Warren Falk

I’m still relatively new to Mono, which is a cross platform, open-source implementation of .Net. The implementation has proved surprisingly gap free for the most part.

But, what Mono suffers from is its lack of Visual Studio. Much of what makes .Net development so effortless is what is a really good implementation of an IDE (refactoring, a really good debugger, smart tags, and several other nice things). An IDE is beyond the scope of the Mono project, and another project, “Monodevelop” is filling in that gap.

Unfortunately, there are still gaping holes which makes it frustrating to anyone who has been spoiled by Visual Studio. I miss the refactoring, the smart tags which prompt you to effortlessly add a “Using” if necessary, but most of all, a debugger.

It is not hard to write complex code, it isn’t hard to write code quickly, but if you need to do both, you really need a debugger to get it right. And this is where Monodevelop (and also Mono) are way short. It’s relatively young still and free open source; and most importantly the developers are planning to implement all these things. I may see about getting in on that myself. But for now, Monodevelop is slightly refreshing but mostly frustrating.

I have a page dedicated to my ideas for The entertainment system to end all entertainment systems. Comments on it can be posted to this blog.

I have set up a page to describe my idea for an elegant representation of data to replace the unelegant standard XML simply because I can’t bear to work with it anymore than I have to. This should also fit nicely as a component in an application framework I’ve been conceptualizing for some time now too.

For now, all I have is a draft. The hope is that the draft will be clear about the basic concept of elegant data representation. Later, I will add technical specifications to the draft once they are complete. I would also like comments and questions on the draft. (They can be posted here as comments).

I love wordpress, but if you want to use wordpress as photo blogging software, it is somewhat lacking. Especially if you want it to be quick, easy, and something my wife can do. I have seen a few people tackle photos in different ways, but what I was looking for didn’t seem to exist.

My photo blogger plugin allows you to center a post around an image. You begin the post by uploading an image. The system will keep the full quality image, and will also downsample an image for display. The downsampled image is resized to fit completely within independent maximum width and height specifications which are configurable.

A post is automatically created for you with the image attached and the display image placed inline complete with the code necessary to allow users to click the image and see when it was taken, and download or view the full quality version of it.

You can edit the post in the regular wordpress editor to add any extra text etc.

In the future, I expect to add the ability to show a “gallery” or something like that in the Categories list which will find all images and list the thumbnails and post titles.

The plugin is available for download here: wf-blogphoto.php.txt [warrenfalk.com]

If you’re new to wordpress plugins, simply download it, remove the .txt from the end and place in your wp-content/plugins folder.