Friends, here I'll log all the techie commentary/ideas that have no righful place anywhere else. This blog should keep a lot of that crap out of your chat windows, mailing lists, and newsgroups.
WARNING - The average visitor will find this blog about as interesting as a Klingon would find proof-reading the Geneva convention. (As an occasional Klingon diplomat at sci-fi conventions, I can attest that that's ghay'cha' petaQ .) Seriously, for anyone who has been misdirected here by chance, you are welcome, but I won't be posting anything significant.
MVC Frameworks
I intend to write a web app some day soon. I'm continuing my retraining for that purpose, and I'm beginning to discover exactly how much of a newbie I really am at the coding game.
Unfortunately one can build just about any telephony server with minimal scripting (only partly my fault). Years of minimal scripting, it turns out, is devastating to real coding proficiency. Still, things are familiar enough that I need only survive the usual newbie ridicule on mailing lists/irc for a month or two at most.
I've begun evaluating three MVC frameworks: Maypole, Rails, and TurboGears.
Maypole is super-basic, and would work for me if I had not rediscovered my dislike for Perl. So, I gave it up shortly after getting it running and documenting it a bit. If you like PERL and want a simple MVC framework, Maypole is a good bet.
Rails required a LOT of ramping up because Ruby is not quite like PERL or any other language that I am very familiar with. So I've got both the Programming Ruby and the Dev with Rails books and I'm chugging through them. The pragmatic books are well written. After learning more about XSLT, I'm a little suprised that this and other frameworks would rather employ templates that are half code(or a non-standard transformation language) and half HTML rather than seperating out code and XSLT.
I'm also experimenting with TurboGears on the side, but I can't take on both of these at the same time. So far it looks great. The turbogears.org site is an example of the awesome web presentation that even the youngest Open Source projects have these days. Commercial competitors would be jealous.
XSLT
I've just discovered libxslt and started writing some transformation scripts. If anyone has done a lot with XSL transformations I would love to get a pointer or two.
BAVoIP.org
I'm also starting a VoIP Technical Interest group in the bay area with a couple other people - BAVoIP.org. We will probably finish that website up and have our first meeting before the end of the month.
Frittering
I'm still super interested in the same types of analysis I have always been interested in, so I'll gladly fritter time away with you discussing any of it.
And no, my human side does not consider the Geneva Convention to be weak and worthless. In fact, it's one of the few glimmers of hope the hu-mans have shown us - qapla!
