Dev-Picayune

As an interesting side-note to my Linux woes, I found this — MandrakeMove : move with Internet, Office & Multimedia in your pocket! which essentially allows you run Linux off of a CD and a USB thumb drive. Pretty cool idea really.

After a series of personal set backs, I am debating about the direction of my personal projects. One of my set backs was recorded in my ScW Blog and discussed my somewhat successful but lack luster performance installing Linux on my computer. This was preceeded by an accidental frying of my power supply. As a result, things have been really making me doubt my abilities lately and have generally gotten me in an anti-computer funk.

Another set back occurred when I got to analyzing the data and formatting related to my Bible software project. First, I found some $19.95 software at LifeWay that seems to accomplish nicely what I was I attempting to do. So much for my secret desire to show up one day before the actual HCSB was in print to show to the LifeWay folks. I obviously was a little behind in my thinking. The only thing I didn’t like about their software was that it seemed a little busy. There was so much on the screen that it seemed a bit distracting. This is not to say that I will give up on my quest, but it nonetheless makes it harder for me to get motivated about reinventing the wheel.

My second set back with this particular project has been the underlying data itself. If I am going to swipe the online data, and use it, I obviously have a lot of choices about how I format it. I also need to think about other versions that I might want to include as well. Some of the data representation issues are: paragraphs, poetic formatting (Psalms, etc…), section titles (non-scripture that is inserted to identify the various sections), footnotes, glossary definitions and references. My current plan is to turn as much of it as possible into XML and then reformat it coming back out. If I were to try to put too much of it in the database, I might get lost attempting to think of every field that I might need to capture or I will end up with a fairly ugly system of child records that record all the modifications to the text.

As for my other projects I recently have played with a few other things that have either been dissappointments or discouragements. On the discouragement front, Stardock Corporation has a series of products in their suite (Object Desktop) that seem to accomplish anything I could have ever dreamed of. I downloaded the DesktopX component and was particulary impressed with the beautiful enlarging desktop icons and the freedom of placing things on the desktop as I wanted. It certainly isn’t perfect, but it was quite amazing. WindowFX was rather cool, adding a drop shadow to windows and special transition effects. At the same time, it all seems like too much. I shouldn’t need a whole suite to make me happy.

I am still looking for that one good tool to allow me to customize my desktop enough to make it more to my liking. I don’t need to kill off the start bar completely, but using it launch everyday applications is slow and inefficient. And using the desktop to organize shortcut icons is annoying, and cluttered. The built-in windows support for creating toolbars is nice but I don’t like the toolbars that much. I can’t really customize them, I can’t do rotating menus of bars (like I had with my toolbar program).

In an act of stupidity, I decided to recheckout GeoShell. For awhile a couple of years ago I was running GeoShell as my main shell in windows. It provides it’s own version of a task bar, start bar, etc. However, it too lacks the customization I would like and it didn’t seem to work correctly out of the box. Plus, my theory is that anytime you replace the explorer.exe shell you are just asking for more trouble than its worth. I also tried Codename: Dashboard which along with a host of similar programs attempts to emulate the presumed Longhorn sidebar functionality in the future Windows version. Lot’s of components are available (a slide show, news tickers, stock tickers, clocks, and quick bar displays)… but for launching programs it isn’t the end-all-be-all. It is mostly a waiste of space and time. Supposedly, I could add my own component to it using their API… but I am not sure I am all in a hurry to do that.

This entry marks the creation of the new Dev-Picayune blog which will hopefully be used to track the progress of several projects I am interested in.

A quick list of projects I would like to poke around with:
- Bible program that allows searching and cross-referencing with tabs for showing the references
- Text editor (a somewhat manditory right of passage type thing — I have done a simple one in the past but this would be far more expansive)
- Ledger program that would I use to replace Quicken with at home… it would be Client/Server based so Becky and I could both work on it at the same time and it would include some cool budget performance reporting tools — as unlike Quicken, it would be far more budget oriented
- Image cataloguing program. This would allow for commenting images effectively as well as quick views of histograms, raw file conversion and generally would work to support my digital workflow
- Web-site management utility… yes there are lots of them out there but I need something that is simple enough to just support some quick template files — might even have some things for publishing pictures… or maybe just a utility for publishing pictures on the web-site… haven’t decided.