Yay!

Heather is staying with us this weekend. Heather of the now short(ish) hair!

Unfortunately, I can't actually prove with pictures she's here. All I managed today was pictures of her backside.

Boo, my photo taking skills. Though, it's not like I'm not nearly famous for my backside pictures.

Danger, through his mom, had given Kris two VIP tickets to today's A's game against the Mariners. The Mariners who, by the way, have Ichiro playing (Ichiro being the only consistent hitter I have in the Beat the Streak contest. At Doyle's suggestion, I prefilled Ichiro as my hitter for the next two weeks, in case I forget to pick a player. What do you know? My best streak is at 13 now. Kris' is at only 9.).

Not being exactly the biggest baseball fan ever, I suggested Kris ask someone else to go with him. Yes, I'd go, but wouldn't he rather go with someone who will also enjoy the game with him, and not go and wonder why she was there, thinking of all the other tasks she'd rather be doing? I mean, come on, think of the babies!

So, he called up his new best friend yesterday, and made plans. I offered to watchin' the doggen, so plans were made to leave from here, with two dogs having a doggie fun day at Krikitt Downs.

I'm still not sure what drugs I took to make such an offer escape my lips.

So, this morning, Andy came over with Blue and Shadow. Thankfully, he didn't knock when he arrived. Instead, he followed standard Krikitt Downs' friends protocol and walked right in. I love when my friends know they can do that, and do.

A short while later, Kris and Andy were off, and I was in the house with four dogs. Four dogs that, combined, were double my weight. More doggen that I'm used to having.

Blue spent the first half hour of his visit with me staring at the front door where Andy had gone through. He stared almost as if, by sheer force of will, he could bring Andy back through the door.

When that failed, he sat down next to me and stared up at me.

Panting.

For two hours.

Might have been longer, I'm not sure. I tried to pet him, get him up on the couch next to me to snuggle me as Bella does. He wasn't having any of it, and sat there, staring and panting, panting and staring. At one point, he went back to the front door to stare at it, no panting. He returned a few moments later to stare at me.

And pant.

A strange way to spend the day, to be sure.

Eventually, the game ended, and the boys came back from the game. Blue heard the car door shut and either Andy's or Kris' voice first, and bum rushed the door. He was shortly followed by a Shadow, the Cone-head and the Howler.

That either Andy or Kris made it through the front door with the mounds of doggie flesh piled up behind it, amazes me still.

Today's meals were quite questionable. Entertainably so, actually.

Rather than going out to the store, I was determined to find something in the house I could eat for lunch. Preferably something with decent nutritional value. That requirement's the kicker.

Having cleaned out the refridgerator a few days ago of all the expired or spoiled foods, I knew this task wasn't going to be easy. In the scouring, however, I found a box of rice milk on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Okay, milk-ish drink, check.

After searching the cabinets for a bit, I realized I had just barely enough pasta for one serving, so made pasta, with sauce from the open jar in the fridge (handily boiled in case it had started to spoil).

I also found some unopened shaved parmesan cheese. Hot damn, I thought, this was going to be a good meal: spaghetti and sauce with cheese, lemon and herb tuna fish from a can in the cupboard and a big glass of (rice) milk. Not bad, not bad at all.

I sat down with my meal, Blue staring at me on one side, Bella staring at me from the other, and started to eat.

After a bite, I had to wonder if I had accidently put bluecheese into my bowl, instead of the shaved parmesan... Oh, wait, no, I had actually put parmesan into my bowl.

Oh, ick.

I managed to eat only half of my intended meal.

A project that has fascinated me for a long while is Wordpress. I'd link to the site except, well, I don't have to. Everyone and his mother knows about Wordpress (and if you don't, it's only a google search away).

One of the fascinations is the continual comparison of Wordpress to Drupal. Drupal is a content management system that lets you store all sorts of crap on your website. With no programming experience, you can set up a pretty nice website. If I ever finish one of my projects, you'll be able to set up a nice website with a custom look AND import your data from a Wordpress site.

Now, Wordpress is a blogging platform. Anything more than straight blogging, and you need to migrate away from Wordpress. And that's fine. What it does, it does very well, and has a significant market penetration. Doesn't hurt that I've met Matt and spent time accidently running into him.

Because the tool I'm writing will work for Drupal as well as Wordpress, and Wordpress has a huge following, I figured subscribing to a Wordpress mailing list would be good exposure to the issues around Wordpress, from a different perspective.

After about a month of reading the mailing list discussions, my opinion is honestly, holy crap, this is a premiere blogging platform? WTF?

Issues that surprised me, in no particular order other than this is how I remembered them, include (recalling that these are developer issues, and not necessarily issues an end user would notice or care about).

1. No error reporting on plug-in installation failure.

   This is basic stuff. If there's a problem during the installation process, let the user know.

2. Log errors to a central location.

   A developer published a break-through plug-in, without full code release though, that allows other developers to record a log message with a single line, and this was a breakthrough. I almost have to pick on this one, since Drupal has had watchdog() in since I started working on it in the 4.1 days many years ago.

3. Multiple database connections corruption

   Different plugins, needing to create connections to a different database or its own connection to the WP database, can cause DB connection corruption errors. The recommended solution? Use the PHP mysql_* functions, losing all the DB helper functions of the package. This removes a large part of the alure of using a framework in the first place by removing the database abstraction layer (and forcing the user into the only database the plug-in author supports - what if the user wants to use postgres? Or Oracle?

   Update: apparently this issue was brought up from a bad bit of code, which has since been fixed in some plugin. Need to look to see if you can set up access to multiple databases in WP.

4. Big fans of superficial criticisms

   In the GoPHP5 movement, rather than debate the merits and goals of the idea, a lead developer complains the site is ugly. This surprised me a LOT.

5. Plugins for simple fixes

   A user needs to install a plugin to change a quote in a post title from an incorrect HTML code to a correct one. Another one that surprised me. I thought people considered Drupal to be complicated.

6. The view of Drupal as "THE" competitor

   The number of references to "Drupal converters" and Drupal does this and Drupal does that nearly universally implies that Drupal is the WP competitor of note. Personally, I find other blogging platforms like Typo3, or hosted ones like Vox, LiveJournal, or Blogger to be WP's correct competitors.

The part that gets me in all of this is that Wordpress developers seem to both drink the WP koolaid and have a chips on their collective shoulders.

I'll still continue to watch the project, with the intent of bringing to Drupal any nifty tools that Wordpress users get, but the glow of the project has worn off. What is it about discovering the insides of software that removes the shine so quickly?

Mike complained I wasn't putting anything up on my blog. Go fig.