Devauld.ca

As I mentioned previously, I've been tinkering under the hood of my Blog. Odds are you haven't seen that post, or this one, as I haven't updated the DNS entries that will have http://devauld.ca point to this shiney new site. I'm holding out on a couple people who I manage their mail for, so that I won't be putting them out into the cold.

First and foremost, this page is now powered by Typo instead of the homebrewed php, I had previously. I no longer host my own photography, because Flickr does a much nicer job of it. If you want to look at my photos, you can click on the snazzy little badge to the left. I love Flickr's interface so much that I modified the default Typo so that it would do a flickerish collection of my Tags, scaling the ones I post into often larger, and the ones that don't get a whole lot of love, smaller. There is also a neat live search (top of the nav bar), so you can search through the comments and posts for some words, and it's all rolled up with AJAX so you don't even have to reload the page. The comment engine has been changed so you don't need to add an e-mail address or website; simply because nobody did anyway.

You may have noticed that I love the colour green, and I stuck with a green based theme. Typo's themes are really easy to manage, although the CSS differences between IE and Firefox did bite me a couple times. The modifications to Typo were really easy too, now that I have a better understanding of how Ruby on Rails works.

Now it is time for the bad news. I started porting over all of the old content, and I realized it was going to be a swack load of work. Since the pictures are embedded in my posts, and they are now on Flickr, I would have had to look each one of the pictures for the 130 some odd posts I have photos attached to and change them. On top of that, the insertion into the new database, mangled the id's so the comments were appearing on the wrong posts. In the end, I just ended up nuking everything that was causing a problem. I'm not interesting enough for people to go that far back into my history, so I didn't think I was losing anything.

I just got back from the Canada on Rails conference, and I was quite impressed. The whole thing could have been a bit more condensed, with two streams over a single day, but in the end, I learned a great deal.

I was so keen to try all the new stuff out, I managed to hijack Jerry's laptop for a few moments on the flight home to poke around a bit, to finish what I learned.

On the Thursday night of the conference a great deal of the attendees went out for Churrascaria which is always a meat lover's good time. You could tell the geek factor was very high, as most of the conversation revolved around technologies, techniques, working problems and a plethora of other geeky news.

My problem is now: I'm armed with this great view of the world, and how software should be written, but I have to go back to the enterprise where it's all about the bottom line. I'm going to fling myself against the wall until I can no longer take it, but hopefully by then we'll have a little Rails in our system.

Well, it has been forever since I've uplifted this site. I originally edited HTML by hand on wesdevauld.com. Then I moved to a perl based CGI script that would read out of a flat file that I kept on the server. Version 3 entailed a move to php and using a mysql database, that should have had more backups than it did.

Now, it is time for the next iteration. I was previously wrapped up in being in control of all of my net based content. I wanted to run my own server, hatching e-mails, providing web pages, and protecting myself from whatever the haxx0rs wanted to put onto my machine. But now, that is all changed.

I sat infront of my server and typed in the required emerge -up world to see what was required to bring myself up to date. I was astonished to see that I required over 100 individual packages to be upgraded to keep up to date. In that instant, I decided that I would quit being the greedy hoarding capitalist I was, and trust the internet to hold onto my possessions.

I've moved to a different host to ensure that my plethora of web sites are available all the time. I've moved away from maintaining a webserver when there are others that do it so much better. Instead of piling up byte upon byte of picture data, I've decided to let flickr deal with the details.

After I installed Typo, I spent a good deal of time bogging down my computer uploading the 450+ photos to flickr. I didn't quite get it right the first time, so I ended up killing my computer and its connection a couple times.

I'm down to the nitty gritty now, and I need to push over my old entries, and the pictures associated with them, as well as a couple comments, and I'm all finished.

I feel half cheap, and half proud, considering the last two weeks of my PhotoFriday entries were from the same set of photos.

Back from my days of shooting film, and depending on London Drugs to scan them for me.

This past week, I've been mentoring the new addition to our team at work. In itself, that is a major boost to the old self-esteam being that I'm the most junior member, and I've been selected to bring up the new guy.

My head really inflated today, however; when I learned what my 'apprentice' (for lack of a better noun) thought of me thus far. He has been really happy with what's he's seen, and has found me to be a 'real go getter', and was very happy to have been partnered with me.

The inflation went over the top when, today, we were troubleshooting an issue with the recent M$FT 'change' and we had to recruit some help outside our team. Being the technology savvy company that we are, we use the Microsoft Network to avoid having to walk down the hall. As the trainee looked over my shoulder, he noticed the Evil Scientist that Mark and I took. Somehow, he managed to mistake me for Bruce Campbell, and followed by saying how good of an actor that gentleman was. (Army of Darkness?)

I can't say I've never been compared to a celebrity before, but I have to admit that along with Jim Carrey, and Matt Dillon the comparisons are rather nice.