Technology Is Frustrating
Time for another entry. Sure, it’s only been four days since the last one, but it’s looking to be a busy weekend, so I might not have time on Sunday.
I’ve gained another reader since I last wrote. It seems Mr. Larsen, my friend Sam’s dad, told Mr. Trapani (that technology teacher I told you about) about Organon when he told him about me. Or perhaps Mr. Trapani found his way here himself from the main website. I think that brings the total up to five. Wow, I’m really reaching a lot of people. My Webalizer log analysis information says that I’ve gotten over 1000 visitors (5500 hits) from 15 countries, but most of these are search engine robots and other indexers that follow links from major blog update sites like weblogs.com and blo.gs. Also, 42% of the hits come from me. (That’s kind of sad, in a way.)
I’ve also gotten a lot of visits from my content (a very good thing), mainly people searching for computer configurations and reaching my entry about my dream desktop/notebook PC. It’s probably now what they wanted, but I can’t say I care. Finally, my old friend Google tells me that there is only one site (brettia.com) that links to Organon, and that Organon is the top result for “Brett Epps.” Sadly, it’s a broken link. (By the way, did you know that Google has a built-in calculator? Just type your problem into the search box.)
This week was a bit hectic. First of all, I’ve been going to Mr. Trapani’s lab in the mornings to do work on the CSHS website for the counseling department. Thursday I managed to get out of P.E. (much to my friend Jim’s annoyance, who was forced to do the mile run alone) to check out a program Mr. Trapani found called WebMerge.
It’s a neat little piece of software, able to take data from an exported database file and generate static HTML pages from it. However, though it has some flexibility in its templating feature, its power really pales in comparison to that of PHP. (Sorry, Mr. Trapani, but I have a rigid honesty policy to follow here.) True, I use Movable Type for my weblog, which does essentially the same thing, but the real reason I don’t like WebMerge is that it offers no view of the underlying system that it runs on.
I think it will do fine for Mr. Trapani’s purposes (teaching his 6th period web development class about databases), but I really hope he doesn’t want to make it a core component of the website for the simple reason that it must be manually told to generate new pages, so it won’t work well with a dynamic (ever-changing) database. That, and the fact that WebMerge costs $80, which Mr. Trapani seems willing to pay. (Being on a $0 budget, I usually snub anything with a price tag, though there are some pretty good commercial programs out there that I am probably missing out on.)
Aside from the WebMerge project, Mr. Trapani also has me working on one big, more important task: building a Internet-based registration system for incoming 8th graders. Right now, students from the middle school have to make class selections on paper and turn those in, with a counselor or staff person hand inserting the results into a computer (I assume). With my system, which I can finish this weekend, providing I have the time, there will be no need for this arduous task, and the district will save paper. Not bad at all. Obviously there will be a lengthy beta process after I get a preliminary (alpha) version made, but it should be complete long before it is needed around February of 2004.
I’m really excited about this, for the sole reason that I finally get to do something fulfilling and enjoyable, qualities that my own website lacks. So thank you, Mr. Trapani, for awarding me this project when there were so many other contenders wishing to do it. (I was the only one.)
With this new project to work on, I’ve been watching the web development students closely, listening for any hint of knowledge about PHP or any other open-source scripting project that might prove useful. So far, all I’ve found is more people to teach, no one whom I can learn from.
I find it amusing that Mr. Trapani is so enthused by my talents. I seem to by his holy grail of a student, one that can do almost everything and is willing to learn the things he doesn’t know already. I never thought that I knew so much until I could compare myself to others my age and grade like this. I don’t know how I’ll manage to teach anyone in a few months the concepts that took me over a year to grasp, but I guess it’ll all work out all right if I take one thing at a time.
All that aside, I’ve got a new build of Linux running now (Red Hat’s Fedora Core 1). It’s pretty, with updated versions of the GNOME Desktop Environment, Apache, MySQL, and most importantly, PHP. It still doesn’t have the functionality, compliance, or ease-of-use that Windows has, but it seems to be about as stable. A new kernel, 2.6, is set to be released soon, and that will add to it’s ever-strengthening power.
Now I must run away and die, in other words, go take care of a neighbor’s dog. Hopefully I’ll get some cash out of the deal.