Thanks Mark

Cruciforum – a really (really) simple forum, written in PHP.
The goals are pretty explicit:-

A Cruciforum forum is lightweight, doesn’t require a database, and can be set up on your server in about two clicks of a mouse. It’s the easy way to give people somewhere to chat about your project without installing something heavy and complex like PHPBB; just put the cruciforum install file in an empty folder and go to it in your web browser, and that’s all you need to do. Whenever I see a small project’s website I find myself wishing there was somewhere I could talk to people about it, and that’s what this makes easy.

I played with it. I’m impressed. I already started hacking on it a little, fucking about the colours and markup.
So, one thing it could use, is some kind of spam filter thing, and some basic registration system – enter your email address, a password and a given name, maybe. Make the email address optional, even.
But, honestly.. it doesn’t really need much more. In fact, it’s beautifully simple.
Simplicity really is at the heart of it. The installation makes WordPress look difficult, which is pretty amazing.

1. Upload the file to your webspace, in a folder, say ‘forum’
2. Ensure the folder can be written by the web server
3. Visit the php file in your browser, pick a name for your forum, and you’re done.

No databases. No bullshit. And it renders static files, so it’s FAST. Like, really fast.
So, some things I’d like…

• I’d like to be able to register, for two reasons.. one, I want to protect my identity, so people can’t troll as me, and secondly, filling out my name, URL and email address each time I post (because I want people to know it is me) is a pain.
• Markdown is better than Textile, IMO. Plus, this is just awesome cool.
• Make it really easy for someone to brand this. It doesn’t use much in the way of CSS or markup, so do what FogBugz forum lets you do – copy and paste a bit of HTML to appear above your topic list and a bit of HTML to appear below it. Also, offer people a chance to enter a URL to their CSS file and logo if they don’t want much.

Go and download Cruciforum now. X11/MIT license.
The boy Langridge done good here.

But the final straw was with “static”? media which is what the Django folks call CSS, images, javascript, etc. The Django documentation makes no bones about this, they say it is not the role of the framework to deal with it, it should be served directly from Apache. While that makes sense from a performance standpoint, woe to the poor application developer trying to make some nice looking pages. Accessing static media within your templates requires a mixture of folder location, Django settings for media roots, and a complex regular expression url call that pattern matches the folder name to some sort of Django document root – well, I never was able to get an image displayed.

Ouch. I struggled with Django too, but lots of people love it.
Two Weeks With Django details John Taber’s frustrations.

Great article talking about HURD and its relationship to both GNU and Linux

Columbus Day!
For those of you who don’t know (ie. Me)

Columbus Day is a holiday celebrating the anniversary of the October 12, 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas.

Or, in other words… nobody really goes to work and everyone has a day off and most things are closed. I caught up with a lot of sleep, as after that stint in SFO I was feeling mostly beat. I spoke to Justin, one of the sysadmins at the FSF and agreed to meet up at 4pm in my hotel lobby.
Making the most of my day of American heritage, I left the hotel and walked over 100 metres the the 7/11 and got a Double Gulp of Mountain Dew, some Cheetos and a microwaved bean and ‘cheese’ burrito. Man, America rules.
Later, met up with Brett, Ward, Ward’s wife and baby, Justin, Josh and Justin from the FSF, and went for drinks across from my hotel. American bars are so much friendlier than most British places and table service is just so easier.
Dinner at Cambridge One in Harvard, which is pronounced Hahvahd. This involved taking the Red Line T from Park Street (Pahk Street) to Hahvahd. It’s very quick, reasonably clean and I didn’t see any crazy people. Met up with Mako, Daf and Asheesh, plus assorted other people who were hanging out from the GNOME summit. Later attempted with a few random people, plus Brett and Asheesh to locate Elizabeth, who never showed up. But I managed to eat again, which made up for it.
Got back to the hotel in time to grab a Big Gulp and head back to watch King of the Hill, and a lot of stupid commercials.
Running tally of Mountain Dew consumed: 4300ml.

Boston!
Okay, so after suffering the nightmare of having a plane take off on time, get above San Francisco and then have to land again because ‘there is a hole in the door’, and then waiting around 7 hours to get the next plane, being promised an upgrade and not getting one and thereby arriving in Boston too late to make the dinner you’d been hoping to go to for about 2 years, I checked into my hotel and fell asleep.
From what I’ve seen so far, Boston is nice.
Running tally of Mountain Dew consumed: 2400ml.

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails
Derek from CDBaby on why he went back to PHP. Surprisingly high number of Rails fanbois on this one.

CPC/IP – A TCP/IP stack for Amstrad CPCs

If you’re thinking of going to Che Manchester, a tapas bar, don’t. Why? Because they have a fascist door policy, that’ll refuse to let you in if you’re wearing Converse-style shoes.

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drinking mountain dew (not jew, as I seem to pronounce it) and off to find people and lunch.