January 2007 Archives

I started my third (and likely last) weblog sometime around January of 2006 (I almost said earlier this year... but it's 2007 already) and because it was going to be more of an experiment in writing (i.e. seeing if I would perhaps consistently write about things that I felt really didn't fit the purpose of this or my other weblog), I figured I'd also see if I wanted to move to another/different weblog software system. I had already had some experiences with Drupal and it left me with a bad, bad taste in my mouth. It came down to the fact that there was no coherent way of doing anything if you were coming to Drupal from the perspective of MovableType. I say this because it is possible that my perception of how poorly Drupal functioned had to do with my previous experiences with CMS (content management systems) like MovableType. Rather than having a somewhat coherent set of documentation to describe how the system is intended to function, one had to rely upon user/developer provided documentation. Usually, said documentation was lacking in function - i.e. a technical document should have a purpose and how section, at the very least, and consistency among different sections. Drupal's documentation didn't. For example, the term taxonomy was used to describe a user authentication and rights system. Taxonomy? Out of what orifice was that term removed? (According to OS X's built in dictionary, taxonomy means: the branch of science concerned with classification, esp. of organisms; systematics. In my head, this relates poorly to authorization and user rights.) Perhaps this is a poor example. I am trying to give Drupal the benefit of the doubt and it may be that many people will find it a usable and reliable CMS. I didn't, however, and that is the point of the above comments. I found the documentation confusing and incoherent when viewed as a whole. This is not to say the software itself was bad, but my opinion is that software developers need to spend as much time, if not more, writing an explanation of their code as they do coding.
So, with that experience in mind, I looked at the other alternative: WordPress. Everyone seemed to be using it. Two of the bloggers in my top ten moved to WordPress sometime in the year prior to me testing it; Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine fame and Erik Barzeski of NSlog();. There had been general rumblings in the MovableType community regarding two issues: licensing and comment/trackback spam. SixApart had made the move years ago to monetize on the MovableType fame (and rightly so, in my opinion), and in the process irritated many (I'll never forget when they first changed the licensing terms and started [gasp] charging for the usage of MoveableType under certain conditions - especially where MovableType was being used in a commercial environment). I think the worst thing, though, they did, was let issues with comment/trackback spam languish. I know Jay Allen did a lot of work early on to deal with comment spam. This was before he was actually hired by SixApart. I stopped following his weblog after that (frankly, I don't remember why). I think I stopped reading weblogs for some time and his was one that I forgot to pick up again. The problem had gotten pretty big, though, and WordPress had seemed* to have made serious inroads in this area.
One other area of contention - one that I think most hobby users never cared about - was the load that MovableType put on a server as pages were re-indexed and as the site was essentially rebuilt every time a new post was made. This has never been something I really cared about. Most, if not all, of my personal web related stuff is on servers that I either own directly or control and manage. If I needed more horsepower to drive my own drivel, then I had yet another excuse to buy more hardware. Aaron has told me (I consider him a professional in the area of commercial weblogging), though, there are ways around this problem. Either way, it was one of the complaints, and because it was part of my decision to move and try another system, I'm writing it here.
So, with It's you, not me..., I made the jump to WordPress. What a mistake. Why? Simple (for me): MovableType, by default, creates real pages whereas WordPress's default mode (I'm not sure if there are other ways of doing this) is to create pages dynamically. For example, if I set WordPress to create daily and individual indexes of all my posts, you couldn't simply go to the directory in which WordPress resided and find those pages. I learned this the hard way when I couldn't figure out why WordPress wasn't publishing two posts I had just made (and yet I had no errors). After some head scratching, I finally realized the date/time stamp was wrong on my machine (two plus hours behind the real time) and because the posts were made at ca. 18:00 and the server's time was at 15:47, WordPress didn't show those posts until the server showed 18:00. At the same time, I realized that although I had set up WordPress to create individual and daily index pages, they weren't "real" - in the sense there weren't any files sitting there to be had in case the CMS died.
The last nail in the coffin for WordPress was something I wanted on a whim: export all of the content to MovableType. I didn't think this was that big of a deal since it seemed that exporting MovableType content to any CMS I had come across had already been developed. No deal. There is a plugin out there called WordPressExport, but I was never able to get it to work correctly (and believe me, I tried) and it is really too crude to really term as a semi-featured export tool.
This bothered me, not because I wanted to move to MovableType at that point in time, but because I simply wanted to make sure I had a backup of what I had written in a form that could be used in another popular CMS.
As I had experienced with Drupal, I also found the documentation for WordPress to be relatively inconsistent. When I had questions, many people (and Google) pointed me to the forums. I have a problem with this. For the very reason why the first source I hit for information on a given tool in OpenBSD are the man pages or the FAQ, I want the same thing for a CMS into which I'm pouring tons of energy and placing trust to have the same resource. I want an authoritative source for answers to basic questions. Forums and HOWTO's are far from this. (As a perfect example, look at the HOWTO I translated years back for qmail. I haven't updated that information in well over a year. I do have a disclaimer at the top of the page, but the information is still out of date.)
Sure, I believe in the power of user generated and open source software. At the same time, I believe that, for my purposes, commercially written software can be better suited to my needs. In this case, MovableType won out for two reasons: documentation and consistency. I simply like MovableType's tag system and don't mind the issues with rebuilding. I imagine there are many others, if they are honest with themselves, who will come around as I did. Two weeks ago, I spent two hours re-posting all of the content I had generated in WordPress over to MovableType at iynm.net. It has turned out to be well worth the effort. Within no time, I had a Flickr plugin installed and working and no longer have problems posting images inline.
MovableType is far from perfect. I still have issues with comment/trackback spam, but thanks to a [laugh] plugin originally for WordPress (for MovableType: MT-Akismet), that issue is largely resolved. I'm curious to see what other WordPress users will do. I already hear (and saw firsthand) about problems with sites requiring load-balancing and/or to be distributed across multiple servers. This is something I have no clue how one would solve in WordPress. It isn't, perhaps, a common problem, but it is one that seems to be caused by the way in which WordPress insists on generating truly dynamic content. Who knows what others will do in the end. I'm happy to be back with MovableType.

* I know I am using a lot of words like seemed, appeared, etc. I am purposefully softening my commentary because much, if not all, is my opinion and is based upon my subjective impression of the ongoings in the blogging software community.

One of my favorite side computers has become the Sony UX90 that I keep with me as a backup machine.* Although it runs Windows (which I've written about in less than positive terms many times before), I have tried to keep things simple: install only the basics. I have NewsGator, Outlook (from the Microsoft Office Suite - also installed), Skype, Trillian, Gizmo and, of course, PuTTY. I didn't try to replace my main work machine, a MacBook Pro, and really don't expect to be able to accomplish the same types of things.
The wireless reception on the device is great and the built-in utility does a good job of searching for networks. It also has a bit more straight-forward configurability for prioritizing networks than Windows Wireless Zero Configuration utility. (In all honesty, though, I usually prefer Windows WZC because some manufacturer's configuration utilities are poorly thought out.)
All of the problems I had with the OQO are taken care of on the UX. My biggest complaint with the OQO, however, had to do with the battery and things are not much better with the UX90. I thought it was inexcusable that the device lasted, at best, 2 1/2 hours with light wireless usage and general surfing. The UX90 will average just over three hours under the same type of usage dynamics. I solved that problem with both machines by buying an extended battery. The OQO now lasts upwards of 4 1/2 hours and the UX90 lasts often more than five hours. This type of poor power "longevity" is still inexcusable in an Ultra Portable, in my opinion. The benefit of such a small device really is it's ability to be used throughout the day. If you can't rely upon that, you lose the "ultra" part of Ultra Portable because you need to carry a bunch of batteries everywhere you go. I want to be able to use a UMPC the same way I use my cell phone (rather, PDA phone) - use all day and charge at night. Or, if I'm lucky and my PDA phone has a low power wifi chip, I can get close to two days of use out of it.
Having had two different types of UMPC'esque (Ultra Mobile PC) devices has taught me an important lesson in input. A full or, at least, mini style keyboard is really needed to do anything of consequence. A thumb-board simply doesn't cut it. In the case of a Blackberry or PDA cell phone like the Treo or Nokia E61, a thumb-board works to a better extent because of how small the device is to begin with. You can comfortably [learn] to hold the phone with both hands and type decent responses without much stress. With both the OQO and UX90, the problem of holding the device comfortably is exacerbated by the fact that the device is too heavy to use similar to the way one would use the a PDA. So, while enjoying our latest vacation, there were times I really wished I had a Stowaway bluetooth portable keyboard or access to something like my Thinkpad X40. The fact is that even with the added weight of the Stowaway keyboard, the UX90/Stowaway combination would be more convenient than carrying another true notebook with. The worst part of input is when you need to use a lot of odd characters like "/" "|" "=", etc. One of the items that hooked me on OS X six years ago was all of the standard Unix utilities underneath the GUI - and simple program additions like the Terminal. When you don't have access to your normal "environment" (i.e. my desktop and list of programs I frequently use), you learn which ones are the most important. For me, I spend much more time at the Terminal than I realized. So, that fact made trying to use the UX90's thumb-board somewhat inconvenient (of course, in a pinch, I was happy to at least have that).
One item that puts the UX90 far ahead of the OQO is the screen. I ran into more problems with the weird resolution of the OQO and dialogue boxes not fitting in the screen vertically. This meant that when installing program xyz, one has to guess what is below the taskbar. Even if you put the taskbar in auto-hide mode, it doesn't solve The only trouble I had was reading the screen in direct sunlight. The coating of the screen is highly reflective and makes beach reading somewhat amusing: you need to tip the screen away from you in order to view the display so as to see through the glare from the sun.
The UX90 is really what the OQO should have been. The device runs much cooler than the OQO and also handles applications faster. I know we're not comparing like processors and the Core series of processors weren't available from Intel when the OQO came out, but considering the Transmeta Crusoe processor was touted for low power, small devices, it's performance on the power and heat side make it non-ideal in practice. I haven't personally owned any other Crusoe based devices, but if memory serves me correctly, I think I have read other's complaints about the Crusoe elsewhere (regarding heat and power usage).
Other small items make the UX90 ideal for tinkerers: it accepts USB drives (even thumb drives) as bootable sources, the bluetooth performance is stellar (I was able to reach my phone through two semi-concrete), it has dual video cameras (one front and back - as more and more chat programs integrate video, I see this as a good item to have), and the overall performance of the processor is more than adequate. I also like the CF slot. I realize that it would have been nicer to have a PCMCIA or ExpressCard/34 slot, but I imagine that would have added too much unwanted bulk to the machine.
I am hoping with more R&D and/or experience, manufacturers like Sony will do a better job at making input easier (and this does not mean removing the input device). I have complained about devices that forego the keyboard altogether and I think this is a major mistake. Hand input is less likely to be as efficient as keyboard input - especially the smaller the screen gets. In the case of the UX90, I had Dynamism install Windows Tablet PC 2005. Although I think Windows Tablet PC has come a long way, the problem with it on the UX is that the screen is simply too small to make use of pen input (in written form). Having the keyboard is necessary.
So, in the end, I am happy with the device. Sony has done a great job at developing a small, powerful computing machine. Hopefully with time, refinements will make it even better.

* (I've mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again - I had a semi-disaster on a trip many, many years ago where my laptop went out completely and I had work that needed to be done. I ended up wasting more time and money on trying to get access to the internet and find a machine from which I could do the work needed - only three hours was needed - and regretted the whole ordeal. Ever since then, I've carried an extra laptop with me - usually as small as possible.)