C O N V E R G E

So I’ve been working a lot with Drupal, a content management system. Which is suppose to rival wordpress in many ways of flexibility and ease of use–both of which in my opinion is the very opposite. Both in general use and documentation, the terminology used in Drupal is outrageous. I’m not sure if I am just incompetent to the concept of Drupal but it has definitely shaved off a couple months off my life from sheer frustration.I highly recommend you stay clear from it.

However on a lighter note, XAMPP is quite amazing in providing a nice fully functional test environment for web development. It’s basically a series of applications that will emulate a fully functional Apache server off your local system. Which you can use to test or run scripts under a non-live environment. I used this sucker to mirror my wordpress installation while I worked on the basics of my new layout. Quite handy. I also used it for Drupal but let’s not get into that.

Also new 1.1.3 firmware for the iPhone was released a few days back. Some features including native springboard customization (lets you reorganize the tiles, which you had to jailbreak to do before) and faux-GPS system added to work in conjunction with Google Maps. It uses information from nearby cellphone towers and wifi spots to triangulate your location, then feeds that info straight into Google Maps. Probably the handiest thing yet for me. Considering the maps feature is the one thing I use on the go consistently, this is a huge bonus.

[edit] They also converted Gmail’s POP3 service to IMAP. Meaning when files are read via gmail web interface, they show up as read on my phone as well (and vice versa.) Joyyyyy :D

However, with the update came the lack of third party support (jailbreak) so I figured I could go without them for awhile. One thing I didn’t realize though was I have a slightly older verison of iTunes, and not the most recent. So my update failed which required me to do a full restore. I thought this was because of the previously jailbroken stuff, but apparently I read it was due to the older version of iTunes; that kind of sucks, but whatever. I can do without third-party content for a few months.

I’ve been doing a lot of coding lately for work (css, php, xhtml.) It’s pretty scary. The part of me that is kind of drawn to coding is enjoying getting things working and solving problems, but its seriously consuming a lot of my time. I’ve also been reading a lot of the new theories of web development and the part of me that made websites in high school is rebelling to a lot of the practices. However, the older more mature side of me can understand the purpose behind it and at the very least respect it. On one note, I do like the idea of practicing some sort of standard of making websites (to an extent.) If the software developers for browser engines are willing to commit to a standard (minus Microsoft and the dreaded Internet Explorer), as a whole making website will get some what less troublesome and at the very least most of our debugging will just be aimed at IE hacks.

Okay, enough nerding out.