Mephisto vs Movable Type

Recently, I changed the software I use to create my website from Mephisto to Movable Type. After using Movable Type for a few weeks, I want to say that I’m happy with the change. I really like Mephiso, but the new Movable Type 4 is just better.

First, Mephisto is written in Ruby. I love Ruby as a programming language, but it’s horribly slow right now. Using Ruby also limits my choice of where to host my site because Ruby support is still rare. Since I’m hoping to spend my time writing articles instead of programming blog software, I decided that the implementation language doesn’t really matter.

Second, Movable Type will “publish” my site by creating static pages instead of constructing each page dynamically. Because the web server doesn’t have to do as much work each time someone wants to read something, my site performs better.

Third, Movable Type has a much larger user-base. Anytime I have a problem or need a bug fixed or want to change something about my site, my chances of finding a solution are higher with Movable Type. Mephisto development has dropped to almost (but not quite) zero over the last 6 months.

Fourth, my biggest complaint about Mephisto is that it doesn’t support pagination, and that it’s authors don’t intend to add it. Pagination is those links at the bottom of an article that point to other articles. Not having them is a big pain.

I haven’t finished setting up my site the way I want it — the look of the site needs a lot of help — but I have found Movable Type to be much better at supporting what I want to do than Mephisto was.

Age and Creativity

Marc Andreessen just wrote an article about how age affects creativity, specifically targeting what age is best for entrepreneurship. He’s going to address the topic in two parts: first trying to get some real data, second to give his opinion.

He spends quite a bit of time quoting from the research of Dean Simonton at University of California Davis, who has spent his career studying how age affects creativity in different fields. I have to admit I’m sort of a junkie for well written research supported by hard data, and Simonton certainly qualifies.

Java vs Objective-C

I’m a long-time Java developer (applications, not websites) who started doing a lot of Objective-C programming for Macs about a year and a half ago. I thought I’d comment on my impressions of both languages now that I have some experience in both.

Objective-C is a great language, but there are a few things I miss from Java:

• Not needing to worry about linking
• Having all relevant information in once source file (.java) instead of two (.m and .h)
• Not needing to think about file organization
• Having warnings printed every time I compile instead of just once, when the file is first changed
• Easy bulk renames in Eclipse (Java), which are much more difficult in Xcode (Objective-C) though I hear this may change soon
• Debugging in Eclipse — Xcode’s debugger isn’t very helpful
• No memory leaks

Overall, these issues aren’t big enough to annoy me anymore. I guess I’ve gotten used to programming for a native platform again. Hopefully, the new versions of Objective-C and Xcode coming out in a few months will eliminate the last 3 items from this list. That’d be great.

On the flip-side, there are a few things I really like about Objective-C:

• Being able to extend the built-in classes easily
• Creating a user interface in Interface Builder is dead-simple

I haven’t found that the dynamic nature of the language has been all that wonderful. It certainly hasn’t hurt though. I’m sure I haven’t used it to its fullest potential yet, so I guess I’ll reserve judgment for now.

Programming: Master and Expert

I found an article written by Zed Shaw that describes perfectly how I find myself approaching my keyboard recently. He compares programming to martial arts and comments on how he finds himself disdaining complicated solutions in favor of simpler, more effective, approaches.

Summize: Cool Search Engine for Product Reviews

Summize is a cool idea for a search engine based around summarizing (of course) existing product reviews. I like how you can see the distribution of good vs bad reviews, in addition to the average, all at a glance. Much better than Amazon’s star rating system.

UPDATE 7/3/07: Amazon has started summarizing their ratings using something similar. Didn’t take long. :-)

Twiddla

Twiddla looks like a very usable tool for a group of people, who aren’t in the same room, to draw on a web page together. Kind of a whiteboard shared over the Internet, but designed to draw on live web pages.

One of the authors wrote a brief article on the development process (1 day to functional prototype) that describes a bit of why “eating your own dogfood” can be a good thing.

Beware of MP3 iPod

A few days ago, a friend told me he’d purchased an older model iPod shuffle on eBay. When it arrived, it didn’t look right nor did it seem to work properly. He asked if I could document the differences so he could get his money back from PayPal.

At first glance, his iPod looked like a real first-generation shuffle. But on closer examination, I found a lot of differences.

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The Price of an iPhone is Just Right

There have been many mixed reactions to the price of Apple’s new iPhone. Apple will sell the iPhone for $499 or $599, depending on configuration which seems expensive. And those prices require a 2-year contract with Cingular. Apparently, this is more than many people were expecting. It’s more than I was hoping for. But it makes sense when you add up the numbers.

A full size iPod will cost $250 or $350. Many of the nicer smart phones are in the $100 to $400 range, including a 2-year contract. Adding those up gives a $350 to $750 range for an iPod and a smart phone. For people who own both, $499 or $599 for Apple’s new iPhone is just about right. Notice that those prices are in the middle of the range. Apple’s product have been priced very competitively for years, and the iPhone is no exception. I predict the iPhone will sell really well.

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The GPL Is Not About Freedom

(Written in April 2005, but never published)

At home, I am planning to set up a file server. The only other thing this machine will do is act as a printer server so my wife and I can share the printer without any cable swapping. If I could have gotten a new Mac mini, I would have done so. My wife and I have been impressed and very happy with her PowerBook, but my budget was “as little money as possible.” So I asked around for an old machine I could get for free, and then explored my options as to what OS to use.

Of course my budget eliminated any newer Windows from consideration, and I didn’t really want to use my old copy of Windows 95, so I settled very quickly on BSD or Linux.

I’ve used OpenBSD before and been very pleased with it. But Linux seems to have more momentum, so I put it in contention. But I didn’t want just any version of Linux. I use Suse Linux at work and have used Red Hat in the past. I’m not too impressed with either of them as far as a server goes. Being somewhat of a security and simplicity freak, I didn’t want to have anything installed except what I actually needed to share my printer and my files.

After a lot of reading, CRUX became my primary Linux candidate. OpenBSD, of course, is well know for it’s security. I recently read that the Honeynet Project, a group devoted to “learn[ing] the tools, tactics, and motives of the blackhat community”, has determined that the life expectancy of a default Linux install on the Internet is growing, and is often measured in months. Some versions of Windows are compromised in minutes. And OpenBSD? The headline from their homepage reads: “Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years.” They measure themselves in available security holes, whereas Linux and Windows are measured in security violations as the holes themselves are too numerous to count.

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