Mando.org

It’s been a while since I’ve been up this late hacking for fun. I’ve done it for pay, but not just “for fun”. Granted, I’m one of the fortunate few that loves what he does, so even when it’s not “fun”, it’s still fun.

I probably should have apologized ahead of time for the incoherent babbling. Sorry.

But here I am, about to tuck in, and I’ve been hacking on a script to convert this blog over to MT for about 2.5 hours. I’ve got everything done except the comments, and I’m pretty sure that’ll work right out of the box. I’m just getting too sleepy to really test it.

Actually, the truth of the matter is that if it works, I know I’ll be up at least another hour or two installing MT and migrating the site. And I have to be at work tomorrow .

Once I get it working, I’ll put the script (and accompanying Export module) up here for perusal and mockery.

P.S. Okay, I’ve got to tell someone a little bit about how it works.
Class::DBI
107 lines of code (so far)

Testing some syntax hilighting:

Edit: Yeah, so that didn’t work out so well. I’ll have to find a better way to post code, I suppose.

Of course, Movable Type has a plugin that does this: MTBeautifier. Maybe it’s time to get off my duff and finish writing that WP->MT conversion tool.

Testing registered html entities. Nothing to see here:

® or ®

Edit: Sorry for the testing, folks. For the curious, my budddy Steve at Revolution In The Corner was having an RSS problem which I tracked down to a rogue ® symbol. I didn’t know what he used to put that symbol in, but I wanted to make sure that the normal HTML entities of ® and ® both worked with WP.

And they do.

Seriously, tho. I just stumbled across ExtremePerl.org, a book about Extreme Programming and Perl. I’m not saying I’m drinking the XP kool-aid or anything, but there are a lot of really good ideas in the XP ideology, and you’d be remiss to dismiss them outright.

Of course, this only applies if you’re a computer programmer, and a Perl programmer to boot. Otherwise, well, I suppose that last paragraph didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Sorry about that.

Word Press starting freaking out today, so to those of you whose RSS readers got pinged a couple too many times today, I apologize. It’s been taken care of and won’t happen again .

For those interested, Climb To The Stars has the fix and more info about the problem.

Phidgets are physical widgets, which means that they’re little robotic building blocks that are designed to interact with your PC. They range from servos and lights to LCDs and accelerometers, and they’re all meant to be programatically accessed via USB.

So no more hard-coding actions and blowing them into a ROM, or having to write some strange set of opcodes to get your robots to do what you want. You can just write code in C++ or Java or Visual Basic. There’s no linux support yet, but they claim it’s on the way.

This just blows my mind. I can’t wait until Aiden’s old enough to play with this kind of stuff.

Does anyone have a cheap 802.11b PCMCIA card up for sale?

I’ve got an old IBM Thinkpad I’m bringing online to do some dev work on and a wireless connection would be so choice.

Ah, the ever-present software documentation problem. It seems to follow me everywhere I go.

There’s invariably never enough (usually there isn’t any), and there’s never any time to write it. I’ve never solved this problem or seen it solved in the real world, so I’m at a loss here. If, by some strange alignment of probabilities, someone reads this and has a solution to missing/incomplete documentation, please PLEASE let me know.

I don’t even really want to know how you did it (although that would be lovely). I just want to know that it’s not completely hopeless.

Miguel and team have just released Mono 1.0. I’ve been playing around with Mono on and off for a year or two now, and it’s really quite an exciting area. The whole .Net framework is pretty cool, and it’s great that there’s an open source alternative, so go and check it out.

In other dev news, Microsoft released the first public beta version of Whidbey, aka Visual Studio 2005. There are a lot of windows programmers excited about Whidbey, so it’s probably worth a gander if you’re into that sort of thing.

In other OTHER news, Microsoft also announced and released an Express version of their C++, C#, ASP.Net and J++ IDEs. For free.

It looks like Microsoft is really trying to target the hobbyist programmer market, which up until now has belonged to Apple and linux. Things Just Got Interesting.

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