Spring comes early …

Well as you can see spring has sprung early at SM :p I’ve been changing stuff around since I’ve been using the default MT layout for ages and wanted to have something different and unique here. So I set to work with PhotoShop yesterday based on an idea I had day before and while the final result is not exactly what I had in mind (I couldn’t find an image to fit what I had in mind), I am pretty satisfied with what I finally got here 🙂 I need to add a few touches here and there maybe to the borders to make them kind of individual and then use the same borders on all the archive pages but that should be about it.

I’ve been doing a lot of website related work recently since I’ve been consolidating everything to my domain at farook.org. Of course, somebody e-mailed me to tell me that farook.org is blocked from his work and that he won’t be able to read my site(s) from work any longer and I have no idea what prompted that particular action on the part of his employers. I am just curious as to why my domain was blocked but then again, strange are the ways of employers :p But getting back to web site changes, I would like to make SM the site which leads to all matters personal for me and keep The Developer’s Corner as the development/coding related site. So expect to see stuff being moved around during the coming weeks :p Once I get all that done, then I want to add a few more sub-domains for various non-development related stuff but I guess I shouldn’t get ahead of myself and wait till I actually have something in place before I talk about all that 🙂

First of all my apologies to DeViLbOi, who indeed told me about e107 before Phil :p I tried it out yesterday but then realized that I probably am over complicating matters by installing a CMS when all I need is a way to point people to the new areas on my site without cluttering up the interface too much. As time goes on and I add the new stuff that I have in mind, a portal site may make sense but for the moment, I really should be OK with the current set up – if I can come up with a good interface 🙂

So speaking of interfaces, I’ve been working on layouts for both my sites – The Developer’s Corner and SM. You can see the new layout for SM at the site itself since I created it, liked it and put it up already :p The layout for this site is however something that I have been working on (on and off) for a while now. You can find the almost finished result here. Personally, I don’t like it much for some reason – maybe it tries too hard :p I don’t know if I really want to use that layout or come up with something a bit more simpler and clean-cut that I would like to use. I guess I’ll see what all of you think before I go one way or another on that one. In the meantime, the changes at the site keep on – slowly but surely. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, I guess it’ll take a while for all of it to be finally in place and when it is, it will take a little more time for me to get back into coding. So bear with me 🙂

I’ve consolidated all the little adjuncts to this site into one place – now the forums are at forums.farook.org (sorry about the logging in problem that some people may have experienced during the changeover but it’s now fixed) and Solipsistic Meanderings is at sm.farook.org while the picture gallery I recently put up is at album.farook.org 🙂 I intend to add a couple of more sub-domains in the future which will add further functionality to the site but for the moment I think I am done with adding sub-domains and will now have to think about navigation.

I have been toying with either making the UI for this Blog a little more categorized so that people can get to all of these locations easily instead of having to hunt through a bunch of links on the sidebar. I did do the UI a while back and kind of worked out the kinks yesterday but have not uploaded it yet. Maybe I will do so today. If I don’t go with a revamped UI, then the other solution that I have had is to use a CMS (Content Management System) to do the main page and make this Blog just a part of that CMS. I don’t want to lose all my old entries and comments however (otherwise I would have simply switched over the main page to an MT blog maintained using BlogMan) and so will try to find a CMS which allows you to display external pages in some manner or form.

In my quest for such a CMS, I did try PostNuke yesterday but while I did get it to install, it seems a bit too bulky (and a bit buggy too since I could get the user page and the admin page working but not the main page) for my purposes. So I’ll probably drop PostNuke and look into XOOPS and e107 (which was suggested to me yesterday by Phil). If one of them works out, that would be good but if not, I can always use the layout that I’ve already created :p Speaking of layouts, I also want to do a new layout for SM but I’ll talk about that plus a few changes at SM itself over there – if I get the time that is :p

Things are moving and shaking at my site though you can’t see any changes :p I’ve been installing/experimenting with a lot of stuff and I intend to add a quite a bit of new functionality to the site. Unfortunately, all of these new things will mean that I have a new entry page or at least redesign the current main page since it’s getting way too crowded with all those links in the sidebar 🙂 I’m not sure how I am going to go about it but for the moment, I am not too worried about that since I am still in the throes of installing and customizing stuff.

Yesterday I worked with QBoard. Now I know that QBoard is usually a remote server-based tagboard solution but they have also open sourced it and called it Free QBoard. When I first downloaded it and read the installation instructions, it said something along the lines of “use a shell account and run the install.sh file” and I was daunted since I did not have shell access. Yesterday however, I decided to go through the actual install.sh file and see what it had and was able to duplicate all the steps without any shell access. I installed it but it wouldn’t work since there were database names hardcoded in the code and I was not using the default database :p So then I introduced a configuration file to the system and removed all the database name, host, user and password stuff from the code and made it always use the config file settings. I then discovered that even though the system was supposed to be free, it still used the general interface from the original site and still had an ad banner at the top, so I removed that too :p It now works fine and anybody can get their own free QBoard from my site (though I don’t think I’ll be offering that service generally … at least not yet :p) but I am now consumed by the desire to do further PHP/mySQL hacking <g>

Since the source for QBoard has not been worked on at all since it was released (at least as far as I can tell by looking at the SourceForge site) I was thinking of contacting the developers and submitting the changes I’d already made and to further customize the code so that no shell access is necessary at all. Currently the shell access is needed to replace hard coded paths with your own paths and this could easily be handled by the config file – I’ll just have to wade through about twenty files and replace hundreds of occurrences of the path with the variable representing it. I think I would like to do that since that would get me into a new area of development since I haven’t done much PHP but that would also mean another detour for me – why oh why can’t I just continue on one path of development? :p

Hardware error – user not found …

Yesterday was the kind of day that always seems to come around when management is unhappy with my work. Now I must say (and this is not a phoney disclaimer just in case somebody from work is reading it :p), I have done nothing nor have I incited somebody else to do anything which resulted in the following set of events. I come to work in the morning and I’m told that one of the editing suites is not working and that it was imperative that we get it working since the program was supposed to go out yesterday for broadcasting and as luck would have it, the guy who normally does the hardware troubleshooting and maintenance (whom my friend Robin and I sort of co-manage) was on leave. So it was up to me to get it working since I was the only other computer hardware guy (supposedly – since I have never really been taught anything about hardware by anybody) around.

It was just some sort of voodoo since all I did was remove the Matrox card in the machine, put it in a different slot and restart and it worked! This kind of thing happens to me often and I have no idea whether I really did anything or if it really was voodoo :p A couple of hours later, the other editing suite breaks down – this time it won’t play sound. I remove the driver and reinstall it but nothing. So I open up the machine, remove the Matrox card and put it in a different slot and again it works! By this time, my stock among most of the people in the company has risen sky high since I’ve been performing miracles :p Of course, it would make no difference to my boss since he wants me out anyway but basically everybody else now have a justification as to why I should be kept around 🙂

That wasn’t all that happened yesterday though – for some reason work kept on pouring in – all sorts of weird stuff. The last one being writing a VBA script to do some data juggling in Excel. So I’m at work today getting ready to do that since that’s supposed to be "urgent" – ah well 🙂

Things have been rather hectic for me the last few days on the work front but I’ve decided to keep this journal to development related stuff and so you’ll have to read the other journal if you want the dope about why I’ve had a hectic week/New Year :p I wasn’t sure that this stuff I’m going to write should be on this journal either but since it’s about “site development” I guess it qualifies 🙂

First of all, I installed 4Image (sorry, don’t have a link handy and not even sure that’s the right name for the script set) which provides an online image gallery. If anybody’s interested, you can see a couple of shots of my ugly mug here :p I did it at first as a sort of test to see how good 4Image was but now I’m actually thinking of adding more pictures of family and perhaps even of Sri Lanka so that people can see where I live and the people around me of whom I talk all the time – or not so much :p

I’ve also been thinking of discontinuing the mirror sites and consolidating all the different areas of my web presence into one location so that I avoid some of the problems involved with multiple sites currently – such as the problems with updating and keeping multiple sites consistent. I also would like to bring all the mailing lists under my own control since the domain supports mailing lists but I don’t know how much of a support mechanism there is for mailing lists since I kinda like the archival features provided by Yahoo Groups. Existing users would not have to resubscribe since I can simply take the list from Yahoo and recreate the list here at farook.org – at least I hope so.

There are other things I want to do – new efforts I’d like to launch along the GroupHug lines to try and help people in our own little ways but I will not get into it all since I need something to write about tomorrow too – plus, I obviously will not get around to doing this all so soon :p

And it goes on …

Yesterday was full of meetings again. My boss (the managing director) doesn’t want to have to fire me I guess (since that would still make him look bad) and so handed it over to my other boss (the editor-in-chief) and I guess basically asked her to evaluate if I can fit in or not. Now she does not want to be a bad guy and so she was basically putting it up to me as to whether I wanted to stay or go. I said that I was doing the best I can under the circumstances and would be happy to do better if somebody can tell me something specific about what is wrong with the newspapers. Of course, got no answer to that. but she basically handed all the newspaper work back to me and asked me to be in charge of them again – plus two other papers that I hadn’t been in charge of before. In addition to that, she wanted to get me involved in some new programs that the company is producing and we had a few meetings about that too. So yesterday was full of meetings and I still am not sure that the axe will not fall after all this since it has not gone back to the big man yet :p He might decide that I have to go anyway or something. Oh well … I’m getting tired of all the rigmarole.

In the mean time, I’ve received a tentative job offer from an outside source. Since that is not concrete yet, I will not talk about it or tender my resignation here either. In a way, I feel that I should simply hand in my resignation and leave but that would be a form of giving into all the intimidation. So I guess I’ll hang in there for the moment … Fun, fun, fun :p

The year begins :p

First of all, a very happy New Year to all who read this page – all three of you :p My New Year has really started off nice – NOT! Yesterday being the first day of the New Year, my boss wants to have an executive committee meeting and I am a member of the executive committee (or the EXCO for short). The EXCO is basically a set of people who are supposed to be the top-level administrators in our company and all of us report directly to the managing director – who will be referred to as "the boss" from now onwards.

Of course, here I have to step back a bit and recount something that happened last year for it any of what will follow to make any sense. Last year, around the time I was trying to get to the US, the boss and I had a major row. He has this habit of trying to get people to do their work by intimidating them and while I normally simply ignore his tactics, he got to be be a bit obnoxious in his verbiage in front of others and I simply retorted back. So basically, we ended up screaming at each other back and forth in front of the whole office for a few minutes. I did apologize to him before I left for the US and he seemed to be OK at that time. On my return however, he calls me into his room and I realize that he’s been brooding about the whole thing and that he wasn’t happy with what happened. I was proven right because he tells me that because of what happened, that he’s losing his authority because he feels that anybody will think that they can scream at him now. But actually what it boiled down to was the fact that he was afraid that nobody would be afraid of him now since I showed that I wasn’t really scared of him or of him firing me. So I told him that if he wasn’t happy with what happened, he could fire me and that I would leave. Of course, he didn’t like that either since that would make him look like a petty, vindictive guy. So he basically told me to be careful and it seemed to end at that.
However, it looks as if it hasn’t ended there after all – did anybody think it would? :p He starts talking about performance reviews at the EXCO meeting yesterday and tells me that I have not been doing too well with the newspapers. So I asked him what was wrong. He says that the page that we are doing is not interesting enough. So I tell him that it is about the (now stopped) war and the peace process and it was hardly possible to jazz it up since that would trivialize the issue. To which he responds that he is more aware of the seriousness of the issue than I but that I’m not doing a good enough job. So I asked him what I could do to make it more interesting as he claims. Of course to that there was no answer. He did take away responsibility for the newspapers from me (leaving me with no defined job for the moment) and gave it to somebody else. The meeting ended there but it looks to me as if the writing’s on the wall since he was also talking about letting people go since the company has too many employees :p

I’m waiting for his next move to see what it will be but my friend Robin and I discussed it yesterday after the meeting (Robin is part of the EXCO too incidentally) and he wanted to know if I wanted an educated guess as to how soon I’ll get fired and I said that it would probably be within the week and Robin says maybe sooner :p So that’s where it stands at the moment. I’m not really worried about it except to wonder about the level of professionalism in the company when the boss acts like a little spoilt kid. Oh well … stay tuned for the next episode I guess :p

My efforts at site redesign still continue :p I’d give you a link to a sample but I don’t like the way the original layout turned out and would rather wait till I can get the second effort up today with the actual look I wanted. I’ll probably go back and redo bits of the layout but working in layers in PhotoShop has it’s advantages in that that I don’t have to redo all of my work – just certain bits 🙂 I’ve actually been enjoying my work in PhotoShop – it’s different from coding but gives you the same kind of satisfaction when something comes together just the way you wanted it. Of course, my problem usually is that I can imagine it but don’t have enough graphics knowledge to implement it :p Oh, I just realized why my layout doesn’t look the way I wanted it to – and now I realized why I can’t do it that way and retain a good HTML page which works at all resolutions :p Ah well, I still don’t know if it’s any good but I’ll be interested in your reactions when I can put up the next test page today …

In the meantime, I’ve also been turning over the idea of doing some PHP-based behind the scenes manipulation to let users choose different colored variations of the same style for the site. The code is definitely doable (heck other people are doing it :p) but I realized that at least one of the mirror sites would have to run off one of the other servers because it doesn’t have PHP installed on it. The problem there is that if the server with PHP were to be offline, the mirror server would not display the page properly either – unless I put in some sort of mechanism in place for that eventuality too. That seems to complicate things but I guess I should first get the layout out, then look into theme switching and then worry about using that on all of my sites :p

As for actual coding on Scope, Blog or BlogMan, I’m afraid that I’ve done nothing :p I still think there is some sort of a problem in my migration to Delphi 7.0 but can’t put my finger on it. I need to work on it but at the moment the call of PhotoShop is greater and so bear with me while I get PhotoShop out of my system and get back to coding :p

Well what do you know, another year :p I do wish everybody who reads this a very happy new year and hope that all your endeavours are successful and that all your dreams come true this year, even though I don’t really celebrate new years and stuff like that 🙂 But on to other matters – I’ve been working on some buttons for the site in PhotoShop and they kinda look nice – but I did them at a larger size and then resized them and after resizing, they don’t look *that* nice :p I am kind of considering using them as part of the new layout I plan to use for The Developer’s Corner and then have a matching colored site layout instead of the plain white I have had all these years. Then I thought, hey why not make each of the mirror sites a variation on a different color? And *then* I thought, why don’t I skin all my sites so that the visitors can select the color scheme they want but keep the default color scheme for each mirror site a different one? All of these seem pretty good ideas but will probably take up a lot of my time for the next few days if I’m going to implement them. I’m really not sure how much of it will get implemented and how much will not due to various constraints but I’m working on it …

I actually looked into skinning my site already. I installed Land Down Under (LDU) which provides a complete skinning engine for your site as well as forums, IRC chat and a host of other features and uses PHP and mySQL. The problem? Updates have to be done in the LDU interface itself and goes into the database and so bypasses my Blog-based system. I can easily overcome that by modifying the LDU code so that the main page articles are not taken from a database but instead are retrieved either by including an HTML file or a properly formatted text file which Blog created (and Blog can do that). However, that would still leave the two mirror sites out of the loop since they don’t have both PHP and mySQL installed on them to run LDU – at least, I don’t think so. So I scrapped the idea of LDU even though it is tempting to have the whole site with one common look and feel and have all the functionality I would need in one package. Oh well ..

I also managed to get some work done on the coding front and did manage to compile Scope again after some effort. I am still not sure of the new addressbar component and have no idea whether I’ve lost some features with this particular build of Scope or not since I haven’t had time to test. I do intend to do some work on Scope soon so that it isn’t so quirky and I also need to get cracking on BlogMan again so that I can finish the work and do a final release :p There’s just so much to do – how come nobody’s invented the 48-hour day yet? 🙂