So I’ve been playing with Zope and I have to say that I am really impressed with all the features built in. Unlike php it’s a fully integrated development environment. It has excellent database integration features, a reasonably good dynamic HTML component and is very extensible and written in Python. Some of the advanced stuff will require some python knowledge, but for a lot of things it won’t be tha important. The big question is can it handle the traffic of a massive web site. It is clearly good enough for medium sized sites. Any site I would be working on as a pet project wouldn’t be that big, but for a CNN or Yahoo! sized site, it might not be fast enough.

I might even move this web site over to Zope. I’m not sure yet. It’ll take a while if I decide to go that route, so don’t hold your breath.

I saw this silly fake news site today. You can put any name in a url and it will give you one of their templates. For instance, if I wanted to create a url that said I died in a car crash, I’d use this: http://hubert.chen.swellserver.com/news/top_stories/auto80.php.

. Amusing for about 5 seconds I guess.

I’m also playing with BitTorrent again. I had forgotten what a cool architecture it has.

I had another interview where I got asked some of the more esoteric features of C++. I’m trying to decide how valuable I think it is for an interviewer to ask those type of questions for any language. I know what a finalize() method in Java is, but I’ve never had to write one. Even things like defining an interface are pretty darn rare for most application developers.

Sadly, Half Life 2 has been delayed. They are hoping for a holiday release, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it didn’t even make it this year. The good news is that I’ve been playing Counter Strike pretty well lately. And War3 too.

I got Pictures from the Pacific Grove tri. The last few are courtesy of Action Sports International.

Tracy’s mom is in town for the weekend, so we’ve been hanging out with her. We watched Daredevil and Two Weeks Notice, both of which were not bad, but not amazing. Also Michigan football kept up with their great tradition of getting highly ranked and then losing, this time to a pretty tough Oregon team.

Alex said that he’s doing the Treasure Island Triathlon, so I might sign up for that as well. Tracy suggested doing the sprint, which I’ve never done before, and it wouldn’t require as much training. Sounds fun though.

Did the Pacific Grove Triathlon this weekend. My results were pretty good I think. At least i turned 8:07 miles on the run. Here’s a summary:

Pacific Grove Triathlon Olympic: 2003-09-13

Kojo again smoked me. Oh well.

I didn’t even beat him in transition. His strategy of not putting on socks appears to have paid off.

Alex also did it and he finished the sprint in about 1:25. I think he was pretty happy with it. I was watching the sprint and I also heard the name of someone from my high school, Bo Brustkern. He finished 9th in in the sprint. He was always an excellent athlete, the star running back during his senior year(one year younger than me). Of course our high school was really small, so there weren’t the same caliber of athletes as bigger schools.

So I have been learning some Php and it is for the most part straightforward. However, it does have some weirdnesses that seem a bit odd to a Perl user like myself. Each of the separate db interfaces, like MySQL and Postgres has their own function calls, which is too bad because it means your php code has to understand a lot more db specific calls, JDBC for Java and Perl’s DB Interface are much better abstractions.

Also I had to return all the Linksys equipment for my wireless network. None of the cards worked right for me. Linux had no support for their new 802.11b card with a Broadcom chipset. And I couldn’t get the 802.11g card installed properly even on my windows box. It was pretty depressing. On the other hand. Amazon made the return process really easy. Although I haven’t gotten my money back yet.

I was thinking of trying to get Gphoto working so I won’t have to download pictures from the camera to a windows pc and then upload back to my linux box. With gphoto, I could download directly to the linux box.

Michigan football is 2-0 so far against a couple of pretty weak teams. A good start, but that’s a common theme for us. We have a couple good games, and then lose a crucial or sometimes an easy one and that blows the national championship hope.

I spent all of thursday trying to get my wireless network working and it sucked. I decided to go with all Linksys components because I’ve had pretty good success with them in the past. I got 1 802.11g card for Tracy’s PC, 1 802.11b card for my linux box, and 1 802.11g router + access point. I can’t even get the 802.11g card working on the PC because of some stupid motherboard issue. The driver for the card installs, but there’s some weird issue where when it boots and tries to recognize the card, it tries to locate a driver for a “Early PCI non-VGA device” this search in Google seems to be that it might be a VIA Chipset issue. But I can’t install the stupid VIA driver upgrade because of some registry error that I can’t figure out. So with all these issues on just a Win98 system which Linksys does actually support, I’m concerned it won’t work on linux which they don’t even support officially.

At least the new digicam we got worked pretty well, the software installed pretty quickly and easily.

OK. Blogger is annoying me. Twice this week it crashed and I lost the post that I was working on. It might be time to switch. Dave is using moveable type, and he seems to like it. Brig has recommended Bloxsom as well. But because dave already has moveable type installed and it’s the full featured choice, that would be the most likely way to go.

I had two interviews this week. On Tuesday I had a full 2nd round of interviews with Yahoo!. This is the first time I’ve had a 2 complete sets of interviews. In total, I talked with 8 people for 45 minutes each, so 6 hours worth. Most companies do just 4 1/2 hr interviews. The interviews went all right, not as well as the first round, but well enough. I suspect I have about a %50 chance of getting an offer from them.

I also had an interview with Symantec on Friday. The position they are hiring for is in their intrusion detection system. This is a product they bought when they bought Recourse Technologies. I went in not knowing enough about the position, my friend Dave Jung had referred me there. I came out pretty excited about the product and working with the group. Ironically, me and my friend Alex are competing for the same spot. It’s cool though I’m happy if he gets the job.

I should hopefully hear back from both companies by the end of next week. If I get two offers, I’ll have a tough decision to make.