radiac.net

Yes, I'm still alive, just very busy with lots of exciting worky things, including my CMS. Yes, that one. And although this will be something like the 5th version that will make it into production, it will be the first version I'll release under an open source license. At last.

The irony is that although my feature list grows and my available time shrinks, with the server-side and client-side frameworks and tools that have been released over the past few years, it has actually become a lot easier to accomplish what I want. But with so much already written by other people, I'm often finding no practical alternative to stitching together popular open source components, and often even the work there has been done before. I can't find a good enough reason to reinvent the wheel - even though the wheels I've got are a bit lumpy, the amount of time and effort it would take to build new ones from scratch is impossible to accept as a realistic alternative.

I can't help feeling that this increasing dependence on complex frameworks and out-of-the-box components risks pushing us towards a homogenised web, with the only real choice for developers being between a handful of existing projects. And if that is the case, although it may help us now, I'm not sure it's a good thing for the long-term health of the industry.

I'd hoped that dropping a few references to it in my last post would help exorcise the song that's going round and round in my head, but it just won't stop. I woke up yesterday morning humming the "Still Alive" song from the Portal credits, literally humming it before my mind had figured out where I was. That's not normal. I haven't played the game for over a year, but I still spent all morning humming it; I tried listening to it on a loop for a few hours to try to make my mind sick of it. It didn't, and now I know the lyrics, so keep finding myself singing it. Woke up again this morning mid-verse. It just won't leave me alone. Help?

In other news, yesterday I went to see a consultant. I wasn't quite sure why I was going - I'd been to my GP concerning my nose again, and he'd referred me to another ENT consultant, but then the second letter arrived for another consultant. I showed up and it turned out he was the allergy consultant; he gave me a pin prick test, where he dabs blobs of samples of things I might be allergic to, then drives a pin through deep into the skin. It turns out I'm allergic to grass and wheat pollen, or something like that. And unsurprisingly I'm also allergic to being allergic to things - I reacted particularly well to the positive control test. Still, I now know I'm not allergic to cats, dogs or shrimp, which will be very handy next time I go to a pet store.

Anyway, look at me still talking when there's science to do. Laters.