jclark.org/weblog

Milestones

Today is a Milestone date - the start of a New Year. Happy New Year! This is also a milestone post, the 100th post to this weblog. I should have hit this particular milestone some time ago, but who ever has enough time?

I have never been a big believer in making New Year’s Resolutions. As I’ve gotten a little older, I’ve started to take more note of milestones than I used to. Milestones like your 30th birthday (nearly two years ago) will do that. So this year, I think I’ll try on a few resolutions for size, and see how things go.

Personal

1. Spend a little extra time with my kids. I don’t think I do too badly at this now, but why not improve anyway?
2. Have at least one weekend getaway with my wife… and no children. We’ve been planning this forever, and never seem to get it done.
3. Play more Chess (and hopefully improve).
4. Write some fiction.

Professional

1. Finish every last piece of the Client Reporting project.
2. Make the whole thing obsolete with a ground-up rewrite, using no VB (build directly in XML via Office 2003 native XML formats).

jclark.org

1. Add timestamps and notifications for comments.
2. New design. Something a bit less… understated.
3. Hit the 300 posts milestone.
4. Re-organize the categories. Use permanent redirects for moved posts.
5. Add a second, topic specific blog. Potential topics are astronomy, chess, or writing.

I think that’s it for now. If I think of anymore, I’ll come back and update the list.

Reconnected

Home sweet home, broadband sweet broadband. I’m home, but I’m a bit behind on email, blog reading, blog entries, etc. As is obvious, I didn’t make it to Panera Bread Co. over the weekend. I’ll be visiting family again the week after Christmas, and intend to check it out then. For now, I’ll be trying to get caught up over the next couple of days.

Disconnected

Remember dial-up? What a terrible thing to do to one’s self.

I’m away from home right now, visiting family and friends for Thanksgiving (for which I have a post rolling around in my head, need to do that). It’s wonderful, except I’m disconnected. No wi-fi, no high-speed internet, no sir. In fact, I don’t even have dial-up on my Powerbook at the moment… I’m blogging this from my wife’s Compaq Presario laptop.

You see, way back in the mists of time, our first home internet connection was a trial subscription to AOL. Because my wife does so much business online, with an AOL email address, we’ve never gotten rid of the service (a matter I hope to remedy one day). My cable internet provider, Comcast, does not provide dial-up (I think they have something hokey with a third party, but I’ve never managed to track it down), and so our AOL account is our emergency dial-up solution. Of course, when I installed Panther recently, I formatted and started from scratch, and forgot to stick AOL for Mac on it… so no dial-up for the Mac. Oops. At least until I venture out to any retail store in the known universe, where I can pick up an AOL CD at the checkout.

Meanwhile, I don’t have the patience for web-mail, so I’m disconnected from my mail as well. I’m semi-ambivalent about this, because I am on vacation, and I’m enjoying relaxing. But I do have a few projects I want to tinker with, and sooner or later I’ll miss my e-mail and aggregator.

There is a Panera Bread Co. store about 15 minutes from here. In case you’ve been living under a rock, this is the bakery/bread store chain that offers free (as in beer!) wi-fi access in many of their stores. They see it as a service to customers (like a bathroom), instead of as a revenue source (like a coin-op bathroom- remember those?), which I applaud. I’m dying to go check them out, spend some money, and use the wifi. I promise to blog an entry from there if I make it.

Meanwhile, I’m either disconnected, or at the best (dial-up on XP), misconnected.

Famous Last Words

I had a sneaking suspicion when I wrote the previous post that something would louse up my plans to update the site on Thursday nite. It’s Friday afternoon, and Lo, no update. Maybe it’s time to give up this programming gig and try prophecy. Anyone know of any openings for prophets, oracles, etc?

Yesterday was another 12+ hour day at work. The good news is, I think I’m over the worst of the hurdles and my hours should start getting back to normal. By the time I got home, I had no energy left for the computer… any computer. Well, except my wife’s computer. She needed some help with something that changed on eBay recently. For her, a few more minutes at the keyboard I could do. Blogging, I could not.

This morning on the way to work (where I am now, catching up on email/blog reading/etc on the laptop while a set of reports ties up my dev PC for an hour), it occured to me that I’m not quite ready to publish after all… I forgot to add IE-specific bugfixes to the CSS. And be-nice-to-Opera rules. Etc. I’m skipping the Netscape4 hacks. Get a real browser.

Plus, I think I need to make a quick refinement to the story template, based on a misunderstanding (on my part) of TrackBacks. That should be a quick fix, at least.

So, hopefully I’ll get the site update published late tonight, but tommorow may be more likely. I am going to get out of here at a decent hour tonight, but them I’m going to do something constructive… like spend some time with my family.

One More Day

I’ve been busy working on a slew of revisions (including two new blosxom plugins) for the site for days now. I nearly had everything finished last night. I expected to publish the updates, and to start blogging about them, tonight.

Unfortunately, my other (read: paying) job was more pressing today. Working until 9 p.m. does cut into one’s leisure time. The good news is that all of the site enhancements are ready (although I still can’t get Apache redirects to work, to redirect /index.html to /weblog; but that’s another blog entry), and so I should be able to publish everything tommorow night (well, technically tonight, midnight departed over an hour ago) and get back to more regular content posting.

One more day should do it.

Famous Last Words.

Breaking the Silence

Once again, it’s been a few days since my last post. It’s time to remedy the situation.

One of the things I was worried about when I decided to begin this weblog was content… specifically, having the discipline to post my content on a regular basis. I’ve never been a good journaler. I ran a practice blog a few months ago, and quickly found that I spent more time working on the infrastructure than on the content. Much more.

I have started writing new entries several times over the past few days. Each time I seem to get distracted or obstructed by something different. I am quickly finding a fundamental difference between writing prose and writing code - the way in which difficulty affects my desire to complete the task. When writing code, a more difficult problem tends to spark my interest, and draw me into working harder at solving the task. Technical difficulties add to the challenge. When writing prose, however, technical difficulties tend to turn me away from the task at hand. I attribute this to the differences in my perceptions of these tasks - I enjoy coding much more than writing.

For example, when writing blog entries, I often cite topics which should contain links to other resources (e.g., Blosxom). Even using textile to compose my entries, I still find the task of looking up and typing in URLs to be tedious. Late last week, I began a post, only to quickly tire of including the links for Blosxom, the plugins page, etc., yet again. So I stopped what I was doing and went looking for a better way. I recalled seeing something in Dean Allen’s Textile 2 Announcement post regarding storing of URLs in an external file, to avoid embedding them in the text. As well as I can tell, this feature is not (yet?) a part of the perl port of Textile 2.

This led me to attempt my first ever Blosxom Plugin. After many hours of hacking (and still no post), I decided that: A) my perl is rustier than I thought, and B) My original concept for the plugin might be flawed. Eventually I gave up, but the post didn’t get done.

A day or two later, I started on another post. Again, I got distracted by the need to look up (and type) URLs, and again, I got sidetracked by the desire to come up with a strategy. I spent some time carefully combing through the Blosxom Plugins Registry looking for something applicable. Eventually, I thought of a refinement of my original idea, and returned to the failed plugin. Much hackery later, I still had no plugin (and no post). I am very close, but still sans cigar. I plan to post about it on here soon, and to seek help on the Blosxom mailing list and/or PerlMonks.com.

Another hurdle to writing blog entries is the difficulty in formatting posts for my subject area. When trying to include sample code, I’m finding the interaction between wikieditish and textile to be a problem. Escaped markup in the original post gets un-escaped in the wikieditish edit box. Another enhancement for later, but one I plan not to address at the expense of site content.

Silence

It’s been quiet here for a couple days. Besides being out of town for a few days, I’ve been doing some reading/surfing/learning about CSS, site design, etc. Posting frequency should pick up again soon.

I did take a stab last nite at my first Blosxom Plugin. My perl seems rustier than I thought, however, and it’s still not working. More reading ahead….

In the Beginning

I am Jason Clark, and this is the weblog at jclark.org. Welcome.

I am a software developer by trade - and by inclination. This weblog will be my attempt to learn more about the technologies of the web, and to document what I learn.

I have several initial goals. The first is to learn Blosxom, the blogging software which powers this site. I intend to document how the site is put together as I proceed. My next goal is to better learn CSS by evolving the design of this site. Hopefully this will proceed quickly, for the current look can surely use the help. At certain milestones in the site design (as I see fit), I intend to ‘archive’ the site design by copying the current Blosxom flavor and CSS stylesheets to keep for future reference. With luck, this will be instructive.

My final goal is to document the little tidbits of useful knowledge that always seem to be forgotten when later needed. These may be bugfixes, workarounds, or clever hacks for any product or technology I come in contact with. Hopefully they will help others as they help me.

In between all of this, I’ll try to comment on whatever else comes along. This is my first attempt at ongoing writing, and that may be the biggest learning experience of all. Committing thought to text requires more thought than just thinking. Or something like that.