In the continuing fallout from the Movable Type 3.0 licensing debacle, I decided to tryout WordPress. My original list also included Blosxom and PyBlosxom, which I might also try out.
So far, so good. I wrote up my notes for installing WordPress on a DreamHost hosted website. I have a test blog up and running, and overall I have to say that WordPress compares very well with Movable Type.
I plan to migrate this blog's content and templates over from MT later this week, to make sure WordPress really would be an acceptable solution. If not, I'll check out Blosxom and PyBlosxom. Hopefully, I will be able to use some of the tutorials from the WordPress site on doing the migration and on redirecting URLs. No sense in starting over from ground zero with all the search engines.
Late last week palmOne released another software update for the Treo 600. So far, it's available for SprintPCS subscribers only. Either they care the most about us Sprintians, or they think that we will make good guinea pigs, and therefore they care the least about us.
The things I really care about in update 1.20:
- More reliable audio
Hmmm, that was a really short list. I'm hoping that the PocketTunes MP3 player has fewer audio dropouts with the upgrade. I currently get dropouts every couple of songs at random.
The things I might care about in update 1.20:
- POP3 client now in ROM (Assuming this saves memory and makes it faster)
- Support for message priority on inbound and outbound SMS messages (I don't get enough messages a day right now to care about sorting on priority)
- Playback of voice memos received via PictureMail service (Assuming I run into someone else some day who uses Sprint's PictureMail service)
My wife has the Powerbook in San Antonio and my work laptop with Windows obviously went away when I stopped working at Avaya, so I can't check out the upgarde until my wife comes back tomorrow. It would be nice if palmOne supported a cross-platform installer so I could install it from the Linux box I am currently using, but I guess that is too much too ask for.
Should I stay or should I go? Six Apart updated and clarified the license for Movable Type 3.0. The most important update for me was the removal of the single CPU limit. It appears that they accidentally forgot to delete that restriction when they copied the text from someone else's software license. The most important clarification regarded what constituted a weblog (for further clarity, let's use small 'w' weblog to indicate a weblog created within the MT admin tool and a large 'W' Weblog to indicate a logical website level Weblog). In the new license, the limit applies to Weblogs, not weblogs. This allows me to claim only a single Weblog, since my second weblog was just a test blog that appeared under the same http://www.wombatnation.com/ URL.
The author limits still stand, but my personal issue with them is admittedly an unusual one. When I was beta testing the newMediaObject XML-RPC call for Ben, I created a bunch of units tests with Python and PyUnit. In order to test whether MT's implementation of newMediaObject was properly obeying security restrictions, I created a couple extra authors with different security permissions. Since I'm long finished with the beta testing for them, obviously I could go back and delete the authors I created, or take advantage of the license change that qualifies them as inactive accounts. The only problem for me would be if I wanted to do any more testing for them in the future that required testing security permissions.
So, the remaining issues for me are:
- Still annoyed about the unexpected changes, though I'm sure I'll get over that soon
- Still seems too expensive for the value it provides to me
In the short term I will stick with MT and will likely upgrade to 2.661. However, I definitely plan to take a closer look at WordPress, Blosxom, and PyBlosxom. That will be a fun investigation, even if I later decide that the switching costs are too high.
WordPress - Visually the most attractive of the three. Seems the closest to MT in feature set. Written in PHP, which I know about as well as Perl, which I know as well as Dutch, which I don't know that well. Like MT, it would be a tool I mostly use, but don't hack on.
Blosxom - Like MT, written in Perl. Like MT and WordPress, it would be a tool I mostly use, but don't hack on. Blosxom's simplicity is very appealing for my personal blog, though I would more likely lean towards WordPress for a company blog.
PyBlosxom - Written in Python, which I do know better than Dutch. Most appealing if I decide I want to allocate some of my code hacking time to the blog tool that I use. To paraphrase what Ted Leung posted, there's a lot of value in becoming an active member of the communities that also develop and use your favorite tools. If a strong community doesn't develop, a tool may wither away and you will suffer switching costs again. PyBlosxom has a much smaller community than the other tools, but it benefits somewhat from the Blosxom community.
After nearly eleven years at Avaya/Lucent/Mosaix/ViewStar (strung together by two acquisitions and a spin-off), I've decided to move on to Voxify, a small startup in Alameda. My last day at Avaya was May 7th. The killer blow for me was that this month Avaya is moving the R&D team from the Dublin office to the Milpitas office. I could already barely tolerate the 25-mile commute to Dublin. I was seriously dreading the 40+ mile commute to Milpitas through the extremely nasty traffic on 238 and 880. I dread no more.
Fortunately for me, near the end of March I ran into a fellow physics and philosophy major at Rice who recently started working at Voxify. Once I learned that Voxify builds sophisticated speech recognition applications for automating customer service calls, I was intrigued. After learning that the development work is in Java and VoiceXML for deployment on Linux servers, I needed to get an interview. After learning how smart and cool the people there were, I was sold.
Starting the first week of June, I'll be the lead architect for applications. While VoiceXML development started out as a hobby for me a couple years ago, I was able to turn my contact center automation development and architectural work at Avaya into an architectural role on a new VoiceXML-based platform. I'm very fortunate that that experience helped me get an opportunity to focus completely on building speech recognition apps with a co-located development team.
While I greatly enjoyed my time at Avaya, working at a 15,000 person company with over 2,000 people in R&D spread out over the US and a few other countries can be a little distracting at times. It makes sense to try to leverage the work of all those developers, but I've learned just how hard distributed development can be. The December/January 2003-2004 of ACM Queue had a couple of excellent articles on distributed development, though, of course, no silver bullet.
I'm not sure how you solve or avoid the problems of distributed development at any software company that large. Building a very large company organically at a single site takes a very long time. Acquisitions are almost always required to build large companies, but it often happens that the companies you want to acquire are nowhere near your current office or offices. Obviously, you could try to force everyone to move to a single site, or at least to a very small set of sites, but you will inevitably lose a significant number of key employees who don't want to relocate.
Okay, so maybe it's not as interesting or as flamboyant as a torn rotator cuff, but it appears that the popping sounds (accompanied at different times by no pain, slight pain, or severe pain) in my shoulder are due to bicipital tendinitis (which is also, but less commonly, spelled tendonitis), or possibly even bursitis.
If the problem is bicipital tendinitis, the recovery period is estimated at 6-8 weeks. My injury occurred about six weeks ago, but I waited a week and a half before seeing a doctor and I didn't see a physical therapist until two weeks after the injury. It's definitely getting much better, but I now wish I had started the physical therapy a lot sooner. My shoulder feels much better than it did two weeks ago, but my range of motion is still limited and the tendon still pops on occasion.
Based on one article I read, the popping of the tendon could be the result of the tendon slipping out of the bicipital groove. This groove is the spot where the long head of the biceps tendon passes between the two tubercles at the top of the humerus. When I move my right arm too far to the left or above my head (especially when accompanied by bending my elbow or gripping with my hand) I can feel some tension develop in the front part of my shoulder. When I return my arm to its normal position, I can feel and hear a pop as the tendon apparently drops back into the bicipital groove. I'm not a doctor, of course, but the tendon slipping out of the groove sounds like a believable explanation. It certainly matches up well with what I'm feeling in my shoulder.
Of course, it's possible that the problem is a combination of bursitis and bicipital tendinitis. If the bursa sac that sits between the tendon and the bone is swollen, I can definitely understand how the tendon might create a popping sensation as it glides over the swollen bursa.
I'm really surprised by how much Six Apart is planning to charge for Movable Type 3.0, especially when you consider that the only significant new feature (comment management) is offset by new limitations on the number of authors, blogs, and CPUs (UpdateSix Apart has removed the CPU limit from the license, claiming it was a mistake). The cheapest version is $100, with a $70 introductory price. I can get a $45 discount off the price due to a donation I made for a previous version, but that still leaves me paying another $25 for not much more, and arguably even less.
Fortunately for me, they will offer a free version that will meet most of my needs. I've never needed support from them, I don't need their help with an install (see my MT install notes if you need help installing MT on a shared server at DreamHost), I don't use any of their fee-based services, I don't use it commercially, I'm the only author, and I have only two blogs. I use the second blog to test out major changes before I roll them out on my public blog. While my blog currently qualifies to appear the "Recently Updated List" because of my past donation, giving up that feature is no big deal to me.
I think this is a case where the really is such a thing as bad publicity. They've managed to piss off many of their most faithful and passionate supporters.
Obviously I don't mind paying money for good software, as I gave them money before when I really didn't have to. However, I do mind paying a lot more than what something is worth to me and I mind onerous new restrictions.
Well, in the short term I will probably upgrade to 2.661 and then maybe to the free version of 3.0, though I wonder if that time would be better spent checking out tools like Blosxom, PyBlosxom, WordPress, or TextPattern. I started blogging with Radio, but got frustrated with all the bugs, the lack of documentation, and the lack of support for Linux. Also, at $40 a year, Radio isn't likely to be much cheaper than MT in the long run.
I had previously advocating the use of Movable Type for blogging at work, but the price to get started has turned it into a major purchase. I was already facing an uphill challenge just to get people excited about it. Also, I was planning to use MT to set up a blog for a non-profit organization I volunteer for. Although it's an environmental organization, I doubt that qualifies as an "educational institution". Even then, you need to write them for pricing. I think this is a road I don't want to head down.
A new review of the Treo 600 showed up on the O'Reilly Network site recently. This review is especially useful if you:
- Live in Canada
- Own a Treo 180 and are thinking about upgrading
- Want to sync your Treo to a Mac
- And/or are looking for a broad description, with screenshots, of the basic features of the Treo 600
Overall, I think the review does a pretty good job of describing the basics of the Treo 600. I like that he included a bunch of anecdotes about oddities, problems, or cool features that he happened on. A lot of reviews that I read are almost indistinguishable from corporate press releases.
My wife recently ordered a 160GB add-on drive kit from weaKnees for our Hughes HDVR2 DirecTiVo and we installed it last Thursday night. It was a quick and easy install, though the only way we could tell the drive had been properly recognized was to wait until we had recorded enough additional programs to go beyond the 35 hour limit of the original 40 GB drive. Our DirecTiVo now can now store 155 hours of recordings, since the 160 GB drive can hold 120 hours.
It would be nice if the TiVo told you how much drive space was left. The only way to get it to display that info is to enable Backdoors mode. Unfortunately, enabling Backdoors mode on a series 2 TiVo with OS version 3.1 or later is really time consuming. If you have a DirecTiVo that is not hacked to enable the USB ports (which is also a massive pain), you have to remove the master drive from the TiVo as part of enabling Backdoors mode.
I highly recommend The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, especially to anyone in high school or college who is interested in or is already majoring in science or engineering and is looking for an area to specialize in which will experience rapid growth over the next fifty years. It's a great read for the rest of you, too.
The book is split into two parts, "The Future - In Theory" and "The Future - In Practice", comprising 25 short essays by prominent scientists. It's well suited for bedtime reading, since each essay can be easily read independently. That was definitely a good thing for me, as I read it slowly over a span of about a year and a half.
The Next Fifty Years was edited by John Brockman, who runs a fascinating website and intellectual forum called Edge. A couple months ago, I picked up Brockman's newest book, The New Humanists: science at the edge (available from Barnes&Noble, who also published the book). Given my current book backlog, I'll be lucky to even start it in a year and a half.
