procrastination diagram

Here is is something I've been hacking on for quite a while: I completely rewrote the software that handles my website (and did some redesigning, which you who actually bother looking at the site itself have likely already noticed).

The big change is that in this version, everything in the blog is generated dynamically instead of being written to static html files. You don't care, but it gives me a lot more room to experiment, learn how things tend to be done in the modern world, and experiment with caching strategies. The decision to go with statically-generated pages was several iterations of Moore's Law ago, for reuse-grade hardware, and was overly conservative even then.

The primary new feature that I get out of this is now much more convenient comment moderation. Instead of fiddling around with a clunky command line tool, there's a convenient web page that I can use. Also, various other potential anti-spam measures (e.g. randomly chosen form field names) become much easier to play with.

After that... well, likely I'm going to get distracted by other long term projects that I've been putting off to get this done (because I seemed to be writing here much more often). On the other hand maybe I'll actually do something with the 18000+ pictures I've taken. (I have this idea that I'll start trying to take at least one decent/interesting picture every week. I know someone who's trying to do that every day for a year, but he's much more serious about photography than I am (plus he's got a lighter camera)). I've been intending to integrate my pictures with the site (and make them more public) for at least five years now, and this provides me with a much nicer infrastructure to work with.

Now that I've had it for a bit and am mostly using it as my primary laptop, here's a little detail on how well it works with Debian. It's not perfect (see below), but it does let me get work done.

Wifi is the big problem. The latest vendor driver doesn't seem to be able to stay connected to the network for more than fifteen minutes or so with any kernel I've tried building it against. There's a previous version of the driver linked off an ubuntu bug that seems to work acceptably with the 2.6.30 kernel that was in squeeze until last week (and still appears to be in lenny-backports). Unfortunately, it seems to exhibit similar behavior to the latest driver when built against the 2.6.32-trunk that's now in squeeze, which is annoying because...

Sound almost works. It plays things just fine over the speakers; it just doesn't turn off the speakers when you plug something into the headphone jack. Some digging suggests that this is because the snd-hda-intel driver doesn't know specifically about the codec/mixer mixer and is making guesses that turn out to be wrong. 2.6.32 appears to know about it, but I haven't checked that it fixes the headphone problem because I care much more about wireless support.

X, on the other hand, worked more or less out of the box, although it seems to be happiest (2D-acceleration-wise) when beaten into using the radeonhd driver. Really, I was so flabbergasted by getting a working xterm using the full resolution of the display when I started the server with no xorg.conf that I forgave the ati driver's usual detection problems.

Suspend-to-RAM via pm-suspend just works.

I suspect that the problems will get sorted out over time; the Realtek 8192 seems to be moderately popular, and having a working in-kernel driver would likely make all the pain go away. Still, a couple of weeks on, I could only be slightly more pleased with this computer.

So, we're actually having an Iron Blogger meetup... somewhere with open Wifi. Since I've already posted this week, and this isn't cheating, I figured I should post something.

Sometimes it is necessary to make the effort to give awesome coincidences the opportunity to happen. It is imperative, however, to not be disappointed when they don't. As they say, lotteries aren't a tax on stupidity, they're a tax on hope... and I think I would be a much happier person if I had less of an imagination.

I self-identify as a misanthrope. I dislike abstract people (and aggregates of such, like crowds), but I tend to like the concrete ones I encounter; often, it seems, more than they like me (apparently pessimism fails to endear). A friend who will remain anonymous once suggested I should that I could start a blog "Reasons Why People Should Die" and I'd never miss a day, much less a week. I don't remember what I said, but now that I've thought about it for a while, I think it wouldn't be that good for my blood pressure.

I drive to work nearly every day, because road grids and public transportation conspire against making a distance that, as the crow flies, should be eminently walkable, usefully so. The emotional journey usually starts through "Roads! Often used for getting from point A to point B!", passes through "Look, people, the pedal on the right makes it go faster, the pedal to the left of that makes it slow down, and the big wheel lets you change direction; this isn't that hard" all the way to "DO YOU HAVE THUMBS? SHOW ME YOUR THUMBS!" but often with more profanity.

The above paragraphs weren't actually written to fit together. Does that seem right to you?