The Blog of Lucien Stals

Obviously we would like to be able to grow the membership of ByteClub significantly. Currently we have about 30 people registered on Tyler. Unfortunately, of these, only a half dozen seem to be active. This may change once the semester starts.

O-Week is set to be an opportunity for us (ByteClub and Monkeys alike) to recruit. Russel, Xavier and Matt are actively discussing ideas on the forum (www.byteclub.net/forum ) for O-week activities (coming up *very* soon). Keep it up. How much input do you guys want from Clinton, John, myself etc? Naturally you have our support.

(I'm speaking here for everyone without even checking with them. How nice of me )

But do you want anything else from us? How can we help?

I have some nice little monkey logos printed in colour on A4. Poster fodder for whoever wants them.

Other business…

I would personally like to see a major overhaul of the web site, but not quite sure just what to do with it. Input is welcome. Failing helpful input, arbitrary decisions will be made.

Clinton and I have been looking at some kind of CMS system that could help unify the site, making navigation and logins easier/smoother/more consistent. We have deployed one such system (Drupal) at http://test.byteclub.net/ for testing. Feel free to create an account (currently anyone can set up accounts) and start playing with it and give us feedback. The default account has limited functionality, but as I see people jumping on board, I’ll start elevating privileges.

Blogs…

Russel is working on a new blog engine as I write this. But do we also want to give people a choice of engines? While I have been happy with the SimplePHPBlog engine we have been using, it has obvious drawbacks. Do people want the option of switching to something else? I h!
ave been using WordPress on another site and am quite happy with it. W
e could have the SimplePHPBlog, Wordpress and Russel's Blog installed as options for people who want Blogs.

But again we could be back to issues of separate logins and maintenance issues for sys admins, although with a bit of scripting (sigh), I’m sure this could be easily resolved.

We have had some notable defections from our Blogs (Euan and now Andrew Cain). There is no official word on why, but I did hear some mumblings about wanting more features in their Blogs. Something the current solution doesn’t offer.

If so, what features do people want from Blogs (tell us on the Drupal forum?). Russel started a wiki entry, but there was little feedback, but if we are ready to make change, now’s the time to get involved and speak up. At this ponit, I’m willing to consider the possibility of deploying different blog engines at request, although I’d like to keep the number of different solutions to a minimum to save maintenance h!
eadaches If there is something you want, speak up and you might just get it .

Is it time to prune inactive Blogs? I am inclined to just delete all the Blogs that have never been used, and cast a suspicious eye over any that aren’t getting much activity.

All in favour..?

Logins are still an issue. But people have indicated to me that they are happy to have a separate login for their own personal blog, from the rest of the system. Perhaps we could get the Blog to use Drupals user authentication?

Or make the Blog a module of Drupal?

Or…?

…

Wiki…

What to do with the Wiki?

Do we wish to continue it's use? It hasn't been a huge success so far (Only the Blogs have been *really* popular). Is this an accessibility/login issue? Or have others, like myself, found mediawiki difficult to use? I still like the idea of using the wiki, but is mediawiki, the current engin!
e, gross overkill for our needs? I like the simplicity of docuwiki (ww
w.byteclub.net/~lstals/DocuWiki for a sample installation). It auto indexes pages (something I still can't get MediaWiki to do), and it has syntax highlighting of code which I really like since the ByteClub wiki is primarily a code repository, or at least largely technical in orientation. The main drawback of DocuWiki is that it has no support for user accounts. It is essentially faithful to the wiki philosophy of being open (read and write) to all. Can we accept this? (It's called security?). Could mean vandalism?

Drupal has a wiki syntax plug-in, but honestly, it sucks. On the other hand, Drupal *is* a Content Management System, and entries can be set to be editable by others. It may not use wiki syntax, but the idea is the same. Plus Drupal could manage user authentication, and I have managed to get a code syntax highlighting module working.

Can we formally drop the wiki? We can try to migrate content from what we have onto Drupal. Shou!
ldn’t be *too* hard, right?

Have a play with it and tell us what you think.

Enough for now.

Lucien (on behalf of Clinton and John as well.

PS, thanks to John for setting up the virtual host for Drupal.a

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I am in awe of the writers of that one. It's an impressivley well crafted piece.

I am also chilled to the bone at some of the implications. ]]>

Andrew was making my head hurt yesterday talking about Latent Typing, Reference Types, and Value Types.

Here's a link he sent me to help explain.

Latent Typing ]]>

what is going on with StarGate? Two weeks now, and nothing to watch on a Thursday night! Who in their right mind would rather watch sports (and tennis at that) instead of StarGate.

I'm going through withdrawal.

Firings Raise Questions of Blogger Freedoms

BTW, (CS1==SD1 && CS2==SD2)

Bowling for CS II ]]>

Design B is the same as A, but white on black…

You can vote for these designs on

the forum

Here's the blank t-shirt design as a Fireworks PNG in case anyone wishes to have a crack at making their own design (don't be shy). Just right click > save as…



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I'm adding a mention about JUnit to the testing lecture, although explaining how it works is well beyond the score of SD1.

I'm adding a mention about the debugger in BlueJ. Again, I don't expect anyone to use it, but for those who want to experiment, I'll point the way.

I'm trying to make up my mind if I should put in a few slides about Java1.5 prinf() method. This one's kinda interesting. If we use it, we may be able to do away with the Util class we give to students. I don't know if this is good or bad, but I tend to feel that if we can use only classes that are part of the standard Java (not our own custom classes), then the students will be better for it.

On a similar line, I wonder if we should drop the Keyboard class in favour of the Scanner class. It is also now a standard part of Java. The drawback is that it's in the java.util package, so we would need to use imports (not taught until SD2). It's also non static, so we would need to create objects of it, but we do teach this in SD1.

With the upgarade of this blogs engine, I noticed some new themes were installed. I tried the “new” theme. It's cute, but takes too bloody long to download. So I'm back to a plainer/faster one.

More themes…

I installed a bunch of new themes on the ByteClub Forum. Users can now login and change their own default theme. If there is enough interest, we could even change the default theme for the entire site. Sub-silver, the current theme, is a bit bland. But them some of the new ones are down right ugly. But I installed them anyway. Who am I to judge what others will like/want?

Even more themes…

My own personal (more personal than this one) blog runs on Wordpress, and I installed the Kubrick theme for it. This guy has done a great job of making Wordpress look very clean. Saved me a whole bunch of work customising is myself. It's all about time managment. I'd love to have a few free days just to sit and play with code. But it just isn't going to happen. So I just made a few tiny alterations to the Kubric theme and now I have a site to be proud of. Just hope I don't get done for copyright for appropriating some images ]]>

(Can I just point out that I have not been looking for this stuff. It just keeps appearing in the kinds of places I read things)

Blogger sacked for sounding off

(different article on the same story)

Bookshop worker first to be sacked over internet 'blog'

The offending blog: The Woolamaloo Gazette , complete with hideous colour scheme.

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