The last month or so has been a real mixed bag so I think I'll start somewhere near the beginning and stumble through to the end.

Firstly, I still haven't finished migrating my site  to Storytlr, mostly because it is difficult to publish static content. It really sucks because you can't just have a few pages organised in any order and you can't have subpages etc which makes organising your static content impossible. You are limited to just 1 page which appears as a tab on your website. I submitted a feature request Here along with a bunch of other bugs and missing features I have noticed. 

Because I cannot easily publish articles in a desirable format I have not published my Storytlr review. I think it will have to be rewritten becauase the whole "1 week with Storytlr" approach doesn't quite work a month later.

Something fairly major has been bothering me lately and few of you have probably heard me vent about it. My employment situation is starting to not be funny anymore. It is half way through February and I have not officially ended my traineeship, and my hours are still minimal. I had a brief conversation two weeks ago in which we discussed my likely employment situation. To help me gain an overview of my situation I put some notes into text file and then said to myself "well it looks like I am probably screwed". I think the worse part of the situation is that I am in limbo , half in a job, three quarters out and I have no idea what is happening. There is no date set yet for an interview/meeting to straighten this out. It's not that my employer is bad, its just that the situation I am in is. Ideally, I want to stay with this employer as it looks like I could possibly have some great opportunities in the near future but the bottom line is that I need money to live on. I am getting very tired of having no money and work is NOT fun anymore.

On a positive note it seems like there is some jobs out there for me which even though they are only entry level pay multiple times better than my current one and some of them seem pretty interesting and a hell of a lot more inducive of a stable lifestyle.

Back to the technical stuff. I am looking at doing more work on my Python based CMS as I don't know how long until either I or somebody else gets around to hacking in better static content support into Storytlr. I think the issue with my project is that I pretty much suck at Python. I think I may need to go back to actually studying the language. Doing one simple task and then  googling for example on how to do the next is far too innefficient and just plain embarrassing.

The other day I thought I would see if I could parse the CUPS print history file as a way of billing. To do this I intended to make a web based interface so that customers could log in to keep an eye on their usage and so that administrators could generate bills and manage users. So the first thing I did was start designing a basic site with authentication and access control using CherryPy. I found this as it seemed to be the only decent piece of documentation on the subject. The trouble is that it seems to be written against neither CherryPy 2 or CherryPy 3. With CherryPy2 you cannot use the quickstart stuff (as far as I can see)  so the example fails and with CherryPy3 the auth tools have changed since that was written. I read more into the matter and found that there has been some changes to do with the auth tools which have not been documented very well so I can't work out how to upgrade the example code so that it works!

Poor documentation of FOSS software is a very annoying issue. Nobody actually likes to write or really even to read documentation; but why would you bother releasing your code into the wild without adequate documentation that people can use what you have provided!?!?!?

Moving away from Python and back to Storytlr. I have been browsing the code a fair bit lately pondering how I can hack in certain features. At one pointed I attempted to hack Zend Captcha into my live site and this did not go so well. I need to set up a development server at home and I have a virtualization capable sever except that I do not want to re-build it because I suspect the power supply is the root of all the problems I have had wiht the machine. It doesn't seem to be a very good idea to damage more hardware and waste time and money just for a few weeks of development which would might be lost when a  hard drive starts spewing corrupt data into the array...

I have been in contact with a few people in regards to creating an actual Storytlr community. Thankfully the Laurent (one of the creators of Storytlr) has been on the ball and is soon to help the community building process by recreating Storytlr.com to help enable a community to grow around it. See the mailing list thread here where this was briefly publicly discussed.

I don't think I will write another blog entry in this style. If people really want to see my random crap they could browse my lifestream at http://ddevnet.net