Month: April 2005

Dream

Today I had the best sleep since Maxim was born. I slept for about 8 hours or even more. Olga was taking care of Maxim and I didn’t even heard them. Ok, maybe once or twice, but that doesn’t count really.

Usually, I don’t have dreams in those two or three hour sleeping breaks that I am used to have recently. Today though I had enough rest to notice the dreams in my head. One of them was particularly entertaining.

There is an expression in Russian which can be translated as “as ugly as a crocodile”. This was the base for my dream. I don’t know why it came up though. So I was there, in the dream, telling a story to some British folks. In Englihs. Strange, I know. And I came to the point where I wanted some nice graphical description which would sound funny. I am bad at these things, but I try anyway. And I was telling them something along the lines of:

She was ugly. She was ugly as a crocodile. No, actually there is this type of crocodiles which are so ugly that all normal crocodiles don’t want to hang out with them. So she was as ugly as one of these.

Being just funny is not enough. I had to be smart. So instead of using “this type of crocodiles” and “that type of crocodiles” I wanted to actually name the types. And than I realized that I totally uneducated about crocodiles. All I could remember were Nile crocodiles and alligators. And I had no idea which one of them is uglier.

Actually, I don’t think crocodiles are ugly. They are kind of cute. In the phrase that uses crocodiles to describe human ugliness, all of them are equally ugly.

So there I was – standing in my dream, stuck in the middle of telling the story, trying to be funny and smart, and lacking one good metaphore. It’s not exactly a nightmare, but surely not one of my most pleasant dreams.

Thus I woke up…

P.S.: From a quick Google search I learned that there are alligators, caimans, crocodiles (reptiles), and gavials. All of these are in a crocodile family.

Oopsy… those were three hours, not two!

Maxim eats about every three hours. Sometimes two and a half. If he starts demanding food after only two hours since last feeding, than either Olga or I start playing with him, trying to win some time. And usually it works. Anything from half an hour to an hour is possible to achieve.

Today Maxim started crying for food two hours after his morning feeding. Olga was sleeping, so I picked him up and started singing to him. It didn’t work. I walked around the flat with him. Nope. I told him a short fairy tale. Nu-uh.

I was trying everything for about half an hour. Olga woke up. We decided to feed the guy anyway. Olga took him and started feeding and I took the baby chart to fill in some blanks. After focusing on for five seconds I realized that Maxim was right. He slept for three hours, not two. We just confused the time.

The point of the story: you can’t trick one hungry baby with no charts of yours. He has his own clocks and expects everyone else to synchronize with those. He doesn’t give a damn about day time saving, timezones, atomic clock, ntp and whatever else there is about time.

Wind of change or switching blogging software

It is spring again, and I am getting carried away by that wind of change that gets me every year. Once again, I am not satisfied with my website and I am ready to have some action in order to fix it.

After using Nucleus CMS for more slightly more than a year I got fed up with it. It seems that it is too flexible and modular for me.

Changing looks and feels by editing templates, skins, and files with stylesheets and blocks of sidebars is way too much. I would rather prefer less flexibility and more centralization. As things are, I always forget where I have to go to edit the output. There is also another issue with most of the stuff stored in the database instead of regular files. Plugins need to be reinstalled every time I edit them. This is not something that I am willing to do anymore.

Also having a huge pile of functionality in plugins rather than in the core has its drawbacks. Plugins are written by “other” people. Meaning that there is less quality control applied to plugins. And that there is version dependancy between plugins and the core software. This brings a lot of problems when upgrading the core. And I don’t want to fix the same problems over and over again.

Yet another issue I have with the user interface. The system is flexible and powerful, but the interface is by far from the well designed. As an example, consider settings. There are global settings for Nucleus installation, blog specific settings, user specific settings and plugin specific settings. All of these are all over the place and one has to remember what is where. Or browse through all of them. I don’t like it.

On top of my complaints toward Nucleus, I have a really pleasant experience with WordPress. User interface is clean and really thought-through. All the functionality that most people will use is in the core. Plugins are taking care of all the rest. It also features a better post editor, pinging tools, user management, and anti-spam utilities. There are also great improvements in the file uploading (thumbnailing, commenting, checking for dublicates and renaming).

Overall, WordPress seems like a much better system at the moment. In fact it seems so good that I can’t stand the fact of not using it. Thus, I will be switching to WordPress 1.5 in the next few days. It will take me some time to move all the posts from the last four years of my blogging. When it will be done, I will correct the obvious problems and will switch it to production.

One of the shortcomings that I can forsee from the change would be the links to posts. I have made a mistake with the structure of the permalinks. I will have to pay for it now. This will cause me a slight reduction in search engine and bookmark positions, but I am willing to do it anyway. If I got there once, I can get there again.

On the bright side, I will (finally!) fully standard compliant blog. Currently, there are still some problems with MS Internet Explorer and Konqueror. These should be fixed with the migration. I will also remove Google Ads from all pages of the blog and will leave it only for large articles, like “Vim for Perl developers” and “Practical RPM”. Maybe somewhere else too. But it will surely be gone from the main page.

So, please stay with me, while I pass this stage. I will keep you updated. You too please let me know of any misbehaviour that you might notice.