Beginning Work On The New Blog Engine

Today I'm starting to work on the new blog engine. A friend of mine has some server hosting he's letting me use in exchange for helping him develop a website for his recording studio. I'm planning on developing the same general blog engine for both his site and mine and then tailoring each to our specific needs. Today has been the first day I've had time to start working on it.

Unfortunately, his hosting provider doesn't support Python as a web programming language, which is really too bad because its syntax is incredibly easy to use and its quite a fast, powerful language and is great for developing things quickly. So it looks like I'm going to have to jump back into PHP, in which I really haven't dabbled for some four or five years. LOTS has changed on the web since then. Anyway, I'm older and wiser now with lots more experience in writing "good code". PHP was my first language and I had no concept of proper code-writing and I just wrote what I could to make things work any way possible. This meant ugly code (hard to understand, difficult to modify, etc), LOTS of repetition, and slow execution. We'll see how I fare this time around.

Anyway, so far I've started my first script for reading-in existing posts from an RSS feed. Yesterday I installed an Apache server on my netbook and got everything running well by all appearances. I hope to get a little development time in every weekend, but with this being my last semester in my Electrical Engineering Technology major, I'm quite busy.

Time will tell.

PS: Ubuntu 11.04 is shaping up niiiiiiiicely. Can't wait for April. :]

How should I title this blog post about how I spent the last 3 weeks of my life?

"My 'forget everything I've learned in class because the class is over' policy has officially come back to bite me in the ass."

or

"Senior Design can DIAF"

?

Activity Journal

Activity Journal is a fun application available for free from the Ubuntu Software Center. It's a graphical user interface that presents data collected from Zeitgeist and allows the user to look at his or her work history. There are several different views for presenting the data including a useful timeline mode. There's a bar graph on the bottom for a quick presentation of your most productive days. It's great for evaluating productivity or providing one with an alibi. It's also just plain fun.

Software Center and App Store

The Internets are buzzing with news of Apple's revolutionary new PC App Store, which delivers applications to its Mac line of PCs. Except, erm, it's not that revolutionary. Ubuntu has long had its own Software Center.

Ubuntu's Software Center (henceforth USC) is a great concept--a single place from which to download all of your apps with a graphical user interface (GUI), rather than the "sudo apt-get" terminal code that I can never seem to get to work correctly (despite copying and pasting instructions from the website). Moreover, the USC theoretically keeps track of software on your computer  so you can easily uninstall software you don't want or don't use. You can even add third party software sources and browse their apps through the center.

It's Elementary

So my desktop PC's fan went out... It served me well for four years now. I'm buying a replacement off a friend for a few bucks tomorrow so that should be back in action soon. In the meanwhile, I've spent a lot of time researching a lot of great Ubuntu customizations. Here's a list of my favorite apps: