So I think I have all of the plugins, and php modules, and K2 mods back in place. I am, however only one guy, and I might have missed something. If you find anything out of wack, please let me know. I really apreciate it.
Monthly Archive for April, 2009
Today I went to the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference 2009. While I appreciate the time and effort in planning, and executing an event such as this, I have mixed feelings about the conference over all.
Right of the bat I was disappointed. I was hoping to be able to ‘live’ blog the event, but the school the event was at had no Wi-Fi that allowed internet use. Fail #1
The event marketing was talking up its relevence to students, but that was a little misleading. There was some fantastic speakers (and some not so fantastic) but there was very little information that a student could take home about developing open source software, or even about the daunting task of finding a job. All in all the conference was geared to developers already in the work place, and entrepreneurs. Fail #2
There were 3 keynote speakers, an anomaly in and of itself, Lee Congdon the CIO, Red Hat, Keith Bergelt from Open Invitation Network, and Tom Parsons, President and CEO, SC Technology Alliance. Lee and Tom were fantastic speakers, and I enjoyed both segments thoroughly.
Lee spoke about using open source software at an enterprise level, and how it has help keep costs down at Red Hat. It should be noted, that not all of the utilized software inside the company is Red Hat software, however it is all open source.
Tom spoke about what his organization and South Carolina are doing to keep its tech graduates form leaving.
Keith read his presentation. It was all I could do stay awake. He was generally unengaging, and rather monotone. He was speaking about what his organization is doing to level the IP playing field for all developers. OIN does things like buy patents and freely lisences them, to prevent patent trolls from bogging down innovation. Now you are asking how I know that if I almost fell asleep. I picked that up from his introduction. All in all, Fail #3.
Between all the keynotes there were several breakout sessions, focused on developers, or entrepreneurs. I went the way of the developer.
The first speaker, Greg DeKoenigsberg, was fantastic. He was the only guy that disemenated any real info for those of us in school. He gave a crash course in contributing to open source projects. He was also very engaging, and entertaining.
Then comes Chris Eargle. I am sure he was a good speaker with lots of wonderful things to say. Unfortunately his topic was open source development tools for Windows, and I missed the only one worth talking about, Notebook++. By the time I got back from the bathroom, he was talking about some .NET development tool the was technically open source, but only runs on Windows, and it is for developing Microsoft languages. I won’t call this one a fail, but only because my dislike of Windows is subjective.
Then we have Jason Dew, Johnny Long, and Mark Gunnels speaking on why functional programming is better than object-oriented programming. They focused on Haskell, Erlang, and Clojure. Basically there big selling point was polymorphism. (Erlang also has one hell of a robust VM, but since the VM has to be running to run the compiled code, the VM is not written in Erlang) There was some slightly misleading information about these languages using less code to do the same amount of work as oop languages, but I didn’t see it. It seemed to be more total code, but less in the main body of the program. While all of this was interesting, and the presentation was well done, it felt like I was being sold on slight untruths, and misleading logic.
Finally there was Stuart Anderson. He spoke on Trusted Systems, explaining what they are and how they work. It was very interesting, but so convoluted, and (at the moment) useless, that it came across as more fluff than content. Stuart was very interactive, so much so that we ran out of time before presentation.
All in all I enjoyed the time I spent at POSCON, and I am not sorry I went. I will go if they have it again next year. I only hope there is more focus on students.
I (used to) keep 2 windows installations. 1 was a Boot Camp partition on my iMac that I installed my games on, as well as ran Quicken from. The other was a stand alone box that was an all purpose server. Apache/MySQL/php, as well my Media server.
2 days ago, both installations broke. The Boot Camp partition was killed by Paralles crashing, and the server was killed by an auto update of video drivers. Nvidia drivers, in my experience are VERY fickle, and upon a change in them, my system failed to boot.
The good news, I didn’t loose the site, only the content. The bad news, some of that content was my new photography page. Owell. The iMac is the server now, as it really should have been all along.
So I decided to make my photography page fit more with the rest of the site, and what better time that when I am overhauling what the rest of the site looks like anyway, right? Check it out!
Also you should note the nice new header image I’m rocking. Also it’s not really new, I just photoshopped the logo on, instead of having an ugly text only title.
Since I last posted about bbPress, my attitude towards it has changed, somewhat.
bbPress out of the box is ONLY a forum. there are almost 0 features. No personal messaging, no avatars, no bbcode, no quoting, no posting images… you get the idea. Fortunately there are many plug-ins to alleviate the perceived shortcomings of bbPress. So after 7 hours of installing testing, and retesting, I have a fully functioning, full featured (as far as what I use, and recommend as general features) bbPress stack. There is one drawback. Some of the plug-ins require adding their php function calls to the theme template. So if I preinstall those plug-ins, the stack is stuck with the theme I choose.
As I said my attitude towards bbPress has changed, and it has. I am not worried about it being unusable, there are plug-ins. All in all I like bbPress okay, as opposed to not thinking it was the forum for the job. I say I like okay, because it is to modular. The themes are not just css files that change stuff around (those do exist). The ones I looked at are entirely new php files. Some add new features (I think new stuff is only for plug-ins, personally), and some don’t. But each time I switch themes, I have to reinstall several plug-ins. I think that is inefficient, but I didn’t write the code, and until I can think of a better way, I will use it like it is.