In a rush of, uh, things rushing, Monday I registered my LiveJournal client as a project with RubyForge, and last night I checked it into CVS there. Shortly I’ll make the version 0.9 release available at its project page.

No actual web page available for the project yet, but I suspect the project’s already ahead of 90% of its SourceForge-esque companions in having started its release in beta stage. I did some testing with the client on Windows 2000 today and, to my faint surprise, it worked perfectly on its first try. (I’ve included an ljpost.cmd file that seems to be necessary to let it accept standard input when called from something like NT XEmacs.)

Right now it's developed a strange problem which only shows up on the real server, but not on the test server. But, that's tonight's debugging...

Theoretically, I was going to get more done this weekend than I actually did. This is usual for me. I’m usually ready to get around to my personal projects by the third day of the weekend, which is of course problematic.

Saturday I decided that I’d head off to the East Bay on another day trip, up to Martinez by way of Oakland so I could stop off at a taco truck for lunch. I have to say, it was a pretty damn good burrito. (Undoubtedly more authentic than the ones at Chipotle, although I’m not sure it was necessarily better. Eventually I’ll get around to writing a mini-essay about the trap of authenticity, but as Alton Brown says, that’s another show.) It also makes me want to try to cook carnitas sometime.

Why Martinez? you may ask. Because that’s where the John Muir National Historic Site is, and I wanted to give it a visit.

It’s an interesting place, although not terribly interesting: a turn-of-the-century Victorian house that Muir bought from his in-laws, and that was undoubtedly too fancy for his tastes. When the house was damaged in the 1906 earthquake, he rebuilt a lost fireplace not as the dainty marble coal-burning kind the rest of the house has, but as a big rustic brick affair that could burn logs and make him think of campfires.

I wandered about there for a while, taking some pictures, most of which didn’t come out in ways that were particularly interesting. I need to work not only on composition but on more prosaic things like watching the camera settings.

On the way out, I explored Martinez itself a bit. Some of the East Bay is quite pretty; while Martinez has a claim to fame as the birthplace of the martini, it’s otherwise pretty non-descript. The downtown was typical of many older small towns in somewhat touristy metro areas, a mildly quaint veneer over a several-block stretch whose economic pain can be measured in the quantity of antique stores. (All small towns inexplicably believe that not only are antique stores are a draw, but the more the merrier.) And, while the claim seems to check out, it’s a little bit stretched: the original drink, simply the “Martinez,” is only slightly more martini-like than a Cosmopolitan is.

One thing I did notice, though, is that Martinez has a very pretty Amtrak station. In fact, I passed by one in Oakland that was also pretty. I also noticed that the trains here are differently colored than most Amtraks and prominently display “Amtrak California” on them. I wonder if this branch of the railway is trying to set themselves up so they can saw off the rest of the corporation when it finally finishes collapsing.

Sunday, I’d thought about cooking those carnitas. I did get a few household-type chores done: a load of laundry, running the dishwasher I’d loaded the day before, cleaning up the stove. But dracomistle was thinking about getting a nice dinner, and being of weak will, I found an interesting-sounding steak house in San Carlos called Izzy’s. I liked it; it’s somewhere between the level of an Outback and a Ruth’s Chris, with a lot of the gentleman’s club swank of the latter at decidedly less painful prices. The food was uniformly good with one caveat—both my prime rib and dracomistle’s steak were cooked medium instead of the requested medium rare. I’m not sure if the kitchen (or waiter) just biffed the order, or if they’re used to diners not really meaning medium rare when they ask for it. I’m pretty sure I’ve noticed this effect at other steak houses.

So, did I do anything productive? Well, I finished poking through Curt Hibbs’ tutorial on Ruby on Rails, working through it more or less verbatim save for setting my version up on PostgreSQL rather than MySQL. There are still a few nerdy questions I have (how would I change a parameter URI from “/recipe/list?category=Snacks” to something more REST-happy like “/recipe/list/snacks”, for instance), but on the whole I’m pretty impressed.

At some point I may revive an old idea of a restaurant review website that people suggested—years ago!—that I should do, using Rails as the back end. It would cut down on a lot of the pain that’d be required to set something like that up.

Of course, this is assuming I get those other projects back on track…

Naturally, after complaining in detail on Friday, Textpattern 1.0rc3 came out on Saturday. And does it fix all of my problems? No, it’s broken in new ways. I’ll spare you the details.

Before the release I suggested, finally, that the developers should have been checking their work into the Subversion repository as they worked over the last few months. I was told—in these words, although not by any of the actual developers—that I and other “complainers” just didn’t understand the software development process. When another such complainer observed that none of the changes we were assured were being made safely out of all public sight could be tested, he was snapped at with “we’re all here testing the previous release—don’t you know what beta software is?” Furthermore, we were not so politely informed, there were virtually no other projects, closed or open source, with developers as communicative and releases as frequent, so what right did we have to complain anyway?

As you can probably tell, my septic tank had overflowed by this point. I knew there’d be little value in pointing out that, in fact, I am currently in a closed source beta test with much more frequent releases and communicative developers (for the Mac RSS reader NetNewsWire); that this is not unique even among commercial developers; that Textpattern’s approach in the last half of 2004 was fairly unique among open source projects, and not in a good way.

One of those other open source projects is WordPress, which released its most recent version less than a week ago. WP constantly updated its source code repository and produced fairly frequent “beta release” installation packages, and the developers somehow managed to both code and communicate during the same week. Textpattern’s loudest defenders would have you believe this feat is essentially impossible.

The really curious thing about WP 1.5, though, is that its new “theme” system is essentially a full template system, allowing the level of flexibility that it didn’t have compared to Textpattern back when I was first looking at systems to run Claw & Quill on. WP’s themes are, frankly, more obtuse than Textpattern’s, a PHP-HTML tag soup. But it works. In fact, “it works” is the main concept that kept cropping up all through my investigation of WP. Importing the export file from Movable Type? It just worked. (It was a minor nightmare in Textpattern.) Viewing the site after import with the default template? It just worked. Presto. In 45 minutes, I got farther with WP than I had in hours with Textpattern.

I still have a lot of “theming” to do on that site, and it may be a little ornery. And it doesn’t address some of the issues I could address by writing my own CMS, I know: WordPress, like Textpattern, is written in PHP, is dependent on MySQL, and is heavily tilted toward the needs of weblogs.

But it’d be a lot faster than rolling my own (or even than forking Textpattern).

And, hey, if I get lost in the templates, WP has pretty good documentation already.

As I start this, I’m in a small town—no, a really small town—called Sunol. I gather the name is mostly heard in traffic reports thanks to a section of I-680 called the Sunol Grade, but what’s fascinating here isn’t traffic patterns—it’s that this feels like an isolated, rural town much farther away from the metro area than it is. Looking out the window of the Sunol Coffee House—an old building itself—I can see a tiny post office, two other buildings and a railway. Farther down main street in either direction are, well, maybe three more buildings.

Yes, this’ll probably be a little bit of a long lunch. I don’t feel guilty because this is a time when much of the rest of the department is out seeing “Meet the Fockers” as a group movie. If they’d been able to stick with their first choice of “House of Flying Daggers,” I’d have gone with them.

But I like finding places like this, and I’m reminded that when I was at There I found the East Bay Regional Parks web site and realized that district is just really honking big. I decided I wanted to go around visiting a few of those parks, but for the most part, I haven’t. Not that I can change that today—there are two nearby parks and I suspect I’ll give one a quick look, but it’s not going to be that long a lunch.

Naturally, my thoughts are on… templating systems. In addition to poking around a myriad of Python systems, I’ve come across the up-and-coming Ruby on Rails application framework (written as some might guess in the Ruby language), which is supposed to be great for what’s amusingly been dubbed “CRUD” applications: “Create / Read / Update / Delete,” the basic database operations. It’s certainly possible to write blogging/CMS software in such a framework, although it occurs to me that where it’d be really useful is… well, the application I’m working on for work. But they’re pretty firmly wedded to Perl where I am, so I’d need to find the Perl equivalent. (I’m also a little allergic to the constant drumbeat in the RoR community for a Mac text editor called TextMate, but that’s another issue.)

The annoying thing is the voice in my the back of my head saying: what would a content management system be like that didn’t have any templates? How could one be designed that’s still flexible and customizable that doesn’t use a template? The ideas that are bouncing around in my mind right now are for things that one might argue are still effectively templates, but I’m thinking of something that’s easier to manage and set up than the “XHTML with placeholders” approach.