I got really tired of the eye-hurty mess that was that other blog skin, so I just threw Simply Modern on here. I kind of like it. It's nice and...simple. And modern.

Who would have thunk?

I had a guest article published today on Boycott "Boycott Novell!". Cue shameless self-promotion.

Also, somewhat unrelated: life is a lot nicer when you don't read Slashdot.

Soyeah. This is in part just to knock that picture of Richard Stallman out of the top spot on my page; I am instituting a "no scaring children" policy on my blog and shall sink that picture post-haste. But it's still a cool project, which is why I'm throwing it out there right now.

Anyway. Senior project for college is coming around, and after a couple of abortive attempts (like what the Drupal AppBar guy did between me getting turned down for my Google Summer of Code project and getting back to work on it for school--agh!), I've settled on a project: a remote music collaboration system that, for now, I'm calling WebSession. WebSession is intended to bolt into digital audio workstations like Ableton Live or Adobe Audition and more easily allow musicians to do their thing over the interwebs.

Originally found here, and re-captioned:

I'd just like to point out that Ubercart may indeed be the best thing since sliced bread, at least in the e-commerce field. After switching to it, and away from the standard Drupal e-commerce infrastructure, I was just able to re-build out this site's core functionality in the space of two hours.

I think I'm in love.

OK, so while I love Linux as a server environment, it gives me the creeping horrors on the desktop and I stick to Windows there. This means I need a terminal emulator, and a good one would be nice. I've used the old stand-by, PuTTY, for approximately two centuries. (Or about ten years, but who's counting?) It's very functional software: does pretty much anything you need. No complaints about that, and I'm grateful to Simon Tatham and company for making such handy software. But it's always had some very un-Windows behaviors, and they're a real pain. Some are understandable, although could be worked around (for example, Ctrl-C is used as an abort command on the terminal side of things, but if you're highlighting text, it's not exactly rocket science that you want to copy that text when you hit Ctrl-C) with a little thinking. Some are not, and after having eight different PuTTY windows on my toolbar¹ today, I had enough of this crap.

I dig a lot of electronic music, and I'm interested in the guts of the technology used to make it. I was looking around the interwebs a few minutes ago for a copy of the Virtual Studio Technology specification for audio plugins (used by Ableton Live, my digital audio workstation of choice) and stumbled upon something way cool: VST.NET, an implementation of the specification for use with .NET applications. Ihaven't checked out Mono for VSTs on Mac OS X, but I'm curious.

The title kind of says it all here. If you are providing a Photoshop document and a "web style guide" as your entire (paid) contribution to a project, you are not a web designer. You are a mockup artist. At present, this is going to double the web-design cost of a friend of mine's project because you "haven't done HTML/CSS in a while and couldn't provide" an actual...you know...web design and he has to hire somebody else to do what you should be doing.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee.

I'm a big Nethack fan, and have been for years. The problem with the regular game, though, is that it's almost impossible to play on a laptop that doesn't have a number pad unless you like vi-keys, and I can't stand them. So I play a lot of the isometric tile-based frontend of it, Vulture's. Vulture's Eye is the frontend for NetHack 3.4.3, and Vulture's Claw is the frontend to SLASH'EM.

It seems like the developer forgot to pay for his development site, though, and downloading the packages became a bit of a pain. I've mirrored both packages here because a friend of mine wanted them, and I figured I'd mention it in case anyone trips over this post.

So I got really tired of the Deco theme from Drupal.org. I also wasn't fond of a lot of my design decisions from the old site; I was new to Drupal when I built it, and decided to fix a whole bunch of mistakes in rebuilding it.

Over the next few days (that should be pronounced "weeks" for those new in town) I'll be adding a number of features back, including my portfolio and a new addition: using the Project module to handle issues and requests from clients. I haven't seen it used that way previously, but I think it'll be cool.

EDIT: Whoops. Sorry for flooding Monologue, I forgot it was set to pick up my feeds...;-)