Well, I just survived my first week of school. Things didn’t go too bad, but they’re trying to make us do a lot more writing and “creative thinking” this year, and though I like to write, most of the things I have to write are required to be on subjects I know nothing about (e.g. I have to write a hymn this year…blech…) and since I was homeschooled (yes!) I’m kinda used to being able to tweak the courses a little to fit my style. I also gotta write at a formality level that I don’t usually write at, which makes it harder still.

For those of you who have been following Midget’s development, I think I should annouce that I’ve decided to rewrite it. Completely.

No lie, peoples!

Midget in its current state is very disorganized - all the layers are there, but you gotta remember all sorts of weird globals, mainly because the old Midget was based on code that is being used at the ExperienceUI website which is really old, bloated, and inefficient. Also, Midget currently makes 25-30 SQL queries per page, plus another 10 or so for the comments form, and 5 or so each for each of the AJAX applets. I managed to get that number down to 6 queries per page for non-logged-in users, and 8 q/pg for logged-in users, because of the additional checks required to authenticate their session. I also hate that wiki formatting engine - it has a lot of bugs and it isn’t properly parsing some pages, specifically when I ported the GNU General Public License to wiki-formatting.

The half-finished rewritten version of Midget can be seen in action at http://area51.midget.no-ip.org/. The first thing you’ll notice is the visual style - I decided to get rid of that old “box art” theme as that too was a rip on the ExperienceUI website. I decided to go with a 3rd-party wiki formatter, as I really suck at parsing text and stuff. Currently I’m using Text_Wiki, which seems to be a lot more compact - and easy to implement - than MediaWiki’s parser. The original plan was to port MW’s parser but…ech…Parser.php is 144KB, then there are like 2 more files you gotta include and though I did manage to partially port it, I eventually ended up with some strange object that looked like it was used for search indexing as opposed to a wiki-formatting parser.

Someday, whenever that is, I’ll write a search page for Midget. I’m really kind of scared to do it, though, because like I said I really suck at parsing text. And parsing text is really the only way to write a mini-search engine. So no searchable websites for awhile, I’m afraid, Midget users.

Well I gotta wrap it up here, got some work to do on Midget though I’m really quite tired even though it’s only 10:45. Probably gonna have to get a cup of coffee or something so I can survive my to-do list:

Midget - TODO:
————————————————————————
[x] Rollback of logged items (when possible)
[x] Comment system
[ ] Finish admin panel
[x] Admin panel options for site name/site desc
[ ] Page categorization
[ ] Make sidebar SF logo and W3C validation buttons actually work
[ ] Make JWS compatible with Internet Exploder
[ ] Make Special:Contributions work
[ ] (minor) Show a notice when delete-votes > 0
[ ] Implement the ability for users to choose themes/styles

Great news - the DSL modem came in yesterday and the Fuhry Kitchen Table is now officially high(er) speed. The transfer rates are 384Kbps and 1.5Mbps - not too bad considering the fact that 48KBps is about 16 times faster than the old dial-up line. We are well on our way to being up absolutely 24/7.

FYI: as of this writing BigMomma has been up for 4 days, 5 hours and 42 minutes. Our goal is to hit 2 months before she runs out of RAM and needs a reboot. And in that case all I have to do is switch a setting on my router so that the port is forwarded to Nighthawk, which will probably end up being a backup HTTP server or at least a MySQL server.

Ohyeah, nobody’s seen Pharaoh Atem (aka Linux Overlord?) for about 3 weeks now…pray for him…he starts choking when his connection bandwidth gets below 200KBps for more than about 4 hours straight He’s like the only guy I ever IM with for any considerable amount of time and I’m starting to wonder what’s going on.

Ok, I’m now officially a graphics designer.

Check out www.fusionnerd.com. See the logo at the top of the page? And the “link to us” section at the bottom? Yep. That’s my doing. Images were created with GIMP and animated with IconLover.