Coding for Vbulletin Has Lost its Appeal

Over the past year, I have basically quit coding any modifications for Vbulletin.

In part, it's because of the nightmare that the Vbulletin.org forums have become. Once Xenon and Erwin left as administrators, the place went downhill fast.

In part, it's because I'm having more fun coding for Xaraya. The Xaraya frameworks make creating modules and modifying the code incredibly easy and straightforward. The only downside to Xaraya is its horrendous administrative user interface.

I should be recoding the quiz system for Vbulletin.

I should be refining and improving the custom userpage modification to make it use dynamic data.

But, there's just no joy in it anymore. The community of coders is basically gone and has been replaced by a bunch of new faces. And, I think I would almost rather code a new forum system from scratch than continue on with Vbulletin.

I owe a lot to Vbulletin. I learned about PHP and MySQL from tweaking it over the years. It helped me change my career and get into web development professionally. It offered a wonderful coding community where I made many friends. It's just a shame that Jelsoft mismanaged the whole modification community so badly. They lost an army of talented coders who gave their customers a myriad of add-ons for free. For a while, I hoped that Jelsoft would become more professional in their management of their forums, but I've given up.

It's time to move on and find another coding obsession.

I Use More Software on my Mac

I'm not quite sure why, but I'm finding I use more applications on a daily or weekly basis than I ever did on my Windows computers.

On a Windows machine, I generally used Notepad, Word, Source Safe, Eclipse, Firefox and iTunes. Sometimes I would have to fire up Putty or an FTP client, but generally my software world was limited to my browser and an editor.

But on my Mac, I consistently use a variety of applications. I use Coda as my tool of choice for working with my PHP files. I use Textmate for quick text notes. I use Quicksilver to launch programs. I use NetNewsWire to read my RSS feeds. I use MacGourmet to track my recipes. I use Skype cause my boss makes me. I use Mail.app instead of using Gmail's web interface. I use OmniFocus to manage my many to-dos. I use Parallels to let me run Visual Source Safe. I use Safari for general web browsing. I use Firefox to debug Ajax problems. And, I use iTunes and iPhoto to interface with my iPhone.

I'm not sure what it is about the Mac that makes me more prone to collect data and to ditch web apps in favor of desktop apps. Heck, I'm even tracking what I eat and how much I exercise on my laptop. This sudden obsession with data has one bad side effect. Now that I enjoy maintaining data on my computer, backups have become important. In my Windows days, I never hesitated to dump any data I had and reformat my hard drive. Now, I find myself saving iTunes libraries, MacGourmet recipes, and OmniFocus projects and tasks.

Also, I find I'm buying a lot more software for my Mac than I did for Windows. There are plenty of free, open-source programs for OS X, but I've fallen in love with some beautifully designed and simple to use shareware. This is almost making me want to learn Cocoa so I can take a crack at creating my own applications. Perhaps after the iPhone SDK comes out.

YouTube Suspends Egyptian Anti-Torture Activist's Account

YouTube Suspends Egyptian Anti-Torture Activist's Account

"YouTube is catching a lot of flack for suspending the account of an Egyptian activist who had captured evidence of police brutality on video and uploaded it to the site."

In this case, I'm not certain YouTube SHOULD catch flack.

YouTube seems to be about sharing light, entertaining videos more than anything else. If it chooses not to feature violent videos, that should be within the company's rights. I am sure there are plenty of other places the Egyptian activist could share his movies online, and these places would be more suitable for his purpose.

The one thing that might give me pause is that YouTube does involve itself in politics in some ways. For example, the political debates in which users created videos of questions for presidential candidates. By opening this door to the more serious side of user-generated content, it could be argued that videos about torture are within the scope of the site and should not be considered as gratuitous violence.

Frustrating Coda Bug

Coda has been acting funky under Leopard today.  For some reason, typing a letter in the first column of a line makes Coda kick me into a different spaces desktop.  I can safely type a tab, a space, a punctuation mark or a number, but not a letter.  I haven't noticed this behavior before today, which does concern me a bit.  Bugs that materialize suddenly when nothing has changed on the system can be hard for engineers to reproduce and fix.