Well, I have to say that I am very impressed with movabletype. Not only is the environment easy to set up and use, it's rather elegant in places. I really like the way the formatting is all css, and can be easily modified with the supplied templates. The admin interface is attractive, reasonably easy to understand, and easy to navigate. I could really see how a person could use it for a CMS an a largeish system and really cut significant costs.
I set up Gentoo on a PC recently. Pretty neat system. I really wanted to update to a newer s/w stack and thought I would give a distro-from-source a try. I have the following comments.
- The documentation is really lacking compared to say RedHat or Mandrake.
- I had trouble with portage, and it wouldn't allow me to emerge to a new one. This is problematic to say the least.
- The runlevels, while easy to update seem foreign from other unix systems I have used. On the flip side, it is dead simple to say 'rc-update add portmap default' and have it do all the right things.
- i had another problem with no clear cause. For some as yet unknown reason devfsd stopped working, which caused a problem with the inittab, where it sets up the tty's and couldn't find /dev/tty. That took overly long to troubleshoot as it left me in a state where I had to reboot to make config changes.
- Emerge is neat, but there is no telling how long it will take to compile something. If I knew, I might line up a few things to do at night. You can emerge -p package, of course but it's difficult knowing much beyond the number of dependancies.
- I don't have a clear idea of how the compile install options are set. So when you emerge vim, it doesn't make a link to /usr/bin/vi and I don't have a clear reason why. See previous complaint about documentation.
- It's overly difficult to figure out what packagte provides what. I know you can search with 'emerge -S'. But that seems to take forever and a day. It takes less time over the web at rpmfind.
- There's more, but we'll cover it on a different day.
Slashdot had a great link to a paper on one of my favorite web sites, First Monday. Social Science at 190 MPH on Nascar's Biggest SuperSpeedways tells how theories of competition and cooperation are evident in nascar racing. In particular, they spend a lot of time examining drafting behaviours as it requires cooperation at some level between racers, or in some cases race teams. It was written in 2000, before Dale Earnhardt's tragic death, and reflects what might not have been written today about Dale's aggressive driving. It's a good read.
CSS or cascading style sheets have come a long way. It's amazing to me how well these pages can be formatted, with simple changes to style sheets. Now if all browsers had exactly the same bugs, everything would be great.
Writer's Almanac features Billy Collins, Moday, February 25, 2003. This is the only poet that I have spent money on, and felt I would spend more. His poems speak to me, the way others don't. He is modern, but not full of himself. You should check him out.
