03.10.03
Posted in Unfiled at 8:20 am by James
I had the idea of writing a book, or more correctly a series of essays about my philosophical views. I was trying to think of witty names. Ideas I came up with are “A motivating thought” and “Appetite for life”. (This was actually a while back. So I was watch a morning show, and they were talking about a book “Room to Grow: An Appetite for Life” by Tracey Gold. This book is psychology book about life and eating disorders. So I guess that thought is better suited to a topic that I wasn’t thinking about..
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03.04.03
Posted in Unfiled at 2:22 pm by James
I was watching the news in early Feburary, and they had statistics about how the last day of frost was around feb 20. (This way you know when to plant your crops). Unfortuantely, I believe the ground hog saw its shadow. Needless to say its freaking cold right now.
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03.03.03
Posted in blogging at 4:03 pm by James
Postnuke benefits include:
1. Modularity: easy to program distinct units of code. Module standards ensure minimal name conflicts, and a greater degree of readability.
2. Wide array of built in modules: this is really cool since i dont have to constantly reinvent the wheel. For example the FAQ system is a stock commodity in any website.
3. Excellent session management: postnuke performs some pretty fancy variable handling under the hood. Most noteably is its handling of GET, POST, and SESSION vars.
Some drawbacks i encountered:
1. Lack of standards in modules: postnuke has standards imposed on top level function signatures. However, once inside the function, a developer can include random php libraries and then really just start doing crazy things.
2. Difficult to locate modules. the website modules.postnuke.com is pretty useful. It has news postings of new and updated modules. Sometimes I find it hard to use. Ideally, I would like a more freshmeat.net type index, where a single project won’t have multiple entries. This way I could easily view an index and see the range of modules that are available.
3. Limited extensibility of layout. This is not a black and white statement. Postnuke has excellent theme support. Additional modules such as centerblocks also facillitate this customization. However what I was looking for in particular was 1.) customizing the left and right blocks on a per module basis. I will have to give them credit though. This is not an easy task. In trying to implement this scheme, I found severe difficulties in actually how to organize this information.
4. Limited user/password system. I was intent on trying to build a ‘My Account’ area for postnuke under a seperate SSL server. Its a considerable hack to seperate the website like this. I’ve seen some posts on on the postnuke message forums concerning moving user.php. This does work, since this is the gateway for all my account functionality. However, it was getting to be a bit ugly, and so i decided to put this idea on the back burner.
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Posted in PL Research at 3:43 pm by James
This semester in school I will be researching the following: 1) Getting up to speed with JavaPLT’s nextgen compiler, and 2) exploring mechanisms to unify the java type system.
The other ideas currently on the back burner is type inference of java byte code. For this I was thinking about using the becl library.
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