Shlrm.org Blag

At work I’m dealing with this “Semantic Web” concept thingy. “Web 3.0″ it is called. Frankly I don’t see the point in it yet. The goal is to have the internet also contain data to ensure that computers can find relations in the data and such, not just pages with links that people can browse. One of our projects involves taking unstructured data and mining entities and relationships from it. I’ve picked up a book, the only book, on programming software to (ab)use the semantic web. So far, I am unimpressed. The source code in the book does not match the source code that you can download from the books website. And, the two different packages on the books website (one is just Chapter 2’s code, the other is all the code for the whole book) also had different code, and the “all encompassing” one was even missing the right files needed to run the code!

So yeah, unimpressed.

San Antonio absolutely sucks for technology.

It is just about impossible to find hard copies of references or tech books.  I know that the internet is a widely available source, but sometimes you just have to have the paper copies of things. Especially when it comes to older languages like C. ANSI C. Not C#. Not Visual C.net. Not C++. Searching the internet for ANSI C tutorials (or help or examples or whatever) doesn’t net very much. (OMG PUN)

So I looked up a couple books based on reccomendations. There’s an 840 page ‘For Dummies’ book that is supposed to be quite good regarding getting into ANSI C especially coming from other languages. And then a C Reference book that would be useful. Especially when getting into the more in-depth usage of C (since there’s no “javadoc” for the C libraries online, at least that I’ve been able to find.) Of course these are only available in one store up in Austin. Even the library doesn’t know anything about these books.

San Antonio only exists for the Spurs, the Alamo, and the Riverwalk. Oh and the Government/Military and the Medical Center. If you’re not employed in one of those things, you might be mowing the grass (and then blowing the trimmings out into the street for someone else to deal with!!! [but that's a rant for another time])

San Antonio Sucks.

EDIT:
Found this. That makes the code not suck. Pasting code into this thing is still a PAIN, as it doesn’t auto translate <>, and other evil html characters when pasting in the code block.  And you can’t simply paste all your code into the visual editor, because it’ll munch off all your formatting :(
Better but not great.

Original Post:

*sigh*

Wordpress does almost everything well. Except pasting code. It can’t handle that #include<stdlib.h> is not an HTMLs.

So I need a blag that doesn’t suck at handling code. Searching the intertubes for source code blog doesn’t get me very far…

Well I should’ve known better than to just use Joomla! for something without doing the research on it.

As it appears, joomla has poor user control. There’s no granulation. So the website I’m working on for my corporation in Eve Online isn’t going to work in joomla. Mostly I need something simple to manage content. A Content Management System as it were. Joomla isn’t going to cut it. It’ll do for now, until I can find something else to manage the content.

My requirements aren’t horrible.

• Blogging type stuff – to allow corp members, who feel so inclined to post articles about their excapades
• News type stuff -  to allow the corporation to post news entries for things that happen corp wide
• Calendar type thinger – to allow the corporation to post events and/or due dates. I think this is probably very important because we need to be able to have deadlines posted somewhere easy for everyone to access. Helping to ensure that we don’t default on any corporation contracts.
• Static Document management – To hold things like the Corporate bylaws (once I figure out how to write bylaws) and other official corporate documents
• User management – I need at least the ability to moderate users to the site. And then a bit of permissions management within the site, so that not everyone can create events, post news, or muck with the corporate documents.

So the requirements for the site aren’t too strenuous, but joomla fails miserably regarding the user management. Which pretty much breaks the entire thing.

Drupal might do it, but I’ve read that drupal is quite complex. I don’t particularly want to roll my own CMS, as there’s already plenty out there, and my goal isn’t to build a CMS, the goal is to build the content, which is going to be difficult enough.

This is just wrong.

The problem here is not that this was all done in a panic. The problem is not that there are evil people. There will always be evil people. The problem is not that it doesn’t have enough oversight.

The problem is that it was done at all. This money is going to be poorly managed compared to someone’s hard earned dollars. There’s no cost to these polititcians spending this money. They don’t care how the money is spent, only that it results in their being reelected next time.

The thing is, no one even considered the consequences of this stimulus. Well, no one in the federal government.

We THE PEOPLE should be very angry. We should be making this anger known to the Federal Government. They need to know that we don’t like what they’re doing. And if you do like what they’re doing, keep in mind that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. What seems good for you right now comes at what cost to others? When does that cost come around to you?