Wow, here’s a new discovery with blogging: I’ve recently discovered the tension that exists between blogging about really important stuff and the time it takes to write such blogs. It’s funny because I want to blog about other stuff, but have these big essays that I’m trying to crank out and don’t want to get too ahead of myself. Sigh. Here’s what’s on the backburner:
* Jen Poley’s photos of Poley Geekfest 2003
* Project Management Methodology, A Comparative Analysis
* Review of theooze’s “Churchless Faith” article
In the meantime, here’s something quick, interesting, and nerdy:
Team DLSI: Project Backlog. I’ve found and set up some bug-tracking software to the project so we can start inputting and assigning discrete tasks. It is available here.
So I was looking around on the web for a system that can facillitate what the SCRUM project management methodology calls a “backlog”—a simple list of prioritized and assigned tasks to be processed over the course of a SCRUM “sprint.” What I wanted was a bug/request management solution for the web. I have built such a system in Microsoft Access, but it’s more for personal use than team use. Bugzilla is a great application, but the forms are extremely confusing at first glance and I feared the install process would be painful. On a whim, I searched the web for “PHP MySQL bug tracking” and found Mantis. Mantis has a very short install process, runs on my platform environment, is stable, and looks great. I couldn’t believe how quick and painless it was.
This would be a great tool for implementing small-time opensource projects like OpenMind.
Ironically, I had actually stumbled across Mantis without even realizing it earlier in the day when I was posting a bug on the Plucker site (see here for more info on that).
The woman formerly known as “The Other Sarah Posegate”—our sister-in-law—finished the Mardis Gras Marathon this past weekend in New Orleans. Results can be found in the Female Results page. You’ll have to hit Ctrl+F and search for “Posegate” (stinkin’ preformatted text). She ran 26 miles in about five-and-a-half hours at a 12:40 mile. Not bad for her first time running…ever. 
Congratulations Sarah!
Update: it’s no secret that I am using Basecamp for project management these days.
The Linux desktop may not be ready for Joe User and his grandmother, but is it ready for the knowledge worker? This is a question I’ve somewhat accidentally been endeavoring to answer since the semester started. A lot of people go looking to prove Linux out when it comes to the desktop in a sort of anti-Microsoft methodology. My latest experimentation, though, wasn’t born out of a desire to prove Linux right or Microsoft wrong—it came out of an immediate need for tools to get my job done as project manager at school. While NJIT provides a lot of these programs for download through Microsoft’s Academic Alliance program, I wasn’t able to get a hold of them easily (the intranet site required that I authenticate three separate times, and still wouldn’t let me do it!). Read on to see just how Linux is performing in these areas.
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…I would use Linux to power weather machines that would create enough snow to shut down an entire city. I was in the car for about three hours this morning trying to get to class.
David Moser (via Mark Pilgrim): This Is The Title Of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times In The Story Itself. This is the first sentence of this story. This is the second sentence. This is the title of the story, which is also found several times in the story itself. This sentence is questioning the intrinsic value of the first two sentences. This sentence is to inform you, in case you haven’t already realized it, that this is a self-referential story, that is, a story containing sentences that refer to their own structure and function. This is a sentence that provides an ending to the first paragraph.
Sarah and I just finished watching the three hidden commentary tracks on the last fifteen minutes of Memento—another story that cleverly deals with the problem of the object/subject dichotemy (I’d use Derrida’s terminology, but it’s dirty). We’re so postmodern.
Snow days lead inevitably to template hacking. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that my “weatherbox” has started to show a broken image under certain conditions. I discovered that my XML stream is sending me an empty tag where it should be sending me the name of a graphic.
Under these brilliant conditions, my PHP was set to display “nothing.gif”, which, of course, led to the decidedly-unprofessional looking red X in place of the graphic. Today I made the PHP code just a tiny bit more robust by bracketing the <img> tag with an if condition. Read on to see the resulting code.
“I’m all about open source.”
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My friend Tom says he’ll call me “in about an hour,” like, two hours ago, so I decide that it’s a good time to sit down and write another blog entry because I don’t want the site doesn’t get all crusty and dry like pizza that’s been left out for too long. And, it occurs to me as I sit down to write this: I haven’t written a blog in seven days.
Seven days. The number hadn’t really rung so true to me earlier in the day. That blissfully ignorant part of my day which I spent watching the Poley kids pummel each other in Super Smash Brothers for our Nintendo 64, or when I was doing observations on Galations 4 during church this morning, or even as I sat on the couch watching Memento forwards with the Schmozer a few hours ago. Seven days wasn’t such a big deal then. I mean, writing “once a week” isn’t so bad when school and work and bills and the other distractions of life are pulling you in a thousand different directions, right?
Right. Sure. Nobody’s going to blame me for not keeping up our pokey little site over the course of a week because everyone knows that Ken & Sarah Walker are busy people with things to do and people to see. No problem. All of this affirmation is conveniently no more than a synapse away from the trailing thought that I should feel bad about not blogging over the course of a whole week. Well, that is, right up until the point where I try to write.
And then, that feeling begins to set in.
You know the feeling. You know it if you’ve ever put off a term paper to the last three weeks of a semester and sat down in front of the blank computer screen waiting for your fingers to start typing, or decided that you’re going to spend the next 45 minutes punching out a letter to a friend you haven’t seen in five years and trying to figure where to begin, or thought to start up a journal again and finding your pen just hovering over the paper. It’s that feeling that takes the edges off of the words that would pour forth from the recesses of your cerebral cortex—well, would pour forth if your brain didn’t feel like its gravity had increased by an order of magnitude while you weren’t paying attention—and turns them into the mental equivalent of projectile artillery: large, slow-moving, and dumb. This feeling makes it feel like you’ve begun to type while wearing surgical gloves…stuffed with cotton…wrapped in wool mittens…tipped with duct tape…
So here I sit on top of the dryer in our bathroom, at 12:20 AM on an early, snowy Monday morning, eating pistachio nuts like they’re going out of style, and slowly coming to the realization that I have absolutely nothing to say.
Does anyone know of any email clients for Windows that don’t suck? I’ve been using Mozilla Mail of late, but–apparently because of some bug–the thing won’t pony up and tell Microsoft Outlook that it is the default mail application. Wuss, er, milquetoast. I’d use Outlook (I’d need to create a new profile because it’s set up for work), but it’s hopelessly integrated with our CRM software at work and won’t start up without initiating a three-minute search for a specific SQL server on the network, by which time I’ve forgotten why I wanted to open mail in the first place!
Outlook Express is crash-happy and doesn’t play nice with my Palm Desktop Address Book. Pegasus Mail, though freeware, looks like they pulled it out of a $5 software bin at Staples. Eudora Mail is nice, but they want $40 to get rid of the ads, and I like to make a habit of spending money on software I really need. Minotaur, the Phoenix-like, Mozilla-based email client, is an exciting idea but smells suspiciously like vaporware. Oddpost is really cool–and their blog is hilarious–but I need a desktop application in order to launch “mailto” links, and it only works with Internet Explorer.
At this point, I’m really tempted just to boot to Linux just to use Ximian Evolution, but, let’s face it, as a project manager for my senior project I need to have my email client up all the time. That just isn’t possible while I’m working on Access databases at the office.
Suggestions?
Update: In the absense of the “killer email app,” I’ve gone over to the dark side.
You may have noticed lately that the semester has taken a toll on my blogging attention of late. This semester I’m up to 13 credits plus work, and I have even more responsibilities this semester than last. Not the least of these is my senior project. The setup of the class is a really great idea and I applaud NJIT for coming up with a class that challenges the learning that we’ve supposedly spent the last 4+ years cramming into our heads.
The class is combined with Computer Science, Information Science, and Mangagement of Information Sciences majors. Each of these majors have a concentration in a particular area that is modeled to fit into a real-world team situation “when we get out”–CS majors program, MIS majors manage, etc. The idea is to form teams such as would be appropriate in a real-world scenario (mine, for example, is made up of one project manager, two programmers, two system analysts, and a database designer) and tackle a problem. The cool part is, though, that we’re not simply given a hypothetical problem by the school. Instead, they actually go to the trouble of rounding-up “sponsors” who present real needs to the class, which we then attempt to build. Students even have to compete for positions by giving applications to their prospective project managers. It’s a kind of micro-economy.
I struggled with whether or not to become a project manager based on all the other stuff I have to get done during this semester (although, unlike last spring, getting married is thankfully not one of them). In a bout of ambition or stupidity–I’m still deciding which–I applied for and got the job. The project that we’ll be working on is for the university itself, and has exciting implications for the future of the Internet. You can find out about it here: kennsarah.net/project.
So, if you find that this page is rapidly getting stale, you may want to check the other site out. By the way, I’ve mentioned to my wife that her audience is clamoring for her, but she’s been sick in bed this past weekend. I’ll set up a link to the blog-admin site on our home PC, though, and we’ll see what happens. 
Mark Pilgrim: Power laws and priorities. All the friendships I’ve developed in the past 2 years-starting long before I was in the Technorati Top 10-grew out of connections I made through writing this weblog and reading others. This month I’ll get 1 million hits on my weblog, and have lunch with 10 friends I met through my weblog. Guess which I care about more.
Mark blogs about a blog entry about blogging about blogs. The irony of my linking back gets apparent when you read the article. The long and the short of it, though, is that Mark makes the argument to blog as a means of building relationships, rather than trying to win fame.
Jode and I have been talking a bit about this. That is, the Internet has provided a way to attain some aspect of community of some–perhaps significant–value. In what ways can we use technology to continue to build the relationships that are established in a church-like setting (such as IronWorks) over the course of the week? How about over the course of a lifetime?
Update: Jason Kottke (the design of whose résumé I seriously copped has an analysis of the power trend of blog link distribution.
