jmac.org updates (2000)

December 30, 2000

Tried yet again at making an about-me page, though this time I worked with an ostensible goal higher than plain egocentrism, so I bet this one will stick around. Furthermore, in a fit of novelty, I used the opportunity to make it my first-ever XHTML-valid webpage. Nice. (Though I did have to settle for Transitional, rather than Strict, XHTML -- the latter didn't like my one image's "align" attribute, and I was too lazy to learn at that moment how I was supposed to do the equivalent thing in the strictest terms.)

December 28, 2000

Hurray, I almost pulled off my machine's move correctly! Almost, because I once again forgot that I have 'jmac.org' registered as both a domain and a host, which makes changing the former harder than merely adjusting the aim on its nameservers, since the latter has an IP explicitly tied to it, and mutual stumbling-over occurs. So my domain was screwed up for the third time this year, but this time for only about a day. Lesson learned: Don't do that. I'm gonna change the host's name to ns.jmac.org or something.

Spent the holidays back in Maine, where, visiting friends, I started to playtest a board game I am designing. The rules remain far from stable; I hope to see them solidify with more testing this month.

December 20, 2000

Well, that sucked. jmac.org fell off the Internet for almost three weeks when my server machine, still in Maine, went down and stayed down, and I wasn't able to immediately tend to it because I had to skip town for a week. Thanks to the kindess of friends (spurred by the careful application of ORA book bribes among them), the problem was traced to an improperly grounded motherboard: my bad, since I originally cobbled the box together last year.

Happily, I just got set up with DSL in my Somerville, MA apartment, allowing me to bring the machine back home with me when I return from my northward holiday trip, and after what I hope will be a much shorter bit of downtime, I'll once again have my domain back under my local control.

Lessons learned:

• If you are clumsy with hardware, don't try to build a computer without a clueful friend's sanity check on your work.
• Plan for what to do when a remotely-located server goes down. This should be self-evident, but I'm a hacker, not a sysadmin; sometimes I'm afraid I learn responsibility only when it comes along and kicks me in the face. Maybe I'll get better at it now.

Well, I've done stuff in the meantime. I attended an XML conference, for example.

November 19, 2000

Made my very first XML page, an RSS version of the Mac open source catalog's recent uploads page. The site has since gotten itself picked up by Meerkat, my Internet what's-new page of choice, so that's pretty neat.

Now that I'm no longer with MINT, I can't really keep my open-source software lying around on their servers anymore, so I have moved development of two of my Perl module projects to SourceForge: DBIx::Schema, which until now had its homepage on jmac.org, and the as-yet-unreleased Business::Cart, which so far hasn't been seen outside of MINT's servers. While I find Schema generally useful and plan on continuing to develop it, Cart deals with stuff I no longer have much personal involvement with, so I'm hoping that the rest of the world will find it useful. I wonder what will happen next.

Allow me this paragraph to thank Adelphia, MINT's parent company, for their surprising and wonderful decision to give the programming team I was with the go-ahead to open up all our projects. Yay, Adelphia.

October 24, 2000

jmac.org was mostly down over the weekend while I moved and upgraded undef, my main server. It now has three times as much RAM and 26 times as much hard disk space as it used to. Pretty good! As for moving, it now shares a minihub with mikomi.org's server at a friend's apartment, where it will live until I can get DSL at my new apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts.

I move myself so far away from Maine (which has been my home for almost 10 years) so that I can start a new job with a really cool company. I have learned and grown much under my current employers, but it's time for me to move on. How excited I am. Whee, I say!

I have started to categorize and becaption some of the pictures I've been taking with the digital camera I bought a few months ago. You may enjoy an album of images from my July California trip.

August 13, 2000

I mushed all my game-related information and links onto one page, somewhat reducing the clutter on the site's front door, and providing me with a good spot to include links to games that my friends and associates have made around the Web.

August 10, 2000

I discovered, to my delighted surprise, that the latest Wunderland Weekly News linked to my heretofore secret Martian Chess: The Computer Game page, about a project I've been kicking around since the year started. Unlike many of my other projects, it's actually usable. Sort of.

July 30, 2000

The Con was beautiful, but I have been too lazy to finish my report yet. This has been excaberated by the fact that an issue of The Perl Journal I picked up there inspired me to write my own entry into that magazine's Second Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest.

July 14, 2000

In preparation for my visit to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, I designed a business card for myself and this site, and had a box of 'em printed. I think they look real swell.

June 20, 2000

Thinking out loud about a free Internet book database.

June 11, 2000

Trying a second time with my media journal. I stopped adding titles to my first journal soon after I launched it last December, because the very thought of editing and maintaining collections of static HTML files is just too much for me to bear these days. This weekend, I was able to apply the same tricks I used with the Mac site to revitalize the media site in a matter of hours. Pretty good.

May 27, 2000

At long last, completed the beta of the new, more interactive Mac OS Open Source catalog, and put it online. I am keeping the old page online for now as well, but will phase it out once I am confident that the new site works well.

Snipped off last year's portion of this update log and put it on its own page.

May 10, 2000

Finished another book review, this time of Mastering Algorithms with Perl.

April 22, 2000

Put up a support page for DBIx::Schema, a Perl module I spent much of my March work-time developing, and which I have just uploaded to my brand new CPAN account. It's now sitting in the main modules directories, under "DBIx". Yay!

April 16, 2000

Very very busy on big projects, still. I made a little page about my office, anyway. Also, a Bob-A-Loop page.

February 20, 2000

I put up yet another Disbroken while you weren't looking, about a month ago. Sometime more recently than that I came to the conclusion that trying to wrap myself around any arbitrary schedule for a repeating project like a comic strip is sadly, a fruitless exercise, since I am too easily distracted by other brilliant ideas that come along, and weeks may pass before I come up for a breath of air. Most recently this has taken the form of some especially nerdy projects, so at least I have taken the time to start documenting their development on my brand-new projects page.

So, Disbroken will continue being a whenever-I-feel-like-it strip, and so long as I keep thinking up new ways to waste my time, the times I feel like it shall remain distant. Such is me.

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