Got MT going again
Properly, this time, I hope (insha Allah).
I ended up having to take the whole lot down and start again, reinstalling the whole Movable Type package from scratch. So far, I haven’t had the 500 error when posting an entry – I suspect it was the MT blacklist “plug-in” which was slowing everything down and causing errors when I posted entries. I’m sending a ping to them to tell them about this.
Also today, I got my copy of Practical Qt, a book on developing Qt applications by the founder of KDE, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, which I had ordered over the Internet from Amazon in Germany. I’m really surprised that it’s taken only this long.
I am sort of mulling what I’m going to do with it, though. Qt is a system for building windowed applications, which can run on Windows, Linux or the Mac. You can make the application look however you want it to look, but it looks by default like a regular Mac application on a Mac and like a Windows app on a PC. A few months ago, I was building a blogging application based on Qt, but I pretty much ran out of steam for that project. I switched blogging tools from Blosxom to MT; to control a Blosxom blog from your desktop, you need to basically build an FTP client with a text editor. For MT, you need something called XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Calls – as the name implies, it means getting another computer to run a command, really nothing more than that). It is a whole different skill to learn, and there’s a shortage of literature on it.
Which is why the Catkin blog hasn’t been updated since mid-July. I have pursued two separate projects based on it, but I’ve hardly committed anything to either in weeks or months. The idea of it as a college project has totally fallen through, as has my entire college course. Rather stupidly I thought this little program would establish me as a programmer, which I’ve since discovered it won’t. In fact, you can’t get a serious programming job without a bit or paper, and the jobbing programmers tend to get the boring jobs – with open-source projects, it’s the volunteers that actually do the exciting bits. (As for why it all fell through, it’s because it appeared that I wouldn’t be able to complete the project, so I stopped working on it for several weeks in the summer. By the time I picked up on it again, I realised that there was no chance of completing it in time.)
Which has pretty much left me back where I started 18 months ago, when I finally realised I had to get back to college after doing the agency game with slowly increasing for nearly five years. What tipped the balance was coming back from Ireland in April 2003, after my cousin’s wedding (she’s now expecting!) to learn that the company I’d been working for since October, which had not given me the slightest indication they were letting me go … let me go. The money I get from these jobs is enough to get by on, but it’s far from what my mother expected of me when I left university. She suggested going to agencies, but I ended up doing driving jobs after 18 more-or-less fruitless months chasing office agency work.
I’m not going to bore you all any more with details of my life (for now, anyway). I sometimes think that the daily adventures of an agency driver would make a blog in themselves (I might tell you the day I had to drive a truck to Birmingham after someone had … sorry, that would spoil the story). On the Qt front, I’ve still got to do some work on the Blogistan blog directory that I first announced when I got this domain nearly nine months ago. Insha Allah, I’ll get it up before the domain expires!
