January « 2009 « A Better Way

My bookshelf

I’ve got a lot of books; just recently I ran to Ikea to pick up a huge shelf to manage the overflow. But, there’s a group of books that I keep by my bookshelf, just in case I need a quick reference, or just feel like reading. Here’s a breakdown, from right to left:

-Manual for an MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard (honestly, not quite sure how that snuck in there)

-The Design of Everyday Things, an absolutely fantastic book; I’m only about 1/4 of the way through it, and already I love it. It’s about the tiny little nuances about designing user-friendly things; it’s not explicitly technical (more about physical objects than virtual ones), but it’s definitely easy to cross it over into the web development / designing realm. I picked it up on reccomendation of Jeff Atwood.

-Dreaming In Code, another really good book; I saw it in the library one day and decided to flip through it. It’s a fantastic rendition of the exploits of the developers of Chandler, a personal information manager, and explains in detail how many things can go wrong with a software project; software is never on time, and the author (a reporter) does a great job in explaining how this phenomenon occurs.

-The Art of War, by Sun Tzu; it’s hard to find a copy that’s just the Art of War, and not ‘the art of war in relation to business’ or some such. It’s pretty fascinating; it’s about military strategy. I couldn’t find this specific copy on Amazon; I think I got it from Barnes and Noble about two years back.

-jQuery in Action; I love jQuery, more and more as each day passes, and I figured it was about time I picked up the book. The online documentation will always be more up-to-date, but I can’t bring that in the car with me (without a 3G netbook, anyway), and the book is written so that I can read it from cover to cover. It has several interesting insights into the technical reasons of jQuery’s architecture.

-Comet and Reverse Ajax; one of the ‘reccomended books’ Amazon advertised to me while I was ordering jQuery in Action. It’s really, really short, but it explains how to do something I never really thought possible with HTTP protocol: use a server push, instead of a client pull. This may mean Neflaria gets a real-time chat.

-Red Hat Linux 8 for Dummies; picked it up a long time ago when I was first experimenting with Linux. It does a really good job at getting a Linux dummy up to speed.

-MCTS and MCPD books for .Net Framework 2.0 web development; a set of 3 books written to get my MCPD. I hate the whole idea of certifications (I’m a firm believer that skill > credentials), but I figure I should get them eventually (because very few other people believe that).

-MCTS for SQL Server 2005; see above. Although, has actually useful information, not garbage to memorize in the rare event that Visual Studio’s intellisense and Google collectively collapse.

Top to bottom on left stack:

-Wired magazines; Wired’s awesome. It’s like Gizmodo, only in more detail.

-Swing Hacks; when we (Don and I) were first looking at developing an MMORPG, we were trying to decide what language to use; consequently, I picked up a few Java books, this and the next two. I knew very little about Java at the time; it was the cross-platform compatibility that attracted me. It was the entire language that turned me off.

-Wicked Cool Java; has a lot of cool project ideas for developers at any stage. If you want to mess around with Java a bit, this is the book to get.

-Killer Game Programming in Java; what I expected, and yet somehow not. It takes you from developing your own graphical engine all the way through game mechanics, which is awesome; but, with the abundance of pre-made 3d/physics engines out there, it’s more than I needed, so I never got more than halfway.

-Starting out with Java 5; my CS classes were in Java, and this was the book I used. Highly reccomended for beginners.

The next book to go up there will be Digital Security, which is another amazing book; it totally opened my eyes, and changed the way I thought about security. I’m only halfway through it now, so it’s by my bed instead of on my bookshelf.

I’ve been using Movable Typ e for a few months now. I’ve liked it, but it wasn’t great; it worked well, but I wasn’t blown away. After a while, it moved slow; there was no way to remove a lot of comment spam at once (which I seemed to be particularly prone to), and I had a few bugs, such as having to log in twice each session. Maybe they weren’t all MT’s fault; but I had trouble finding support.

So, when we set up our new Windows Server 2008 machine using a 64-bit edition, I hit a wall: there’s no MySQL support for ActivePerl x64. There isn’t any official support for x86 either; but there are workarounds for that (use external repositories). It also came at a time when I was deciding whether or not I wanted to switch, so it pretty much cinched it up; I decided to try out WordPress. It was a PHP/MySQL system, both of which I had already set up, so I expected (or at least hoped) that it’d be pretty simple to get running.

The first thing I had to do was back up my old MT database. I expected some long, tortourous sequence of MySQL edits or something, but all it came down to was logging in, clicking “Import/Export”, and then export. It spit out a text file, which I saved to my desktop. Next, I unzipped a WordPress download into my blog folder (and set up the requisite site in IIS). I set up a database and a user in MySQL for my blog. I then edited the wp-config-sample.php, filling in the requisite database information and renaming it to wp-config.php, visited the site in my browser, and hit ‘go’. Seconds later, I had a new, live WP blog.

From the admin panel of my blog, I went to tools, hit “import”, selected “Movable Type” from the list, browsed to my file, and uploaded. And that was it. I had totally converted to WordPress in minutes. I was absolutely astounded by the ease. It was already much faster (with the help of WP-Cache), and running well.

Next stop: new design. WP looks like it’ll be much easier to work with, so hopefully we’ll be up soon.