Micah's Musings

When the members of a society find themselves in a secure position, human nature will lead them to relax their vigilance and they eventually find themselves doing things they never would have imagined in their normal state.. As this can happen to anyone at any given time and lead to crime, governmental control of some kind is found necessary. However, when the same problem occurs within said government the members of such societies must rise up and create a new and better government to preserve their wellbeing. At the last however, when such failings occur to both at the same time by intent or accident the tyranny ensues.

As the people weaken their grasp in one part, the government in its natural thirst for more control reaches in and "fills" that need. As society accepts more and more government control in their lives, the fall increases its velocity. Each time a great movement in priorities takes place, a crack is found in the system which is then filled by the government until the citizens lose control entirely. At this point the government becomes a law unto itself. Now there is a state where each citizen is now the property of the state and no longer a person in and of themselves.

Translation

irritating knee injury + trapped mental energy = rambling.

I injured my right knee recently playing indoor soccer. It's just a surface wound (took a lot of skin off) but because its on my knee it can't form a proper scab. Every time I move my leg the scab cracks and more liquid seeps through to rebuild it. Trouble is, it overdoes the seeping part and leaves bumps on my knee that hang loosely when they crack. So I physically break off the excess to keep it under control. Interesting opening for parallel applications? You tell me.

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I'm sure everybody (meaning the few that read my blog... or lack thereof) is wondering why in the world I haven't put out a detailed post since April, or any post at all since October. So here are the two biggest work highlights of mine in the past six months.

The Confederate Shoppe

Probably my biggest project this past year has been a Confederate ecommerce website for a store called The Confederate Shoppe. A gentleman in our church told me about a friend of his (the store owner) who needed her online store redone (the original was done in '95 or so). We exchanged emails in May, and I started work on it immediately. The new site went live in September and has handled orders successfully. Many of my client's customers are a little wary of shopping online but she really wants to leverage the potential of the site since it means she doesn't have to answer the phone or wait at her house for someone to buy things from her.

Plethora

One of the reasons I offered my services on the shoppe was that I had just completed a revision of my web framework. To abbreviate into English for all of my non-geeky readers, a web framework is essentially tools for building a website that get reused over and over for multiple projects like displaying a web page, authorization, storing data, and so forth. These frameworks are usually common pieces from websites grouped into one coherent package and sometimes published for others to use, like Django, Ruby on Rails, Turbogears, and Pylons. I've tried a few times to write my own framework, but usually fell into lower quality from time constraints on websites. Right before I did The Confederate Shoppe, I made another attempt to build something useful, and called it "Plethora" (more on the name later). Since then It's grown both in actual size (nearly 5,000 lines of code), functionality, and quality. I got the name "plethora" from the fact that it shares first letters with the language it's written in (python) and a principle I'm attempting to reflect in my work known as loose coupling which allows for interchanging parts within the original product, hence the framework is "one, yet many" or a Plethora ("a" denoting singular, "plethora" denoting many).