Chuggnutt!

Month: December 2003

  • NetOffice

    Installed NetOffice, PHP project management software, this morning to better manage my various Web projects. Once it’s up and working, it’s a pretty slick piece of software. Had some trouble installing it and getting it to work initially, though.

    First, after it’s installed, it prompts to you log in to start using the software—with a username and password. The only password I gave it was an administrator password, and the documentation I had didn’t indicate what the username is to log in with. I correctly guessed the username was “admin,” but then the system wouldn’t let me in, it kept giving me a “Session error” message. I was finally able to make that go away by disabling NetOffice’s custom session management routines and letting the system default to PHP’s native session handling. The files I had to modify for this were includes/library.php, general/login.php, and projects_site/index.php.

    Pain in the ass, but that fixed it, and now it works pretty well.

  • BendBuzz

    My friend/business partner and I are launching several new websites, and I’m pointing to one here: BendBuzz. He’s taking the lead on this one, but I’m totally behind it. It’s a weblog-type site devoted to Bend and Central Oregon—not necessarily news per se (which Bend.com has pretty well covered), but for anything we can think of. Kind of like Slashdot for Bend. Check it out. It’s brand new, so there’s not much content to see yet, but that’ll change quickly. Also, I encourage anyone local to Bend to head over and feel free to contribute. We’re open to just about anything.

  • Late night

    Late tonight. I’m actually working on 2 big articles to post here, at least one of them will be up tomorrow sometime. They’re long, geeky passages on content management, PHP, data modelling, metadata, and stuff that’s been floating around in my mind for awhile, and it’s about time for it to come oozing out. Be warned.

  • The Far Side

    Come on—who wouldn’t want The Complete Far Side for Christmas?

  • Beer Brewing Software

    For some reason that I now forget I started digging around online tonight to see what the current state of beer brewing software looks like. The last time I’d played with any such software, I installed the evaluation version of ProMash on my old computer and tried it out. It’s probably the best piece of software for brewing out there, and to be sure it worked well and did a good job, but when you look at it you can’t help but notice the Visual Basic GUI-clutter-itis that prevents it from breaking through to the best-in-show program it wants to be. (See a screenshot here to see what I mean.)

    The two lists I found are Lee’s Brewery Guide to Brewing Software and the Open Directory beer software category, and I’m disappointed to report that the state of brewing software is right about where I left it. Even ProMash looks the same.

    Here’s a bit of a wishlist of features I’d like to see in brewing software:

    • Simple layout and navigation.
    • Visual color indicator—I want to see what color the 30+ SRM porter will be.
    • Staggered complexity by usage—if I’m brewing from extract, I’m not worried about seeing all-grain stats and figures to tweak on the recipe formulation screen.
    • Open source—open code, open databases.
    • Perhaps web-based. (I tend to see everything as having a web-based solution these days, go figure.)
    • Custom report generation.
    • XML data transfer. Data storage in a database is great, but I want to be able to export to XML for whatever I might need.

    To be sure, ProMash covers most or all of this quite nicely—its layouts and colors make my eyes bleed, though, and it’s not open source.

    Of course, complaining about the current state of affairs for a particular genre of software, accompanied by listing a bunch of desired features for said software, is usually followed by the self-same person announcing that they’re going to develop the ultimate version themselves. What can I say? I’d be tempted to do it, but I really don’t have the time—there’s too many other irons in the fire right now. Plus, I haven’t even brewed a batch of beer in over a year, so I’m not even qualified. Sometimes, though, you just gotta vent. :-)