I've started posting my daily personal thoughts to my own website at http://suso.suso.org/. You can view previous thought and vote on whether you agree with me or not. I didn't want to create a forum for discussion because I think that forums just get out of control eventually anyways. Or aren't used enough to be useful.

Development

Over the past month I've needed to seriously revamp the way I handle accounts at suso.org and as a result have been rewriting the database and applications that I use to be more flexible, this has included learning about database normalizing and reading some books. So I've been out of the Open Source software loop for a bit. I may release all of this stuff as a solution for others to start their own managed multi-purpose servers. e-mail me if you are interested.

I moved my new personal website into place at http://suso.suso.org/. I think it's pretty snazy. Drop me a line and let me know what you think. Next I need to add more content and hook it up to a database for web based management of information.

Programming stuff

Haven't really been working on any open source software lately. Instead I have been beating the bugs out of my suso.org user management scripts so that I don't burn out on handling user account requests.

Life lesson #10,013: Chances are, your 12 year old self and 25 year old self are not really the same person. ;-)

All went quite well. About 22 people showed up initially and I think 30 people in all because some came in after the break. Only 2 people left after the break, which is good. I thought that I did a good job of covering the information without too many Umms or pauses or getting lost. There were some good questions from the audience and I feel like I helped some people either resolve their problems, guide them to the right place or discourage them from using FrontPage at all. As a viable alternative, I suggested that everyone wait for WebDAV to mature. I think that I'm going to try to work up another presentation to do at ApacheCon Europe in Dublin, Ireland.

Numeric Utilities

During some free time at ApacheCon and while on the plane I wrote the majority of code for the initial versions of numsum, numgrep and numavg. From testing them so far I think they work pretty well and will be well recieved. I'll have to submit them to CVS on sourceforge pretty soon so others can take a look.

Tonight I started doing actual practice run throughs of my presentation. I setup a video camera for a short while in Kiva's conference room so that I could look at what I recorded and critique myself a bit. It's working out pretty well so far. I have a "reheasal presentation" in front of some Kiva employees this Wednesday evening at 6:30pm in the same conference room. Hopefully I'll be ready to go by then. That way I can make some revisions based on their feedback. The actual ApacheCon presentation is on April 5th at 9am.

AeroMail

I've had to halt my development on the modifications I made to AeroMail because of my involvement with ApacheCon. But a guy contacted me who was interested in having me help with a spin off project called BlueFox. Appearently BlueFox is a more official project to implement the features that I added to AeroMail into a full fledged web-mail solution. The main guy who started it says that he isn't so much of a coder as he is an organizer. Here is the SourceForge page for BlueFox.

Numeric Utilities

For a long time I've always thought that there were certain words missing from our beloved Unix language. A few times I'll come across situations where I want to pipe the output of a command from the shell and run it trhough a program that will give me the sum of all the numbers on stdin. As a solution to this problem, I've always ended up writing a sort perl routine on the command line. Last week, I wrote a short script to do this for me. Now I've created a project placeholder page for what are going to by the Numeric Utilities. Basically they will be a numeric version of the GNU textutils. If anyone is interested in helping me in this endevor, you are more than welcome to send me an e-mail and let me know. I'll probably create an advogato page for it too as soon as an initial version is released.

[I think a lot of us can relate to this guy.]