I saw the new version of Pride and Prejudice last night and thought it was really good. Kiera Knightly was born to play the part of Lizzy. She is very easy on the eyes. I think the A&E version is the definitive work, but this new version is really good.

I thought they were very inventive in the way they tightened up the story so it would fit in 2 and a half hours instead of 4. If you have a chance, I highly recommend the movie.

Once question I thought I should answer after spending a month or two of my spare time writing my own blogging software is, why do it? Why write your own software? Why not use Moveable Type, Wordpress, or some other blog package or hosting service? Well there are a number of reasons, so let me go over a few:

• Well first I'm lazy. Like Larry Wall, I hate to do things twice. I needed a system that would allow me to templatize practically anything so I'm not constantly re-entering HTML code.
• A system that works offline and locally. I want to be able to create blog entries offline and be able to upload them at my convenience. In addition, with an offline system I can choose whether anything gets published or not. So if I want to create a private blog for a project or work, I can. And, I can run it off the local file system without every hitting a server. A fancy Web interface can be added, but is optional.
• Everything can be controlled from a shell and vi.
• No database required. To me blogging is a perfect fit for XML. You create an entry once, and then never change it. Adding in a relational database and the code needed for that just adds unnecessary complexity.
• Data files are a standard text format. Some blogging tools I have played with allow you to blog using text or HTML, but don't use any standard format. You either get wiki like formatting or some limited HTML. This blog's data files are all valid XHTML. This allows me to create and edit the entries with standard tools and yet transform simply formatted XHTML files into more complex output.
• Standardized templating system. As far as I'm concerned, XSLT is best templating language I have run across. By using XML files for the entries, the power of XSLT can be used to templatize just about anything.
• A modular system. I wanted a system that is made up of swappable components. Not one giant hairball of code that can't be broken apart. For example, if I want a comment system, it can be added. If I don't, everything still works fine.

There is still quite a bit of work to do. I started this project in Ruby, but since it was talking too long for me to learn Ruby, I switched to Perl so I could get something working quicker. Eventually, I will have a Perl and Ruby version, but the first pass will be Perl as I know that language a better than Ruby. But porting everything to Ruby should be a fun exercise.

The category system still needs to be built so that I can automatically assign categories to entries through a text user interface. Also, I will need to add a commenting system as well. Maybe a sample CGI based system or a link to an open source bb system. Finally, I'm currently still using Ant to do the transforms. This will need to be switched over to Gnomes libxslt so no Java is required.

Well that's the scoop. More to come as things progress.

Well if you are seeing this page, my weblog software has been successfully swapped out. Woo hoo!

You will notice that the tool bar matches the tool bar for the howto pages. Plus the CSS has been cleaned up to match my tastes a little bit more. I could never quite get the Wordpress CSS to do exactly what I wanted. I like the look and feel of the new page much better.

I plan on leaving up the old Wordpress system for a while. So links to the old posts and stuff will work for some time. If you want to get to the old home page, just pull up oldindex.php, everything will still be there.

The replacement of the backend software for this blog is approaching quickly. I have all the code basically done. I just have to put on finishing touches related to automating publishing and the like. I also need to do a little more testing with rss and Atom feeds.

When the swap out takes place, the atom and rss feeds will change. I will make a final post on Wordpress with the details. I will leave Wordpress up for about a week. Then, all that old code will get ripped out. I hope to make the switch on Tues or maybe Saturday of this week. It depends on how things go.

The new system won't have a comment system, but of course that only puts me on par with the current system (given my experience with Wordpress and spam). Intially, comments will only be tracked via Technorati posts, so it will essentially have talkbacks. Hopefully I can create a simple, yet effective comment system over the Christmas break. More details on the actual software to come in another post.

I'm finally upgrading by TiBook to OS X 10.4 Tiger and am in the process of reinstalling all my applications. One feature that I wish OS X had is virtual desktops. A virual desktop tool allows you to distribute your running applicaitons to several different virtual views which you can switch between using hotkeys or a mouse. If you used any Unix flavor you are probably familiar with this concept. Anyway I recently tried Desktop Manager for OS X again and it looks cool.

I have been using an application called Space that was available on Jaguar and Panther. However, it looks like no one is developing this app anymore, so it is time to find something new. I had previously tried Desktop Manager and Virtue for this task, but found both lacking the ease of use of Space.

From what I have seen so far, Desktop Manager has improved quite a bit from the last time I used it. You can move between desktops using hotkeys or a visual paging manager in the lower left corner of the screen. You can also move applications between desktops which I don't thing worked in the last version I tried. Anyway, if virtual desktops is a feature you need, give desktop manager a look.

I was fortunate enough today to run across this story on an MIT web side today. MIT has done a study on the effectiveness of aluminum foil hats blocking the governments mind control devices. Well it turns out, that the hats actually enhances the signals sent to your brain.

Stunning news!!! And I had just purchased a custom hand made Centurion model for $20. Well I guess its back to the good old steel WWII army helmut for me. Safe, tested and true.

I gave Google Desktop a try this week and I'm impressed. Google Desktop is a stand alone Windows version of the Google Search engine. With it, you can index all the files on your system, your e-mail, your pdfs, and pretty much everything. Searching your local system is a snap.

The search interface is very similar to the web version. You use it in a browser just like Google, but of course it just searches your local machine instead of the entire Internet. The interface is very clean and easy to use. Plus, the searches are extremely fast. The default search mechanism in XP has always annoyed me. It has that stupid helper interface thing that just gets in the way and actually makes the search harder to use. Plus, its super slow!

You can get the latest version of Google desktop at: http://desktop.google.com

There are also a number of plugins that further enhance the product that you can download from the web site. I found the anytextfile plugin especially helpful as it allows you to index XML files which GDS does not index by default.