dsandler.org/wp

The thing is, because I’ve been working on
dsandler.org I’ve been reluctant to post any new entries. This is
total laziness: I’ve already extracted and converted the weblog
database to the new system, and I don’t want to have to do it again.

But the important part of having a journal like this is to write about
things that are interesting to me, when they happen, rather than putting
it off until later when I have more time, and, invariably, less
inspiration. As with everything else in my life, if it’s not easy for
me to deal with it immediately, it tends to disappear from my brain
forever (or until it becomes a real problem; see
procrastination).

So, here we go, as it happens: Today was my last day at PalmSource. In a way, it was my
last day at Be, Inc. as well, as there are
about two dozen ex-Be employees still at PSI with whom I converse (over
IRC, natch) almost daily. I’ve worked with these people for four years,
ever since Erin and I went crazy and went west on
the advice of a very good
friend.

Improbably, I even had a little farewell lunch today, as Jeff (who lives in Austin)
and Jason and and Justin (who are
each infesting Jeff’s house at the moment) drove down to Houston to meet
Trey and myself for delicious Chuy’s. It was a little bit of Be, one
last time, before I close the book on my professional life for quite a
while.

Fig. 1. The crowd (E was kind enough
to suffer our geek talk all afternoon).

Thanks, everyone.

I had planned to have the new dsandler.org stuff up this
week, but it just didn’t work out that way. The code that runs the site
is old, cobbled-together and horribly busted; I decided, after some
anguished introspection, that I’d prefer to spend less time fixing my
weblog software, and so I’d use some OSS package instead of developing my
own weblog engine again.

The whole point was to reduce the amount of hassle, and here
I am, knee-deep in hassle with pyblosxom. I think the idea
behind it is great—entries are Plain Old Files (like my current
implementation), flexible categories and URI syntax, and implemented in
Python (so I can hack away at the parts that don’t work). I find myself
hacking away at the whole thing, because in some ways the architecture
is fundamentally flawed.

For instance, I’d like it to show just one day at a time in the
default view of any category; OK, I can write a callback plugin to cut
off the entry list after the first visible day. But what about “next
day” and “previous day” links? Pyblosxom has these great date URLs; out
of the box, it will show you a day’s entries if you append /YYYY/MM/DD
to a URL. So, given a date, it’s easy enough to create links which
blindly point you forward and backward in time, but I want to skip over
days which have no entries. Sorry! Once your callback function gets the
list of entries for a given day, it’s already erased all knowledge of
the rest of the weblog, so there’s no way to search the rest of the
database for the next and previous valid day.

This ties into the other fundamental suckage of Pyblosxom: It has no
concept of indexing for its entries. It is incredibly slow on
the dsandler.org database, because there are a couple of
thousand files it must stat() and sort. A database-backed
weblog engine would keep a by-date index of the entries, but Pyblosxom
does all kinds of perverse destructive things to the list of entries as
it scans the filesystem, making indexing impossible. The pyblosxom
people must either not use their weblogs a lot (!) or must render
every possible page to a static HTML file, which really defeats the
purpose (to me) of a dynamic system.

In short, hassle.