Opposable Thumbs

So, just a couple quick updates.

First, if you've visited here in the last month or so (not just reading my feed), you probably noticed that I set up my del.icio.us bookmarks to actually get saved as posts here. Over the course of time, it started looking pretty awful considering my relatively infrequent posts (I mean the real posts with actual content written by me).

So, I've reconfigured the del.icio.us tool that was posting those links here to save them to a separate category called, appropriately enough, 'Bookmarks.' You can find this in the list on the right. Currently, they don't appear anywhere else on the blog, but at least they're getting saved here. Eventually, I'll probably add snippet to the sidebar that will show the latest handful of links. I just need to figure out a way to do this that loads enough of the content to make it worthwhile since so many of the sites I link to have such useless page titles set -- which is, of course, the default name used for the link. Occasionally I change the name of the link myself, but often I forget to do or otherwise choose not to.

Anyway, for those of you who just read my stuff via the feed, you probably won't notice a big difference. Since I run my feed through Feedburner, I simply reconfigured it to start adding in my daily del.icio.us posts again. Handy tool, that Feedburner.

Ok, so here's the deal, my laptop (supplied by my employer) is kaput. The BIOS started report SMART errors about a month ago, but I didn't worry about it too much. I never got any errors while using it, so I just backed everything up and figured eventually I'd get them to send me a new drive.

But then it got worse: the LCD started going crazy. It would randomly fade to a sort of greenish, off-white color. I could usually get it back to normal by moving the lid around a bit. It was acting like the connections were going bad in the hinge, but it just kept getting worse and worse. I was really afraid that the cable would just give up completely at some point. Yesterday, it got to where I couldn't reliably work on it at all.

So its about to head off back to Austin, likely never to return. Hopefully I'll get a replacement soon, but probably not for a couple weeks at the soonest. Instead I'm tied to my desktop now.

Mind you, my desktop is one hell of a machine (again, its worked-supplied). But I had grown into the habit of moving around to various positions around the house to do my work. My favorite spot was sitting in the recliner in the living room. It was a lot easier on my back.

See, I've got a bad back. I've had issues since I was in high school, roughly, on account of my bad posture, but it all got much worse when I was in a bad accident in my mid-twenties. It's usually not a big deal, but something I did about a week or so ago messed it up again pretty badly. It feels approximately like a mild pinched nerve. Anyone who has ever had a pinched nerve in their back will know that even a "mild" one is not fun.

So I'll be limiting my time in front of the computer to strictly what is necessary to get my work done and the occasional checking of email. Of course, maybe it will mean I'll be more focused when I am sitting here. We'll see.

I figured this was as good of an excuse as any to finally update this blog. Ever since I set up my del.icio.us posts, it seems as though the automated portions of the blog are overtaking any semblance of human presence around here. I've got to make sure that isn't the case, of course!

So, I've got more to say, but I'll save it for tomorrow's post. Yes, there will be a post tomorrow. You can count on it.

So, just a quick update to let anyone who cares know I finally dumped Typo and moved over to Mephisto. I'm using Mephisto to manage some other sites, so it just seemed to make sense to stick to one system. Nothing much else to say except that I'm sure most any links pointing here are probably now broken. Oh well, such is life. Get on with it...

I can't believe I just used that word... well, I'm back. Some shifting of hosts and wrestling with ruby, rails, typo and some missing ruby gems on the new host, and here I am again. I've also now got Drivel running, so adding posts should be a little smoother. And smoother means more frequent, right? Well, we'll see about that.

One of these days I'm actually going to redo the design for this blog. That and I'll actually post something new and interesting (well, new at least). I promise. One day.

Well, I haven't written anything here in a while. It's pretty sad actually. Of course, I've had a lot of thoughts on the election and the various responses that have been written about it since then, but I decided to keep it all to myself and those lucky few who get to live with me on a daily basis (the wife and dogs, of course). The other big thing that's kept me away is the new (maybe renewed would be better) job. I started working for Triactive on the 25th of October. Anyone who has known me for a while or who bothers to read my resume will see that I worked for Triactive way back in time. Well, I saw a job posting that didn't look too far off my needs and I sent in my resume. Much to everyone's surprise, they decided to hire me back! Anyway, it's been keeping me busy and maybe I'll have more to say about it soon, but so far it's been great. I've got a decent laptop, my own window office and I'm only a couple of miles from my house. I can't complain at all. In other news, you can expect some downtime around here. I've recently signed up for the wonderful TextDrive hosting service and will soon be moving this website off of the current colocated server that I've been maintaining along with some friends for some time now (wow, it's been years now). I don't know how long it will take to migrate things and while in the real world I would try and make sure there was no noticable lapse of service, this is my own private little world here and it runs on my schedule, so deal with it.

;~)

I'll be back soon, if I can help it!

I guess sometimes in an effort to make things more flexible, they just get more complicated. A few months back I set up a couple of additional blogs so that I could seperate out my more technical content and so that I could post simple links. Unfortunately, I'm not so consistent with the posting. So one barely maintained blog turned into three empty voids. A couple of days ago I resolved to fix this issue. I exported all the content from the technical blog and imported them into this blog with a new category: technical. In addition, I decided the link blog was pretty much useless and was simply someplace else to store bookmarks (not taking the place of or duplicating, just another outlet for more of them) -- so I deleted it. So, now there's a bunch of old posts that didn't exist before. Enjoy.

So, the whole many-shades-of-gray thing was getting to be just a bit much. I also wanted a little bit more of a refined feel here, so I've done a bit of tweaking to the stylesheet. Also, I've added/modified a few things over in the sidebar. First, the archives are now all rolled up into a selectbox. You can select a month/year combination to view that particular archive. Also, I've added a feature that pulls in a list of recent links I've added to my link blog. I haven't really spent much time figuring out the best way to maintain this or a good design for it or anything, but it'll give you a reasonable view into the things I've been checking out lately.

I've been thinking lately about how I really should maybe start posting more about the work and project related stuff that I've been doing, but it's become clear to me that the small handful of people who actually read this site tend more towards the friends and family category, so in order to avoid boring the living bejezus out you, I've decided to just go ahead and start a second blog. This one's all techie, all the time. You can find it over here, if you're really interested, though you might also soon see links to the new posts over in that sidebar thing on the right. Who knows when I'll get around to implementing that, though.

Why is it that I can create trackback's to other sites just fine (Parentetx.com), but for some reason, even though I have everything enabled, they don't work on my site. Anyone? Everytime we try to do it, first, the URL points to lockney.net not opposable-thumbs.net, which is probably ok, since MT is actually hosted on the former and the latter is just a DNS alias anyway. But in addition, the URL that it gives doesn't seem to ever work. What the....

I created a TypePad site to test out it's features: geekpunk. First on the list of things to test is Trackbacks of course!

Just noticed how horrendous my comments pages looked. I made a quick pass at fixing them, but they still need a lot of work. I guess I left a lot of things hanging when I redesigned this site. I guess I need to learn from my mistakes and be a little more thorough in the future. Oh well, things are holding together ok for now, but this will demand some attention soon. Be on the lookout for more to come soon. Well, soon as I find some free time anyway -- who knows how many years that might be.

Just a quick test to see how these trackback thingys work. Please ignore this unless you're hopelessly geeky and are into this whole blogging thing. The link: TrackBack Development

I've been doing some thinking lately about the work that I've been doing and plan to do outside of my primary job. I was recently talking to a friend about doing some work for his company as an independent consultant. It occured to me that I don't have much in the way of a professional face to present to him or his employers even though I have a background in this sort of work. As fate would have it, a number of months back I registered an additional domain for this site: opposable-thumbs.net. The original plan was that it would simply be an alias for lockney.net, but it occured to me that I could use this distinction to seperate out my blog site from my professional site quite easily. So today I made a few subtle changes. It won't be obvious to most of you, but when you link to lockney.net you will be redirected to opposable-thumbs.net. The intention is to create a new site that will live at lockney.net which will include work related information, while opposable-thumbs.net will be dedicated to content of a personal nature. Stay tuned for more info.

So last week I was sitting around, lurking on #joiito when someone asked if anyone else on the channel was a MoveableType Perl wizard. Having programmed in Perl on and off for the past 6 years or so, I wouldn't call myself a guru or anything, but I have poked around in the MoveableType innards (though I hadn't actually implemented anything). So I responded. What he was asking for was a plugin that would allow people to vote on blog entries. He showed me an example of what he wanted, but, sadly, I didn't save it. However, based on that input and the basic direction to make it rather configurable, I started diving in. My first concern was where to store the data. As it turns out, starting with MT 2.6, there's a mechanism that allows a plugin to store arbitrary data using Perl's Storable module. The real issue, it occured to me, was how to get readers responses back into the system. Granted, I could just write a plain old CGI script to handle this, but it needed to be MT aware. Again, it turns out that, though this is reaching into the seemingly arcane aspects of MT plugin development, someone (Ben Trott I suspect) had the foresight to build MT in such a way as to make this rather straightforward. And they documented it well, too!! So here I present to you, the latest