I’m in one of those annoying places where my brain is full of project and code ideas, and my hard disk is full of half-completed projects.

While I’m really NOT in a position to start hacking away on yet another item, especially when 99% of my active code-writing cycles is going into Spot Specific, there’s some good ideas that I really want to get out/alive.

So, I’m wondering – not dissimilar to the Shot of Jaq contribution scratch-your-itch wikithingy – should I just get them out there (even on said scratchpad, or my own site) and let them roll with the punches, see what happens.  I’m in the fortunate position where time is the one resource I’m lacking, but I’ve got pretty much everything else that I could need. Hosting coming out of my ears, spare hardware, etc. Could probably even muster some geeks and support workers to help with the project…

Anyway, what should one do when you’re sure the software you’re thinking of would make the open source world a better place, but you don’t have time to write it?

Suggestions welcome.

-Dx 

I’ve been spending a lot of time inside the inside of wordpress recently, partly by choice, partly by "force". I was requested to make some modifications to an already existing CMS to allow it to be used for online publishing, but the time available and my experience with the product in question were both very slim so I put forward a case to use wordpress and to do a total conversion instead. Client wasn’t so keen, client went away, client thought about it, client came back, wordpress happened. Writing a theme for wordpress that looks nothing like wordpress was a lot easier than I thought, and I look forward to spending some time (when I’ve removed the my study from boxes) into redoing my own site in a similar style – neuro sorta had a theme similar to the one I want, for a while. I want my content to be presented differently depending how old it is:

• Loads of space, bigger fonts, and more obvious, perhaps with a custom background colour and border
• Smaller, but still full width, with less emphasis, a stock background and no fancy border
• Left Column, 1/4width of page
• Middle Column, 1/4width of page
• Right Column, 1/4width of page

and a seperate column on the right hand side, full width, bar the header, that carries the usual wordpress gubbins. I’m also liking the idea of theme highlighting based upon category, so I will play with that too, I think Like most of my projects, I’ll probably never get off my arse and write it, but I think this recent (paid) excursion into wordpress hackery has given me the kick in the crotch I needed to get off my backside and work on my own site for a change! Maybe.

The site in question is CK:ClicK. We also have plans to take our wordpress changes into a grand unified plugin and release it open source style "at some point" soon-ish.

As emo as that sounds, it has nothing to do with knives. Although it does have something to do with resiak (he tidied up my regexp, and notified me of the bug in the first instance).

FaceHack is a tiny application that gets around the facebook inability to import from URLs with GET paramters (?’s, or question marks, as google will like to index them as) – this is ideal for you LiveJournalers, etc. because they use stuff like http://resiak.livejournal.com/data/atom?tag=facebook

It’s currently verison 0.1a and you can download it and run it to cludge around your own specialst URLs without having to wait for facebook to wake up.

Will obviously work for other type people who have this bug too.

Patches welcomed, and, yes, I will host URLs for you, friends, if you contact me and give me the URL you want "hacked".

-Dx 

PS. Try Essk’s Ubuntu Countdown for Facebook; and leave her nice comments if it doesn’t work.

LugRadio updated their site. To match the Shiny Season 5ness of it all.

aquarius phoned me up on Friday to ask if I could whip something up for planet.lugradio.org in-time for Monday.

So I did.

(download planetplanet theme – don’t whore the CSS)

Enjoy.

-Dx

I’ve recently taken some time out from the whole embedded/xBase/RTORS thing stuff due to a number of reasons, one of which is a burning desire to work on something else.

Something half-way between a server appliance and a Windows box. I want to develop my own Linux distro.

Something like Ubuntu for the server room.  My working name for it is Open Domain Controller, or ODC. I’m planning a wiki – not tool for tool sake – because at this stage there’s more planning than anything going on, and I want somewhere to stick my ideas and document things. That way, if I have some good ideas, maybe people will join me

ODC should manage everything from users and security to access and maintainance of all network available facilities (mail/intranet/wiki/etc) on a network-wide basis – including being aware of other ODC servers on the network and sharing account and security data with them (without excessive user intervention)

If this sounds vague and vapourwareish, that’s because it is. Nothing more than an idea I’m playing with for now.  Chatted it around IRC for a bit, where it got a good responce, done some SAMBA reading, etc. Not much.

What do you think, sound reasonable? Doable? Worth while?

"Open Small Business Server" – only thing missing is SharePoint….