The Slow Lane

I’ve had an idea. I’ve been having lots of ideas lately but this one has been in my head for a while. There are lots of Content Management Systems or CMS’ out there, software that you use to build and maintain a website. They come in all shapes, sizes, and complexities. I have observed there is a missing niche among all of these CMS’. Something that is simple to use for non-computer people, and offer the basics without going overboard with complexity or features. This Wordpress blog I’m typing on now is a good example. In fact Wordpress has become very popular as a CMS for small websites where you just need to make a few pages.

That is where my inspiration came from. Our SCCA webpage could use a CMS like that. And a friend of mine runs a videography business where he wants to be able to update his site frequently. You could just use Wordpress for these sites, but why drag along all the blog oriented code when you aren’t going to use it. Plus I believe Wordpress could use a good tune-up. It is still written for the no-longer-supported PHP4.

So I started writing my own little CMS in my spare time. It’s very slow going. It’s hard to get something really going when you are doing it two hours at a time. and of course I’ve been running into some snags and doing a lot of learning. One of those snags turned out to be database access. I saw that I would be writing a bunch of similar queries. So I wrote a lightweight database abstraction layer to automate some of that SQL creation. This database layer is based on PHP5’s PDO, meaning it has an object oriented interface and I can use it to connect to many different databases, assuming the SQL I write is compatible.

I don’t want to re-invent the wheel so I looked at two frameworks that do something similar, Zend_Db and Solar_Sql for ideas. They both take a different approach on how to handle prepared statements and how to pass the data into them. I tried to take the middle road and support both. The solution which I came up with, I recently found out won’t work. So I’ve got to give it a big re-think. It’s thing like this that are slowing the project down. Plus the stop-starting from lack of time. I didn’t want to talk too much about this project until it was more together. but based on this “little” setback I realized that it’s going to take a lot longer then I hoped for this thing to see the light of day. So I might as well talk about it online. I certainly haven’t been autocrossing this summer.

This isn’t another “I just tried out Linux and it’s…” blog post. I’ve played with Linux off and on since 1998. Back then I ran a webserver off a “lunchbox” Sun SPARCstation I bought at a computer fair for $40. Over the last 10+ years has gone from “can’t get the sound working, I give up” to “I’ve got just about everything I need”. This blog post will follow that journey a bit, and serve for a precursor to more computer related blog posts.

As I mentioned my first experience with Linux was to scratch an itch to run my own webserver out of my bedroom. This was in the days of Windows 98. I don’t remember exactly why I decided to find an old computer and do the Linux thing vs using Microsoft’s Personal Web Server. I didn’t do the hosting thing b/c I was a poor college student. Maybe it’s because I had a job that forced me to work on Unix and I did some webpage creation there. But I managed to get everything working and through the magic of DynDNS ran a website for my cover band out of my bedroom over a DSL connection.

Because I ended up with such weird hardware there were only so many distributions that I could use. I ended up with Debian. The thing I remember most is the ability to browse the many “packages” of software available online and then install it by typing in a command. This was or would become the apt-get command that I think helps make Ubuntu so popular today.

Fast forward to after college and I tried Linux on a PC computer. I basically wanted to play, and see where Linux was at compared to Windows. I looked around at the the various distributions available. I wanted one with a Desktop Environment. Last time I used mostly used the command line. I did have Ice Window Manager but that was pretty basic.

I decided on Slackware. It had a reputation of having a rock solid basic system. And all of the packages were layed out in a modular and sensible manner. The hot Desktop Environment at the time was KDE so that is what I tried. I thought it looked better than GNOME (this was 2002/3). I got the software installed OK and booted into Linux and started up KDE. But I could not get sound working. I tried a couple different things but never got it working. Being a music fan That was a non-starter for me so I deleted the partition and went back to Windows.

Three year later that computer was getting old and slow. I got a “new” computer through work. Actually it was a computer work didn’t need anymore and they were auctioning them off for charity. It was a good deal and at least newer and faster than what I had. One problem is that it came with Windows 2000, which wasn’t cutting it anymore once you where used to XP. But this was the era of Windows Genuine Advantage and I didn’t want to pay for what Microsoft wanted for a license of XP and I didn’t want to bother with cracks and patches to get around WGA. In comes Linux again and this hot newcomer distribution Ubuntu.

Ubuntu was pretty slick, and I can see why it was gaining so much traction as the go-to distribution for desktop Linux. But there was a few things that annoyed me. The biggest is the lack of codecs to play mp3s and various “non-free” audio & video formats, the biggest being Microsoft’s wma & wmv formats. Now I understand the ideal of promoting open source formats like Ogg Vorbis & Theora but having to go to search Google & Ubuntu Forums for answers and then go to third party sites to get the codecs is just going to drive potential users away. And those codecs were full of problems. There were several wma videos I tried watching and they just wouldn’t work or would freeze. I had problems with avi files too. I also had major problems with Java. Never got it working. I tried downloading/installing packages from Sun and the official ones from Ubuntu. Never worked. Irene wasn’t crazy about using it and after a few months of use I found a deal that was too good to pass up.

The deal was on a refurbished HP. Core2Duo processor, 2GB RAM, 320 GB HD, $300. And of course it came with Windows Vista. I was a little apprehensive about Vista since i heard mixed review about it. Getting the computer and firing it up, on one hand it was pretty, on the other hand it seemed slow to boot, login, and whenever the User Account Control stepped it. Now first off people all over the net have lambasted UAC. I don’t have a problem with it being there and how it works. My only problem is that it is so slow to operate, and that there are two different screens that can show up, which can lead to some confusion. Why did Microsoft even waste the time to develop two different screens that do the same thing?

The slow boot and login thing got to be so excruciatingly bad that is what ultimately forced me back to Linux. I searched and searched online and tried to use some “boot performance monitor” thing that Microsoft built in all to no avail. I have no idea why the bootup was so slow but the login was slow because of the stupid Windows Search thing that would thrash my HD looking for who-knows-what everytime I tried to login, making my system unresponsive. Worst yet Windows Media Player would get in on the act and start doing something in the background, making it so that if you actually tried to use WMP it would not start up because it was already started as a background process. That one turned out to be a bug. If you turned off the Windows Search thing, which probably involved a registry edit, it would cripple the start menu features that were new in Vista.

Another big Vista gripe of mine is the new Explorer interface. The new way of doing the address bar is cool, but why did you take away my toolbar buttons? Especially the “up” button? Even further is why did you take not even put a comparability mode in so we could go back to an XP like Explorer if we wanted to? And how could you have screwed up to algorithm that decided which Explorer view to show? Just about all my folders ended up with the picture view. That was another registry hack to fix that one. Service Pack 1 seemed to have fixed the booting and login speed issues some but by then I had thrown in the towel. Speaking of SP1 for some reason it never asked me to download it. I read that it was out in an article a couple of months after the fact. Thanks MS, I didn’t really want those updates!

So now I spend most of my time in Xubuntu, which is a community developed version of Ubuntu with the GNOME desktop replaced with XFCE. XFCE is know for being “lightweight”, which means it uses less RAM and is more responsive. And it uses GTK+ at it’s core, which is what GNOME uses at it’s base as well. GNOME is a layer on top of GTK. So as long as a program isn’t built for KDE, it will run and look good in XFCE. Ubuntu has been improved since my last try. Java worked out of the box. There still wasn’t included non-free codecs but getting them was easier this time around and they work so much better. My printer, my camera, my video camera all pretty much worked out of the box.

Running Linux has also given me the ability to play with compiling programs. I have compiled Linus Torvalds’ Git source code management software and started playing around with that. And I complied my own version of my favorite editor, VIM. The stock Ubuntu one came with Perl, Python, and Ruby integrations that I was never going to use. And I was able to compile a few of the PHP 5.3 betas and release candidates. So I got an early sneak peak at some of the new features at work.

There is still some learning to do and some growing pains to working on Linux. But it seems at times that it’s easier to get answers, or you can look at a configuration file and see what it’s doing. I’ve even looked at some C source code to see how something works. And that’s neat. Though that could be the geek in me talking.

September. Damn that seems like a long time ago, because well it was. And a lot has happened since then. For one I’m married now. There is not much to blog about atucrossing over the winter b/c there really isn’t much autocrossing over the winter. Philly region does have a winter series but I didn’t attend it b/c my Miata got rear-ended and subseqently totaled out by the insurance co. That was obviously a big bummer b/c I was looking forward to really tuning the car this year and bridging the gap to the CRXs.

And Irene and I decided to get rid of the Prelude. It was just getting two high in mileage. So that is two cars gone over the winter. We did get something cool to replace the Prelude though, a Mazdaspeed3. We both like th car a lot. S-plan pricing really made it a good deal.

Initially I was going to find another Miata shell this spring and swap everything over. But I decided to put that on hold till next year so we can focus on finding a house. The government is holding this $8,000 tax credit carrot in front of our noses and we’d be stupid to not try and take advantage of it. So there hasn’t been much to report on the car front. I have done a few autocrosses in the Mazdaspeed3. But I’ve also missed a bunch.

So because of all that stuff, and there was some crappy medical stuff going one over the winter, that I haven’t been posting. I’ve realized of late that there is a lot of other stuff I could be posting about other than cars and autocrossing. I don’t like putting to much personal life stuff up on a public blog. But I have been getting more interested in what is happening in politics, or more like what the current President and congress are doing to “fix the economy”. For the record I don’t like it, which is why I feel I should be writing about it. In addition there is the real possibility of “carbon cap & trade” coming to this country now. I have some strong opinions on that since I work in the utility industry. Specifically I don’t like it.

I have also been messing around with computers more lately. I got really fed up with Vista and tried Linux again. There is at least one future blog post in that story. I have also been messing around with trying to write a small CMS for websites. It is going very slowly since I can only dedicate an hour or two each day to it. IT is very rewarding though and I could see myself doing that for a living if I was to find a way to change careers w/o a drop in pay (yeah right!). And I have been doing more unique stuff with the 3D design software we use in work, Autodesk Inventor. There are some potential blog posts waiting to come out of that experience.

So now that I’ve made the excuse post and gotten back on the horse let’s hope I can me more active on this thing again.

Not much has been happening on the autocross front for me lately with the wedding only days away now. I missed Philly Event #8 at Warminster because Irene and I had too much on our todo list for that weekend. Doug borrowed the car and won STS2 with it again. His time was impressively close to perenial front runners Scott in an STS Civic and Cy in an STX Civic. Doug also confirmed that turning down the front shocks helped the car at Warminster.

Event #9 was at Boeing on September 7th. Really no need for a race report there. The Boeing courses are always a compromise and this event was no different. There was a very tight hairpin built in that I was downshifting to first for on most of my runs. Most of us STS2′ers tried it both ways and there really wasn’t an advantage to either. I drove well enough to not be crappy but not up to my expectations. I ended the day 4th out of 7 in class, 0.5 seconds out of 1st. My PAX ranking was 16 out of 67.

Event #10 was a Warminster event that I wasn’t sure I was going to make. I could use the fun and relaxation of thrashing the car about but our wedding todo list was still high. Irene and I kicked butt on Friday and Saturday so I woke up early on Sunday and headed over to Warminster as a walk-up entrant. Normally Warminster events are pretty busy and hectic for the chiefs because it draws large numbers of entrants. My plan was to show up, work a normal shift, run, then split. This event turned out to be pretty low key due to the fact that it rained all weekend. Doug texted me as I was leaving to say that he was sick and wouldn’t be making it. I thought about bagging it since I hadn’t pre-registered but I wasn’t going to let the rain spoil my fun.

The course was FAST and the Miata handled great in the rain as it had before. I had the front shocks turned down 5/8 of a turn from full stiff. Each bump on the Koni Sport adjust is 1/8 of a turn. Although steady state cornering and braking grip was lower from the rain the transitional grip was unbelievable. And you needed it. There were 2 very fast slalom sections were I just below the limiter in 2nd. My times didn’t bear out how I thought I was driving though. I ended up dead last out of 4 in class. The course ended up being kind of cone intensive due to the reduced grip and a couple of right angle boxes and I was no exception to that. But even if you discount the cones I still wouldn’t have moved up. Boo. I was 27th out of 80 in PAX.

There won’t be a whole lot of activity in the coming months. I’ll be off on my Honeymoon for 2 weeks. After that there are just two Boeing events, and maybe some NNJR ones to attend. Then the long break for the winter holidays. No word on a possible winter series yet. I am looking forward to getting some much needed work done on the car over the off season. Details to come when I actually get around to doing it. For now I leave you with an action shot snapped by Bob McMillan.

In my last post I mentioned I was updating some software. At work we use Autodesk Inventor 2008 for our 3D design & modeling. I was applying Service Packs 1 & 2 to that and the AutoCAD that comes bundled with Inventor. I am the CAD manager for my small little group and had disributed the service packs to the other users and managed not to install them for myself. After the program kept crashing while trying to a simple task I decided to check for hot fixes for the issue. That is when I realized that I wasn’t up to date with the service packs. And wouldn’t you know it after updating the problem went away. Stay up to date people.

Shortly thereafter, and now at home, my Windows XP laptop told me that Service Pack 3 was availible and it would like to update it. Service Pack 2 for Win XP included a lot of big changes so I did some Google searches and read around at winsupersite.com about it first. There isn’t any drastic changes in it, mostly a round up of hot fixes. But one unintended side effect is that the update wiped out my patched uxtheme.dll file. No more custom skins until I re-patch it, which I haven’t yet. Also when it rebooted with Win95 looking windows I went into the display properties and reset the Theme back to WinXP. What I should have done is reset the Apperance because resetting the Theme cleared out my custom icons. And my trial of Icon Packager was up a long time ago. So I’m back to a stock looking WinXP for a while. Boo. Hopefully someone else reads this and doesn’t make the same mistake.

And speaking of updates there is two pckages of software I like to use on my Windows computers that always seem to have updates. To the point where it is annoying. Filezilla (an FTP client) and Paint.NET (a lighweight graphics program). It seems like everytime I go to use these programs there is an update availible. Can’t you limit this to once every three months or something. Both come with one click updaters which is nice. Filezilla’s update is fairly quick and painless. But Paint.NET’s takes forever. It’s always stuck on “Optimizing for your computer”. What does it have to optimize for 5 minutes? It’s a 3 or 4 meg program. Must be related to the .NET framework.