Adam's Blog

i have this book that talks about a psychological state called "flow." flow is optimization of sorts - when you are so focused you lose track of time and other needs. while i have acheived this state of flow, i sometimes equate long term flow with writing php. see, i go for weeks or months without any real development - to the point i actually forget how the stuff i wrote works. then, shortly thereafter, i operate on high for weeks. lately, with the rebirth of ft, i've been on high. c2 is now in the works, and it's amazing how much better my code is these days. just look at qdpa and flip lite - small, smart, more secure, portable code. it makes flip look so amateur. that's why i'm so excited for c2. when i get a weekend, i'm going to slam through a lot of the rough draft and get it semi-functional.

it's official. i have written the first characters of what will become flip c2. c2 will include a ton of stuff that should be in any bloggin application, but will eliminate a lot of extra stuff that has bled into flip-current. in addition, it will reduce the code signficantly and improve security, all while easing use and user interface. i don't expect to have anything workable for a while, but it's going to be exciting. development is going on at our dev site: ninjafoot.com.

notsomuch. according to css expert eric meyer, large scale tables used for page layout are okay. so stop the presses everyone - tables are okay today. i'm really getting sick of all these "made without tables" buttons on pages. it's very cool to be able to be good enough with css to be able to layout a page without tables, but it's definitely not worth much more than cool points. tables are not evil - they just shouldn't be endlessly nested to control prescise layout. i'll phase the new pane in shortly, once it has content. Update: She flies. Ingest the new ftblog.

after four long months, it appears that tomorrow I may finally resolve my compensation woes at work. thank freakin god, too, because i had reached the end of the line. i can honestly say for the first time it wasn't just about money - i was getting my chain yanked by guys taking advantage of me because of my age, because of their pride, and because they are cheap bastards who nickel and dime everyone there. anyway, it appears we may be at a point where we finally agree. i can;'t believe i'm the one comprimising, but i have faith.

yeah, i have a habit of getting into feature creep. i add something, then i add more, then i add more, until it spirals out of control. i don't intend to extend fl much more, but i will be touching up the blog interface to add a links bar down the side. mainly because right now it's so big it's distracting. i'm going to try to do it with div's only.

In a way, these two are a bit like a marriage made in heaven. You see, I use sethadam1.com for fun, and inevitably, the work I do here sparks new development over at flipsource.org. That translates into projects on tubecode.org. So the entire suite is kind of related. See, just getting this blog running in the new fashion has really been amazing, because it's led to all sorts of customizations of flip lite, which has led to all sorts of features being backported to the main fl tree. Kind of cool, in a really geeky way.

All this recoding of firsttube has gotten me thinking about the needs and wants of the typical blogger. See, I don't get livejournal and blogger users- the majority of them are just keeping an online diary. Worse off, the content is tripe - entries like "went to the mall with Jordy today, it rawked. we <3 shoos!" Ultra lame. So I pondered this: what does the average blogger really want? Do they care about a valid rss feed? Do they give a crap about the code? No. They care about this: a nice, pretty, clean interface and the ability to quickly and easily add and edit their posts. So I will add the boldify and italify and underlinify and linkify functions to Flip Lite, and start thinking about what in Flip Lite gets to graduate to Flip c2.

Since 1999, I've written a large number of articles for OSnews and babysat the site for Eugenia on a number of occasions. I also participate in the moderation and news maintenance on a regular basis. That's why I was so upset to see my latest piece, which I was really excited about, get completely passed over. That sucks. Cobind deserves a better reception than the icy one OSNews readers gave it. Too bad.

I've had this site for almost 5 years now, and it's been a rollercoaster. At its heydey, sethadam1.com was serving about 40 MB of traffic a month. There was an archives waiting list that was well over 200 names long. Then, with the advent of phatphiles, we were serving gigabytes of traffic, almost 3 terrabytes in just over as many months. Now, with Phish touring having cooled down signficantly and smaller, less mainstream bands gaining signficant followings, sethadam1.com is a bit in the dust. There isn't much traffic. I hesitate to convert this into a personal site again, but I think I'm going to do some housecleaning to make things a little more useful, both for me and for users. A /classic section a la tubecode, to keep relevant. A /photoalbum and /docs section, for personal stuff. My /blog, because I'm a l33t haxx0r who must blog the events of his life. Albums recommendations, because I like lots of /albums. And more. As I decide. In time. Today was productive, and I did some interesting Flip Lite hacking that may make its way into fl2.

...or does it? Since this thing has been around for a long time and gone through many periods of use and dormancy, it was time to resurrect, with the ultra stripped down sethadam1.com 5. It seemed natural then, to use Flip Lite, rather than the full Flip package, to keep it running. Sure, the theme isn't as cool, but that'll change too. More to come. Promise.