!”

—Clement C. Moore

Been slow to post anything the last couple of days, mostly because we have the flu in the house, and we've been nursing sick kids. It's mostly run its course, but turned into an ear infection in our oldest, and we got antibiotics for that today.

And no, we didn't get flu shots. I've never bothered to get a flu shot, and have never gotten the flu. If I caught it from the kids (hey, there's a first for everything), it turned into a head cold that's pretty much gone. Of course, I rarely get sick as it is, so maybe I just have an iron-clad immune system.

As promised, here's my proposed database schema (using MySQL) for my Spokane Personal Publishing System. It's long and technical, read on at your own risk.

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Jeremy Zawodny had a post imagining a corporate worst-case scenario involving that ubiquitous Movable Type-developed technology, TrackBack. I'd been musing over TrackBack for awhile, and two things yesterday got me looking deeper into it: Zawodny's blog entry, and the link to my site from Ensight that I detailed in my previous entry.

I'll admit, before yesterday what I knew about TrackBack was fairly minimal: it was a way to let sites know when other sites were linking to them (by sites, I suppose it should be clarified I mean blogs)—which to me is basically the equivalent of scanning the webserver's referrer logs. Hence, I've more-or-less ignored implementing it in my own software.

I'm rethinking that decision now, largely because of the Ensight link. You know how I found that link to me? Technorati. (I would've seen it in the Apache logs, sooner or later, but I've been behind on those lately.) It occurred to me, though, that if I hadn't checked Technorati, or if the post containing the link to me had scrolled off of Ensight's front page and off Technorati, then I might never have known that I had been linked to.

TrackBack might change that. I say "might" because I'm still on the fence, as far as it goes. I can't deny that if I had a TrackBack implementation in place, I would have gotten a notification of linkage in this case—Ensight runs Movable Type, which of course runs TrackBack. So I looked into the TrackBack specs yesterday to educate myself.

Here's my official "from the fence" opinion:

TrackBack is a rather ugly kludge, albeit somewhat clever.

It has its good points, and its bad points. Here's the good points:

• The concept. It's good, I admit it. However, it took a close reading of the technical spec to get it across to me. The most important thing about the concept is that it can transcend the weblog world; done right, this could be a powerful tool for all sorts of Web applications.
• It uses plain-vanilla HTTP calls to ping other sites. Simple, easy to implement, firewall-friendly.
• The autodiscovery concept—having your client try to automagically retrieve and ping a site based on the link you give it is neat.
• Adoption. Almost all Movable Type and TypePad blogs I've seen use it, and a good number of other blog tools use it too. It's got the inertia.

Now, the bad:

• It's too vague and confusing. Prior to yesterday, I only had an inkling of how it worked and what it did, and I'm pretty savvy at this stuff; I just couldn't grok what exactly was going on when viewing sites that use it.
• Related to the previous point, the name itself doesn't work for me, it makes me want to only look in one direction for links (back) while the spec several times emphasizes it's a peer-to-peer technology (ie., two-way). Too much confusion and vague imagery doesn't breed a good market presence.
• The execution leaves me a bit cold. That's tough to quantify, I know, but it just seems to me to be too Movable Type-centric, and hence too limited to be the real-world peer-to-peer communication framework it wants to be.
• The autodiscovery solution, while clever, is an ugly hack: embedding RDF into the HTML of a page? Worse, having to surround it with HTML comment tags to avoid breakage? Ick, ick, ick. Seems to me a better solution would have been to embed the autodiscovery stuff in HTML meta tags, like the RSS autodiscovery link you'll find in many sites (including my own). Even something simple along these lines, like:
  
  <meta name="trackback" content="http://www.example.com/tb.cgi?id=1">
  
  would do. And it would play nicely. I've noticed more than once that sites with that embedded RDF cause script errors in my browser.

So while TrackBack, conceptually, is good, its execution is kludgy and ugly. Because of this, I probably wouldn't give serious consideration to implementing it on my site... except for the fact that it's being highly adopted, and as a community-building tool it's better than nothing at all. Do I want to miss the boat? I don't know, yet.

Other thoughts? What do you all think? Is TrackBack good enough? Or could it be better?

Jeremy Wright over on Ensight has wrote up some good commentary to my Thoughts on Content Management post from a few days back. He's hit on the exact points that prompted me to explore this topic: "most CMS's are piss poorly designed" (which is exactly right; most are piss-poorly designed, I'm just as guilty of this as anybody), and "there is no need to choose how you are managing your content until it is actually time to manage it." (Emphasis mine.) Right on.

And, here's some kudos from Jeremy that caught me entirely off-guard:

Jon, over at Chuggnut.com, is one of my favourite writers. Balanced, fair and most importantly, intelligent.

Wow. That's a damn nice thing to say, Jeremy—thank you! (To everyone else, sorry for the ego-stroking; I'll try not to let it go to my head... too much.)

Jake over on UtterlyBoring is having some serious back problems and could definitely use some support. So, if you can, donate to Jake, or maybe buy something from his Orty.com store. If things are tight, hey, I understand, just send him some email or link to his site. Every little bit helps!

Busy busy weekend. Most of it was holiday-oriented, though, and you can see the fruits of a good part of that in our nice six foot Douglas fir that's laden with ornaments there on the right. Click for the larger image in all its glory.

And of course, I couldn't resist including a picture of the prize ornament (gotta click to see!):

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This article on Gadgetopia links to my content management post I made yesterday (er, today?) and brings up a drawback to my system that I forgot to include: searching.

Within the relational database world, you can do precise, structured queries against specific fields in your tables. In a properly normalized database, this is all-powerful.

However, when you bundle a bunch of content up in an XML package, and stuff that into a single field, you lose this functionality of doing atomic searches against those fields. In the example I wrote up—a geocaching XML record with latitude, longitude, etc.—there would be no way to this type of query:

SELECT * FROM content WHERE longitute BETWEEN -122.5 AND -120.5;

So, a problem. A big problem, since searching data is a pretty fundamental concept in content management—hell, in any application. I have some ideas that address this, but they're still percolating. More to come.

I've been thinking a long time about content management systems (which isn't surprising considering developing various types of website CMSes is what I do for a living), how they pertain to weblogs and similar types of content, how to implement them in PHP and MySQL, and what type of system I would really like to have. Now, content management is a big topic, so let me clarify and narrow down what I'm talking about before I go on.

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Installed NetOffice, PHP project management software, this morning to better manage my various Web projects. Once it's up and working, it's a pretty slick piece of software. Had some trouble installing it and getting it to work initially, though.

First, after it's installed, it prompts to you log in to start using the software—with a username and password. The only password I gave it was an administrator password, and the documentation I had didn't indicate what the username is to log in with. I correctly guessed the username was "admin," but then the system wouldn't let me in, it kept giving me a "Session error" message. I was finally able to make that go away by disabling NetOffice's custom session management routines and letting the system default to PHP's native session handling. The files I had to modify for this were includes/library.php, general/login.php, and projects_site/index.php.

Pain in the ass, but that fixed it, and now it works pretty well.

My friend/business partner and I are launching several new websites, and I'm pointing to one here: BendBuzz. He's taking the lead on this one, but I'm totally behind it. It's a weblog-type site devoted to Bend and Central Oregon—not necessarily news per se (which Bend.com has pretty well covered), but for anything we can think of. Kind of like Slashdot for Bend. Check it out. It's brand new, so there's not much content to see yet, but that'll change quickly. Also, I encourage anyone local to Bend to head over and feel free to contribute. We're open to just about anything.

Late tonight. I'm actually working on 2 big articles to post here, at least one of them will be up tomorrow sometime. They're long, geeky passages on content management, PHP, data modelling, metadata, and stuff that's been floating around in my mind for awhile, and it's about time for it to come oozing out. Be warned.

Come on—who wouldn't want The Complete Far Side for Christmas?

For some reason that I now forget I started digging around online tonight to see what the current state of beer brewing software looks like. The last time I'd played with any such software, I installed the evaluation version of ProMash on my old computer and tried it out. It's probably the best piece of software for brewing out there, and to be sure it worked well and did a good job, but when you look at it you can't help but notice the Visual Basic GUI-clutter-itis that prevents it from breaking through to the best-in-show program it wants to be. (See a screenshot here to see what I mean.)

The two lists I found are Lee's Brewery Guide to Brewing Software and the Open Directory beer software category, and I'm disappointed to report that the state of brewing software is right about where I left it. Even ProMash looks the same.

Here's a bit of a wishlist of features I'd like to see in brewing software:

• Simple layout and navigation.
• Visual color indicator—I want to see what color the 30+ SRM porter will be.
• Staggered complexity by usage—if I'm brewing from extract, I'm not worried about seeing all-grain stats and figures to tweak on the recipe formulation screen.
• Open source—open code, open databases.
• Perhaps web-based. (I tend to see everything as having a web-based solution these days, go figure.)
• Custom report generation.
• XML data transfer. Data storage in a database is great, but I want to be able to export to XML for whatever I might need.

To be sure, ProMash covers most or all of this quite nicely—its layouts and colors make my eyes bleed, though, and it's not open source.

Of course, complaining about the current state of affairs for a particular genre of software, accompanied by listing a bunch of desired features for said software, is usually followed by the self-same person announcing that they're going to develop the ultimate version themselves. What can I say? I'd be tempted to do it, but I really don't have the time—there's too many other irons in the fire right now. Plus, I haven't even brewed a batch of beer in over a year, so I'm not even qualified. Sometimes, though, you just gotta vent. :-)