I attended the monthly Seattle.rb meeting, and it was a lot of fun. Mostly educational, because all of these guys were more experienced than me. There was pair programming (it’s a long story - go look up “Extreme Programming” on Google). There was meeting geeks. I learned a bit about Unit Testing. Plus, it was in the “cool” part of town, so I got to see some impressive tattoo jobs.

NPTT? That’s a horrible acronym. Anyhow, I’ve taken a break from Ruby programming stuff to … uhh … do Python programming stuff. Maybe we’re talking about a little bit of obsessiveness, yes?

The fruit of my day’s labor is a templating mechanism inspired by Perl’s HTML::Template module. It allows simple variable substitution, if structures, and loops. I’m planning on spending this week cleaning up the code and figuring out distutils. Once I’m confident that it will install and work in most circumstances without blowing anything up, I’ll make it available on the site.

Until then, why don’t you go play with the test page? If it’s broken, then you probably wandered in while I was fiddling with it =-).

See this face? Do you see the expression on my face? No, of course you can’t. Trust me, it’s not a happy face. I succumbed to a little dotNET hype, and went so far as to install IIS, so I could mess around with that nifty ASP.NET thingy. I was a good boy, and I grabbed all of the Windows Updates I could find.

Sometime in the dark of night (or the middle of day, I never can tell), some script compromised my server and set it up so that all of my HTML pages would open some sort of executable file on loading. Every HTML page. Not just the ones in wwwroot, but every dang HTML file readable by Windows. That means my awkward backup system is all messed up, too.

The easy solution would be to simply go back into Linux and never look back. The only problem with that is the fact that most of the available office packages for Linux suck, and the ones that don’t are still too raw to be useful for every task. Plus, I would go into withdrawals if I had to miss out on PhotoShop. Don’t try to tell me the GIMP is just as good, I’ve used the GIMP for a few years - I know better.

I’m going to go grab some coffee. That usually puts the happy face back on.

Problem (partly) fixed with ZenWeb, a creation of Ryan Davis. I’ll fill in the details later, but in the meantime you can read all about my adventures playing with ZenWeb.

I have been fiddling with Ruby for a while now, but just started getting serious about it over the last week. I thought, “what the heck, a Ruby topic sounds like a good idea.” Not much there right now. A few links, and that is about it.

Oh, and I decided that the DHTML menu was just too ugly to live. I’ve replaced it with a PHP-constructed CSS2 menu. There are a few things that I want to do with it (like make it a little more browser-safe), but it works.

If you want to see some browser-busting uses of CSS, be sure to check out Eric A. Meyer’s css/edge site.

Whew! I have spent the last week or so working out a decent Gallery to show off photos and drawings. It is finally done. It needs a few things, like a few nifty graphics and … well … some more images.

In other news, I decided to put the processed VIM documentation back on the site. All you geeky UNIX folks, enjoy!

More pictures + a geekery topic

I’ve been digging around in my hard drive over the last week or so, and found a few pictures to add to the Gallery. There’s also a new UNIX toolbox topic for the Geekery section. The Toolbox section provides a spot for me to share my notes on using the many many tools available to developers under UNIX-like systems (including Linux and FreeBSD).