I now have a basic

I now have a basic commenting system that people beside myself can post to. Also my fellow bloggers can easily turn it for their own blogs by just dropping a new tag into their blogger templates. You want to know what the hardest part was, the piece that displays things like 12 Comments or Post Comment. I ended up jumping into Cocoon’s XSP stuff and wrote a couple Java one-liners. Now that everything is over I need to go through some re-factoring and tighten it up and simplify it. Also I need to wipe out the two perl scripts that I hacked together for saving comments.

Alright, I have a very

Alright, I have a very basic commenting system put together. It’s mostly XML/XSLT files but I have one CGI script which does the actual saving of the comments. I’m not happy with the fact that I had to throw together a perl script to do it. I wanted to have the server side process the forms with Java either in the form of servlets, or preferably XSP but I have been daunted by the various XML parsers for Java. Well that’s not entirely true, I wanted something smaller than a full blown DOM implementation and that worked on Java 1.1 which is apparently a pretty tall order.

I've purchased a few CDs

I’ve purchased a few CDs in the past month or so: Built to Spill, a Silver Mt. Zion, Fila Brazillia, Batman Beyond Soundtrack, and Tortoise. The Fila Brazillia CD “Anotherlatenight” has Marvin Gaye’s song “T Plays It Cool” and it is so unbelievably good. On the CD it mixes right into Brian Eno’s “Regiment” perfectly. I can’t believe 27 years of my life went by without me hearing this Marvin Gaye song. It’s an instrumental with a funk sound and a somewhat subdued rhythm section. Marvin Gaye was decades ahead of his time. I still have no great love for his popular stuff like “What’s Going On”, “Lets Get It On” or “Sexual Healing” although I do like the extended version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Another highlight off the Fila CD is Mr. Scruff’s song “Get a Move On.”

I just watched Woody Allen's

I just watched Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors. I can’t think of a more bleak or depressing film at the moment. I’ve seen my share of bleak films in movies like Straw Dogs, Requiem for a Dream or The Deer Hunter. However, I must say that none of those left me as empty and angry with an uncaring universe as Crimes and Misdemeanors. As the title suggests it’s drawing on Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. In the movie Judah (Martin Landau) might as well have been called Raskolnikov as he too comes from the Nietzschean Superman theory of morality. However I think the thing that bothers me the most is the cruelty the Cliff (Woody Allen) and Professor Levy characters suffer through. I can’t imagine that my desires to lead an honest and virtuous life would be punished so thoroughly.

It's heeeeerreeee. I've been hit

It’s heeeeerreeee.

I’ve been hit by the coding mania. I’ve been waiting for this to hit me again for quite some time. It’s this awesome feeling where I don’t have to sleep and I can be in front of the computer for hours, days even. It’s got its weird side effects. I pace in the shower. I’ve chewed my finger nails down to nubs. That’s okay though. It’s a great feeling. I caught it last night when I wrote the Blogmailer program. I don’t like the way the code looks though so I really want to rewrite it and make it pretty, especially some of the perl regexs I’m using. Right now it needs a lot more exception handling put in. That’s definitely not one of perl’s strongpoints, and I’m not up to speed on perl’s more esoteric functionality.

This is the first real

This is the first real test of blogmailer. Right now it should handle processing multi-paragraph emails into the proper number of

..

I’m not quite sure how to handle the blogid, username and password processing things. I’m thinking that I will put some sort of which it parses out. Maybe the blogid should be fixed with the appkey and you only have to put the username and password in the email. I wonder if I should also put in the auto publish thing?

Okay, this is the very

Okay, this is the very first test of blogmailer from an actual mail client. Everything before this has just been me reading a fake email from stdin. I really hope that this works.

I should probably delete this blog after it posts.

This is the first real

This is the first real test of blogmailer. Right now it should handle processing multi-paragraph emails into the proper number of

..

I’m not quite sure how to handle the blogid, username and password processing things. I’m thinking that I will put some sort of username=dsaint thing at the beginning of the email which it parses out. Maybe the blogid should be fixed with the appkey and you only have to put the username and password in the email. I wonder if I should also put in the auto publish thing?

I've been too busy to

I’ve been too busy to sit and contemplate all the events going on around me. Maybe that’s a good thing as I tend to dwell on the negative. In fact, I’m not just busy, my time seems to vanish into some vortex everytime I blink. As in: Blink. I’m awake. Blink. It’s lunchtime. Blink. It’s dinner. Blink. It’s time to sleep. These days just woosh by. In between blinks Mark, Dave and I went to the new Apple Store in Plano. If I had money I could see myself easily laying out cash for all the techno goodies they’ve got inside.

This weekend I was in

This weekend I was in Austin with Thon and Dave. A good time was had for all. Despite being the world capital of slack I took all kinds of Austin’s great sites and foods in. We stayed at a house Meredith was house sitting. Here are the highlights of my 40 hours in Austin: Waterloo Records (Picked up a silver mt. zion, Built to Spill and Tortoise. Rock on!). Cactus Club. Spider House. Town Lake. Las Monitas. Barton Springs (Year round 68 degree water. Brrrrr!). Mangias (Stuffed crust whole wheat pizza with spinach, feta and other spices. YUM!). Club Deville. Paramount theater (Raising Arizona. Woohoo!). Mi Madre. Headed out of town at 8am. We got into Dallas at about 11:30am and I was back on the road by noon as I began the long trek back to Huntsville.