Mercenaries Kill
… time by going over their stalled projects, summoning whatever motivations led them to start said projects in the first place, and then going to work. At least, that’s what this humble (software) mercenary, having been forced to a bit of down-time recently, has been doing these past few weeks.
And on that note, let me introduce Dollhouse.
Houses of, and for, Dolls¶
Continuing with (just now established) tradition of using vaguely homoerotically-suggestive names for things Google will index forever and will possibly become a source of embarrassment for me in my old age (see Exhibit A), I’ve put up a hub for something I’ve mostly constantly been doing for the past decade or so: free software development.
If you’re curious (and not one of my three regular visitors to whom I’ve already shown this to—which likely means you don’t exist), and would like to see what I’m talking about, you can check out the index here:
And so as to set the record clear for the sudden barrage of militant homosexual visitors this blog will receive after Google once again ranks me for all sorts of LGBT-related keywords (probably for paragraphs such as this), let me explain that I’m referring to a kickass Joss Whedon TV show which, as is usual for not-Buffy Whedon shows, was canceled just as it was getting really good.
Playing with what makes Ersatz Genius tick¶
As alluded to in this incarnation’s debut post, and as detailed in the site’s colophon, I’ve managed to slap on custom functionality on PyBlosxom through its pretty-sweet plugin system. I also mentioned that I’ll probably put the Tumblr-to-PyBlosxom plugin up at some point.
Well, that particular plugin is still offline. However, I did manage to put in the required effort to ready most of the other custom plugins for public consumption; they’re up on Dollhouse if you want to gawk at and/or grab them.
I’ve also tweaked the layout a little, making available the little “taglines” to the main navigational items up top. They’ve been there from the beginning; I just never figured out a satisfactory way for them to become visible on hover. I’m still not overly happy the way they are now, but, damn it, I’m a code monkey, not a designer.
Replanting Ersatz Genius¶
Unless I screwed up mightily, you shouldn’t even have noticed this particular change.
Recently, I got a VPS instance from HostMist (consider this an endorsement); I’m now in the middle on moving everything I put up on my other VPS to the HostMist one. Dollhouse is already on the new one (which I’ve taken to calling defiant).
I’m not going to go into details as to why I’m dropping my other account; suffice it to say that I wasn’t very happy with what I was getting. Yes, yes, I know the usual argument: if you go for low-end VPS services, you ought not to expect too much. But I’m sure expecting that, at the very least, my VPS stay up when I’m not actively screwing it up falls on the right side of “too much”.
So, yeah. No longer giving them my hard-earned money.
HostMist, though… They’re something else entirely. They cost a bit more, of course, but I’m happy to part with my money when I’m getting something great in return.
March is International Women’s Month, so I’m trying to figure out something to do that ties in with that. Maybe I’ll dust off the draft of an old post on abortion; I might even get to actually push it out (been trying to do that since around September 2010, actually).
We’ll see.