Who begins too much accomplishes little

February 7, 2007

It’s been a long long time since I last posted something on this blog site. During these months, I can’t say I’ve been lazy, or unproductive. I’ve worked long hours at work, and I have started many projects, but yes, I haven’t written much (nothing at all to be honest). The problem lies in the fact that I start many things and never finish them. It’s something I can’t help. Something innate. Just like curiosity. By curiosity, I mean intellectual curiosity, I’m not a big fan of gossip magazines.. anyways.

Let’s go back to our geekery, and let’s talk about projects in the works.

A new blog engine

Inspired by a friend of mine who rolled out his own a quite some time ago, I decided to build my own CMS/Blog engine, one that would fit my needs better than what [WP][WP] does. There’s nothing complicated in developing a custom blog engine. Nothing. So why isn’t it finished by now ? Well, it was almost finished, when I decided to fully rewrite OOP style. That was a big mistake. I should have finished it, and then put it online, and made changes along the way. But that’s not what I did. Instead, I trashed every file, and I have yet to code the first line. Everything is written on paper, just needs to be coded... just needs to be coded... sigh...

Then came along ... Python. Well, Python did not exactly pop up out of nowhere 3 months ago, but that’s when I decided to give it a try (probably subconsciously influenced by prominent bloggers). Since Python is an easy language to learn, it didn’t take long for the "I should write my blog engine in Python" idea to go all the way up to my head and hypnotize me for ... two weeks. ahem. This time, it’s a technical hurdle (connecting a mysql database to Python 2.5) that came in my way and made me give up on this idea. I have some working code, that I might post here, but a blog without a DB is hardly conceivable. Fortunately, or unfortunately if you look at it from the productiveness angle, I’m full of ideas and in no time at all, I was all excited by a new project of mine.

NHL Videos for us, mac users

I’m a fan of NHL, and a fan of Montreal Canadiens. Unfortunately, I live in Europe now, and NHL is really not big here. The wonders of Internet made it possible for people like me, to follow the results of their favorite team, and in a broadband age, to watch games highlights in videos. That is, if you’re not a mac user. For some odd reasons (who said money ?), yahoo sports, NHL.com streamed videos with Windows Media Player. Mac users never know if by some kind of magic, they’ll be able to watch the video or not. And believe me, for an apple fan-boy and NHL enthusiast like me, there’s no way I was going to let go on this. I came up with a plan, that involved hotlinking videos from akamai and then share them on playlist, using some obscure (but nonetheless useful) standards. I was ready to shake things down. The development was almost over, web 2.0 goodness, and every design cliché you’ve seen on start-up websites for the past two years, for once, I was going to release something, useful (at least I hoped), well coded and nicely designed. It all crashed just before launch, when Yahoo released a revamped version of their sport sites. (You can read about it on RWW). Highlights are now available to mac users. great. Next idea please...

MVC programming kicks ass

Ever since Ruby on Rails was released, I’ve been paying close attention to the ROR style of coding. It amazed me. I’ve toyed with it for a couple of weeks, but I wasn’t really into learning a new language (for once), and so I gave up pretty quickly. 2 years later (or you could say, last weekend) I stumbled upon Biscuit, a PHP MVC super lightweight framework. The quick tutorial charmed me and I gave it a try on-the-go. It rocks. It’s so easy to use, so easy to understand, and mimics pretty well ROR. But that wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t get my super-genious-brand-new idea out of my mind: build a MVC framework. At this point, to really understand the magnitude of my disease, you have to remember that I haven’t developed anything using a MVC framework, and I wanted to build my own framework. Two days later, I gave up (again) and left something unfinished like always. Well, I didn’t give up on the MVC coding style, just on building my own framework. I’m now investigating Cakephp, and this should keep me busy for at least, the end of the week... ;-)

Note: Thanks to Babozor whose recent blogging activity made me realize how much I suck at blogging, and as a result, made me want to write this post. Thanks !

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Hi, I’m Tim. I’m a Software Engineer at Formspring.me. You can read more about me or follow @pims on Twitter or ask me almost anything on Formspring.me