Trying out Blosxom 2.0 to see if it can replace MovableType
It looks like it's grown up a LOT since the pre-1.0-beta days. Quite fully featured.
I'm hoping that I can script a modification of the timestamp of blog entries, to the values saved by a handy-dandy movabletype-to-blosxom export tip. If I can do that, and if it can handle multiple blogs and multiple authors, then we're good to go.
I just "released" my first web application using XStreamDB today. The part that has to talk to XStreamDB took less than an hour to write, and was really quite simple to do.
The app is an interface to a database of 641 (and counting) teaching resources, to be used by faculty, grad students, students, etc. to find solutions to problems facing them in the practice of teaching and learning.
The app works really really well right now, and it's completely unoptimized. Page queries returning hundreds of results are spit out in under half a second.
Wow. Wil Wheaton just posted a bounty on the rat bastards that are crapflooding his weblog.
Yes. That Wil Wheaton. Actor. Author. Spamhunter.
The refugees from humanity decided to post kiddie porn in the comments section of his weblog. Not Nice. And he's had enough.
He's posted a $1000 bounty, to be rewarded to anyone providing info leading to the arrest and successful conviction of the crapflooders.
Good on ya, Wil! Squash those rodents...
I've updated the ImageMagick shell script I use to generate the various image sizes used by Pachyderm.
The new version is a bit cleaner, and optionally takes parameters on the command line OR runs in interactive mode to determine source and destination directories.
It also provides a little more feedback now, so you know WTF is going on.
Here's a link to the script.
I've just enabled indexing and searching of .pdf documents on the Learning Commons website.
We're using ht:/Dig as our search engine, and it's quite flexible. It can take external parsers to teach it to read non-text-only file formats. There are libraries available that can teach it to read .rtf, .pdf, .ps, .doc, .swf, .xls, and even .ppt files.
For now, I've only added the .pdf parser, using the Xpdf library. There was no binary available for MacOSX, so I had to compile from source. Here's a link to the compiled binaries for MacOSX (compiled without support for the X11 windowing system - these are just the command line utilities). Just drop them in /usr/local/bin and enjoy!
I've opened up a SubEthaEdit document to serve as a shared workspace for the Pachyderm training session today. Not sure if anyone's going to use it, but it might be a cool way to get a rough draft of documentation, on the fly (especially since most Pachydermers are in San Francisco, and there are a few stragglers - myself included - scattered around the continent).
The direct link to the shared document is here, and the SubEthaTrack listing is here.
I've written a simple ImageMagick shell script to batch convert a bunch of images into the various sizes required by Pachyderm. Man, ImageMagick is pretty sweet. Installed in a few minutes using Fink, the I was off and running. I call this script to generate the images, which can then be fed to Generator to create the .swf files used by Pachyderm:
#!/bin/sh
for img in `ls *.jpg`
do
convert -sample 46x36 ../11/
convert -sample 56x56 ../12/
convert -sample 72x72 ../13/
convert -sample 160x160 ../14/
convert -sample 280x200 ../15/
convert -sample 300x260 ../16/
convert -sample 480x380 ../17/
convert -sample 790x540 ../18/
convert -sample 1280x1024 ../19/
convert -sample 72x72 ../23/
done
Zeldman links to a page describing a Flash actionscript template that reads in XML and links .jpg files as described in the XML.
A demo is available, as well as source code.
Sounds like a modernized version of the Pachyderm templates. Going to have to take a closer look.
I just got an email from someone asking about the wiki engine I used for the CAREO wiki stuff. He was wondering if there were any WebObjects wiki engines out there. I thought I'd seen one, a long time ago, so I did a quick Google for it.
After filtering the usual noise (some from my own blog. doh.) I found a page by Pierre Bernard, with a link to WODev.
WODev is a wiki on WebObjects, implemented in WebObjects. And, it's Open Source, so code is available etc...
Michelle made a good point in an email. I'd overlooked the value of collaboration at a distance, because I really take it for granted now. I've been working with folks over the 'net for years, but much more intensely over the past year.
The Learning Object Syndication with RSS presentation(s) (here and here) wouldn't have been possible without iChatAV, wikis, and weblogs.
And the Pachyderm install would have cost a few orders of magnitude more without these tools (well, we really only used iChatAV/Trillian). The cost of travel between Calgary and California would have been waaaay too high, since it would have meant a few trips to get it running.
Josh and I have been poking at the Pachyderm for the last few days, and have finally convinced it to do something other than stare blankly at us.
Josh wrote some PHP script mojo to suck the Filemaker database (used to manage assets) into the SQL Server DB (used to author presentations). Works like a charm, once you know where the hidden landmines are. Like, say a field name has the wrong case. Or, say, records in one (and only one) table aren't actually saved when the rest of the database is (so they have to be manually re-entered every time the database is opened. No hassle there...)