I’ve been bothered by my latest project. Without going into detail, it’s a web-based programming project that leverages MySQL and PHP. I know how to design and code, but I’ve hit a wall of… I don’t want to say creativity, more like, philosophy. There’s a problem, and it may not be a problem at all, that I simply don’t have a solution to. Hopefully, it’s just a matter of time.

I wish I could discuss the project here more, but I’m well aware it breaks a lot of license agreements. The goal is to make something cool to show off to people and impress them with my ability to make a finished product. It is not intended for a wide release, but I won’t rule it out entirely. I also want to use and rely on it myself, and making it web-accessible is a major plus.

Usually, when a programmer makes an app, it works great, but looks like shit. Don’t ask an artist to make an app. Just don’t. I must not be an artist, but I know I’m not a programmer. Ame tells me I’m a designer at heart, but nobody wants just an “idea man.” Sometimes I advertise myself as a “jack of all trades,” and keep to myself the rest of the phrase: “master of none.”  I fully expect the more intelligent people to whom I give that line to breathe in what I say and internally mumble my own omission in unison.

Perhaps I need a new slogan that still says, “hey this guy can do an awful lot of things pretty damn well. He can put out fires, and even build water towers.” A horrible analogy, but hey, I’m flying by the seat of my pants here.

So that’s me talking about the app, and around the app, but like I said, I wish I could go into more detail about what the app actually is. More on the snag though: it’s like I don’t know how to think about the problem at hand. The least bad solution I can come up with is to put the problem aside and keep working on the things I do know how to solve. That thought keeps me less discouraged, and that may just be the pick-me-up I need to continue. Something else encouraging is I have a couple friends that know how to think like I need to think, and they’re quite approachable, even if they have to dumb things down to my level.

When I fret about the fact I can’t solve a problem, especially an important one (not just struggling with a particularly difficult Sudoku), I question my whole ability as a human to function in society. In some ways I need to chill out and relax, but I take so few things seriously, that I fear my entire motivation to do anything would collapse. I get so caught up in the problem though, that I get cranky and depressed, worst of all distracted and inattentive – and that’s never a good thing, especially when it negatively effects into other areas of life.

By the time this post goes live, hopefully I’ll be back in the swing of things, and banging away on the project.

I need to post more, and I can cheat by using the articles I read on Slashdot to fill content. This is really cool though.

I didn’t read the original article the Slashdot summary links to (this is standard fare for Slashdot – only newbs actually read the articles), but my takeaway from the summary is a robot came up with a hypothesis, predicted the result, experimented, and observed & recorded data. This is capital H-u-g-e Huge.

Is this robot artificially or synthetically intelligent though? My vote is ‘artificial’ as it has not proven its own awareness, but this is a gigantic leap in the field.

More changes here; notice the new(-ish) Meebo Me! widget on the sidebar there. I’d say I wrote it myself, but it’s based heavily on the Xbox Live! Gamertag widget. I just changed some values around and voila! it worked… not on the first try, but that goes with any piece of software. I’m always hesitant when something I write appears to work the first time out the gate.  It’s like, “okay, what’s broken?” Like a house or car that is up for sale way below the market.

[Scene: Suspiciously Fantastic Apartment.]
Fry: Well, I give up. What’s the catch?
Landlord #3: Oh, no catch. Although we are technically in New Jersey.
[Scene: Planet Express: Lounge. Fry, Bender and Leela sit around the table.]
Fry: Not one place even remotely liveable.

I’ve been playing around with a lot of themes and plugs lately around here – you may have noticed.  The coolest thing I have discovered in all of this is the stuff you can’tsee.  SSH’ing into a server and downloading files directly is a breeze.  Sure it requires knowledge of bash, but it’s just a UNIX-fied version of DOS (which is, I’m not certain, more accurately, DOS is a re-imagining of UNIX).

I can grab a theme from the WordPress site directly, unzip it and test it out in less than 10 seconds! Under the old regime, I would have had to download the package, unzip it all, and then upload the files into the appropriate place. That’s two file-transfer hops versus just one, and I can unzip on the server. It really is awesome.

It took awhile, but I finally got it! Well, mostly.

The main page is functional enough for publishing. Don’t let the simplicity fool you though, there are some inner workings in the background that will make it a breeze to make posts in the future.

I only have a few minutes at a time to myself as per the nature of my job as a phone-jockey doing tech support.  What amounts to less than 50 lines of PHP and HTML is several weeks of work. I could probably have banged it out in a day if I had one to myself, but now I have mostly working code.  There are some bugs in it, like I can’t do PNGs unless I do them manually. There may be some oddities in the navigation of the posts. There is no random page at all, that just breaks outright.

In any case the major functions are there, and I’m proud of myself! Hopefully I’ll update regularly, and I need to add functionality for NSFW content.  I call it art, but hey, some manager out there or *gulp* even mine may not.  I’m thinking like adding an extra field like thumbnail, or censored version, or something.

I’ll try to update here more regularly as well. Try, try, try.

Anyway, cheers! (I’m not even English!)