Articles by admin

Fortune magazine got a “tech guru” to switch to an iMac for an article on the readiness of Macs for the small business world. The resulting article by Jonathan Blum lends some serious doubts to his guru status…

Macs are apparently not ready for the business world because:

• He didn’t like the packaging the iMac came in.
• He couldn’t find the on/off button.
• He hasn’t heard of a USB hub, nor a Firewire drive.
• He uses some odd Ethernet-via-USB device instead of the built-in Ethernet ports on pretty much every Mac or PC built in this millennium.
• He blames the Mac for Citrix’s software sucking on a Mac.
• He couldn’t turn off Spaces, nor figure out the very “complex keyboard commands” (pressing F8).
• He got confused by the two-button Mighty Mouse because there’s not a visible line between the buttons. I suppose this would indeed be challenging for someone who loses the on/off button, but he could always plug his PC’s mouse in.
• He didn’t like the graphical interface to Time Machine.

Not a single critique in the article is widely relevant to the business world. Most of them are bullshit criticisms, as well. Part of my work duties include taking helpdesk calls and tickets, and even our most challenged users manage to remember where the on/off button is after the first time.

Fortune, it’s time to get a new tech guru. Macs are by no means the right choice for all small businesses. Got mission-critical Windows-only software? That’s fine, and perfectly understandable. If your reasons for not considering a Mac include the packaging and the location of the on/off button, though, your goal for the next few months should be to figure out how to remove your head from your asshole.

After brief experimentation with other themes, I’m back to Tarski. Somehow, none of the themes out there (with the possible exception of K2) make it as easy to customise, tweak, configure, etc. as our little (heh - 6,300 lines of code in 70 files) WordPress theme.

Much of this is undoubtedly due to Ben’s relentless dedication to good code and good design, but there must be more to it. Competency is rare, but there seems to be a mindset at work here that’s even more rare.

In my work at the D&C, I’ve been playing a lot with Drupal. It seems like a basic CMS at first - post a news item, upload an image, what-have-you - but if you’re one of the lucky ones, you discover the API.

With Drupal’s API, you can change just about anything about the way the site looks and functions. And here’s the key - all without editing the core code. Want to add a field to the login form? No need to edit the Drupal code - you can write your own module that’ll use Drupal’s API to add it.

Compare this to, say, phpBB, which promotes changes to core code as the main method of making hacks (to the point where I’ve seen the developers actively bash suggestions of a hook system). There are some nifty hacks for it, to be sure, but editing core code has huge problems - you either can’t upgrade (security holes bedamned) or you lose all your hacks every few weeks. You’re screwed.

The tremendously popular Joomla CMS is possibly the best prominent example of these failings. We considered it initially for The Loop, but it was far too limiting. Want an article to be placed in more than one category? No-can-do - not without replacing the core content module entirely!!! Add in the pay-to-play and poorly coded nature of most of these extensions and it becomes an unusable nightmare for anything beyond a site that functions almost exactly as the original coders intended.

There’s the key, I think. Tarski and Drupal are both designed to be used in ways the original coders might never have anticipated. Tarski can be tweaked - without touching the core code - to look entirely different than the stock install. Drupal could be turned into something so distant from it’s original use as a web FTP client - again, without touching the core code.

This is the way software for the web should be made. With proper design, it’s possible to make systems that are extraordinary powerful without sacrificing the security, new features, and more that come with keeping up-to-date core code.

Everyone, please welcome Jen back to the world of blogging. She’s back with a new blog, new URL, and new job to talk about.

This is awesome…

Popular science (specifically, evolution) blogger PZ Myers got banned from the screening of a Creationist movie titled, appropriately enough, Expelled. The kicker? Richard Dawkins - the most prominent voice for atheism in the world, probably - got in without anyone noticing.

Drupal makes a great web application framework, even if you bypass the node module entirely. User management, template system, menus, loads of modules, etc. - all ready if I need ‘em.

I’m definitely liking the improvements in Drupal 6.0.

Massive congratulations to Corsix for winning one of the grand prizes - a trip to Google - in the GHOP project for his work on Drupal!

It’s very cool to have someone I know participating, let alone winning.

My new Flickr Digest plugin is finished and installed. Now to find out if it picks up today’s upload - it should post sometime after midnight tonight.

I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed…

The perils of running WordPress off the Subversion trunk: someone switched the WordPress get_avatar() function to use a different order than the (also Subversioned) Prologue theme’s get_avatar() function’s order. Ugly!

I’m idly working on a Flickr digest WordPress plugin. Eventually this’ll be a lifestream sort of thing.

After a long hiatus, ceejayoz.com is back. Please pardon the dust while I remodel.