Rant

OK, OK. So not everything is working right yet. The drupal cron job is running so some feeds are starting to show up. I plan to add more and plenty of links to helpful websites. (I certainly have browsed a few of those trying to get drupal to work.) One big problem which has been there since the beginning is that transparent PNG files just don't work on Windows Explorer. My apologies. A fix exists and I'll try to get it implemented soon. But I have to admit that being primarily interested in the Macintosh and having been to enough Windows-only websites, I just ain't in that big a hurry. Leading to the next big thing: Explorer for the Macintosh - or as I like to call it "Exploder". Basically the CSS on this site fails miserably on my copy of Explorer. So if you aren't running Safari by now...

I have been programming for over 20 years now. The year I learned to program (in Fortran) was the last year the university had punch cards. By the next semester I was using a line printer and the next year a CRT. Only two years later I had purchased an Apple ][, although I was mainly working on minicomputers. (If you are too young to remember, they actually used to break things down as micro, mini and mainframe. There were never any maxi-computers, just super ones.)

Throughout my career I have loved making things work the way they should and have absolutely abhorred it when the tools stopped me from getting the results I wanted or making the tools work was the largest part of my job.

Will the wonders of the world wide web ever cease? There are a lot of things about web technology that just don't make a lot of sense. A lot of unixisms show through like a bad one-coat paint job. (And not everything about unix "makes sense" either. It's just the way things are done. After all, the internet is a unix legacy.) What many people seem to love about the web is the way all these different technologies can work together to achieve results. My pet peeve is the way they don't work together.

Well, the nightmare continues. I decided to try an Apache2 setup on my server. But using DarwinPorts I was unable to get subversion to build the mod_dav_svn. It wouldn't put it into the already installed Apache2 server in /opt. I tried all the variants including building a DarwinPorts Apache2 installation. In the end, I decided to look at Fink which I haven't tried in years.