Axodys

It was almost surreal watching the [Seahawks take it to Carolina today](http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/football/nfl/specials/playoffs/2005/01/22/panthers.seahawks.ap/index.html). Seattle has played pretty well all year and they’ve looked pretty dominant at times (just ask Philadelphia), but I just didn’t expect them to do this well against a tough and experienced Panther team. I kept waiting for a big play to shift momentum the other way, but it never really happened. The Seattle offense was solid all day and the defense forced Jake Delhomme and Steve Smith into subpar performances. What a great day for Seahawk fans everywhere.

Next stop Detroit!

Since I haven’t really felt motivated to revamp my weblog’s theme yet I’m reactivating my old customized theme for the moment with a few tweaks. I think originally I had thought it might experience significant breakage under [WordPress 2.0][], but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The front page is going to display entire posts again because the excerpt plugin I was using and the standard excerpt tags don’t play nice with Markdown and Textile formatting for some reason. [Google AdSense][] will be reactivated for individidual posts still, but not the main page. That won’t change at all until I do a complete overhaul.

[WordPress 2.0]:http://wordpress.org
[Google AdSense]:http://http://www.google.com/adsense

[Dan Bricklin][] (one of the guys behind VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet software application) is working on a web based application called [WikiCalc][] that will offer the collaborative features of a wiki in the guise of an online spreadsheet. [WikiCalc][] is in the alpha stage of development now, but based on the [screenshots][] I’ve seen it looks very promising. Perhaps more importantly from a user adoption standpoint, [WikiCalc][] is being developed in Perl and will be released under a GPL license so it should be freely available to run on all major platforms once it’s ready to go. Needless to say I’m very excited about this application and I anticipate a lot of other people will be as well.

[Dan Bricklin]:http://danbricklin.com/log
[WikiCalc]:http://softwaregarden.com/wkcalpha/
[screenshots]:http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?page_id=2349

This year’s [Rose Bowl][] was pretty good tonight and Vince Young was unstoppable. I saw most of the Texas - Ohio St. game at the beginning of the season and I knew he was good, but I definitely gained a profound appreciation for his abilities tonight. If he came out this year and I was looking for a guy to build an offense around I would definitely take him over USC’s two Heisman winners. He’s tall and a good passer, strong enough to stay upright when grabbed by a defender, yet he’s highly mobile so that rarely happens anyway. NFL scouts have got to be drooling.

[Rose Bowl]:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/football/ncaa/specials/bowls/2005/01/05/young.texas/index.html

I just got an email announcing the Aaron Swartz’s [web.py][] framework has been released. It’s just a .1 release, but it’s already in use by [Reddit][] and looks fairly interesting.

On a related [Python][] web application framework note, [Turbo Gears][] is steadily marching towards its .9 release by all accounts. [Turbo Gears][] gives you a little bit more out of the box than [web.py][] at this point ala [Ruby on Rails][] in terms of packaging everything up together nicely, it’ll be interesting to see where both frameworks are three months from now.

On a completely different tack I took a look at the [PAWS][] (Python Adventure Writing System) a little bit over my vacation and it looks fairly appealing. I really like the idea of being able to write a text adventure in [Python][] rather than say [TADS][] or [Inform][], but in practice it’s got some issues. I had to dig into the code and tweak a couple things just to get the example game to run under Python 2.4 on MacOS X because the tkinter and curses based interfaces didn’t work. On top of that game portability is nowhere near as simple as it is for [TADS][] and [Inform][] games because you need some form of Python installation rather than a simple player application. I want to write a text adventure at some point this year, but I remain unsure as to what language I want to actually write it in.

[web.py]:http://webpy.org
[Python]:http://python.org
[Reddit]:http://reddit.com
[Turbo Gears]:http://turbogears.com
[Ruby on Rails]:http://rubyonrails.org/
[PAWS]:http://members.nuvox.net/~zt.wolf/PAWS.htm
[TADS]:http://tads.org/
[Inform]:http://http://www.inform-fiction.org/

[DSL][] (or Damn Small Linux) is a nifty minimalist Linux distribution crammed into a 50 MB iso. It’s designed to run on Pentium 200 era machines and up and Mary’s old Compaq fits that bill so I was intrigued by the idea of removing Windows 98 and putting that on it. [DSL][] is built on top of the [Debian][] packaging system so it’s definitely possible to install a lot more than the base system if you desire too.

I decided to give [DSL][] a try on my computer first this afternoon before trying anything with the Compaq, but ran into a blank black screen problem during the startup sequence once XWindows tried to launch. I just about gave up on getting it working on my computer, but then while poking around on a [DSL][] support forum found a reference to [NVidia related XWindows issues](http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=10;t=9096) and used that info to get things booted up properly.

I haven’t had a chance to really play with things yet, but I expect to have some time this week to explore the system further. I may even give it a go on at work if I can find an old PC to try it with. I’ll try to write up some further impressions later this week.

[DSL]:http://damnsmalllinux.org
[Debian]:http://debian.org

I decided to take some time today and upgrade my weblog software to [WordPress 2.0][] now that it’s been out officially for a few days. The upgrade seems to have gone smoothly for the most part, but I still need to iron out some plugin and theme issues.

For now I’m going to run things using the default theme until I get my bearings and determine where I want to go from here. I was getting pretty tired of the old look and I’m not sure whether I want to continue tagging my posts any more or not. I’m going to have to go see what kinds of 2.0 themes are out there and see if there’s anything that I want to use as a basis for the next Axodys revision.

On the individual post formatting front I’m also leaning towards standardizing on markdown rather than textile, but I will need to do some further investigatiion on the relevant post pluginformatting issues that [WordPress 2.0][] may have introduced. It looks like the [Text Control][] plugin will allow me to switch between [Textile][] and [Markdown][] formatting relatively painlessly, but [Smarty Pants][] character encoding doesn’t seem to work properly at the moment. I’d investigate further, but it lets me set [Textile][] as my default for all my old posts and specify [Markdown][] on an individual post basis and that’s all I really need.

At any rate now that the new year is here I’m going to resolve to renew my blogging efforts and write more daily.

[WordPress 2.0]:http://wordpress.org
[Text Control]:http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/text-control/
[Textile]:http://www.huddledmasses.org/2004/04/19/wordpress-plugin-textile-20/
[Markdown]:http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
[Smarty Pants]:http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-smartypants/