As of approximately 9:30 PM this evening, the entire site is officially running on a combination of the Smarty template engine and the PEAR DB database abstraction layer. I expect productivity gains in the long term via cleaner, more portable code. I quickly found that Smarty is particularly effective at changing the way you think about scripting your pages. Thanks go to Titus for bringing Smarty and Pear to my attention.
In addition to the aforementioned changes, roughly half the site now feeds from a PostgreSQL backend rather than MySQL. The rest of the site will soon follow. I’ve planned the migration as a direct precursor to a comments system. Rejoice! (Or don’t.)
I picked up a couple tickets for the Cowboy Mouth concert at the Roxy Theatre on October 30th. Ticketmaster wanted an obscene 30% service charge online so I made a special trip to the Roxy’s box office this afternoon to save some money.
I’ve been searching for the one personal information manager (PIM) that will take care of all my needs (e-mail, appointments, etc.). The obvious solution would seem to be Microsoft Outlook; it comes with Office and it purports to have all the necessary features. But Outlook also has a lot of little problems—some by design—that come together to make it a pain to use as an all-in-one PIM. This is where Outlook add-ins hopefully come to the rescue. I’m going to try some of these out and see if I can’t make Outlook usable.
- Outlook-QuoteFix
- Reasonable arguments assert that the way Outlook formats replies goes against proper netiquette. Outlook-QuoteFix runs in the background and automatically corrects the formatting when you reply to a message.
- SpamBayes
- SpamBayes adds a Bayesian spam filter to Outlook.
- Lookout
- Lookout indexes Outlook content for fast searches.
- PocketKnife Peek
- PocketKnife Peek allows you to preview a message, examine any HTML code, and view header information.
Chris Pirillo covers a host of Outlook add-ins in his column from the October 2004 issue of CPU Magazine.
My old roommate from ASMS, Mike, caught me on AIM late this evening. I probably haven’t talked to him in almost two years so it was good to hear from him. It sounds like he’s had a rough time fighting with some real problems in his life. Just chatting with him provided a sobering realization that any problems I think I have really pale in comparison to the problems other people, far and near, have to deal with. It’s a fact I should probably be more appreciative of.
