It’s been a very long time since I last flexed my network-god muscles. My last sysad-duties-inclusive job was three years ago. However, I now find myself having to twitch at least my net-godlike little finger.

My brother abuses our DSL bandwidth at home. Bittorrent downloads of tons and tons of anime constantly slows down everybody else’s connections, myself included. And today happens to be one of the rare times I need/want to download large files from the ‘net — specifically, Java EE 5-related files. Not to mention, just doing ordinary browsing invariably slows down to a crawl whenever my younger brother starts leeching anime of questionable taste.

So.

Time to do some tweaking on our Linksys router, I decided. Blocked Bittorrent, put my brother’s MAC address on low priority and my MAC address on High Priority QOS, and five minutes later, I’m a happy Net God.

I bought the October 2006 issue of Linux Magazine yesterday. The thing that caught my attention and prompted me to buy it was this article on Turbogears, a RAD web app framework for Python. I quickly devoured the article and soon found myself wanting to actually try it out.

Turbogears is supposed to be Python’s answer to Ruby on Rails. To TG’s credit, it really does make coding a web app using Python very, very simple, in a way that’s almost as simple as doing it on Rails. Now while I haven’t made a formal comparison, I’m more inclined to think that I can work better with Turbogears than with Rails. But then again, that’s just my Python bias showing. I love Python, and when I read the article I thought, “well it’s about freakin’ time somebody made this for Python!”

So, I fired up my Ubuntu box and tried it out.

And I didn’t get past the second step of installation. First, the magazine article is outdated already; there’s already a 1.0 beta release, and the URL for the Turbogears preview that the magazine was pointing to wasn’t there anymore. Second, when I ran the install command:

sudo easy_install -f http://www.turbogears.org/download/index.html –script-dir /usr/local/bin TurboGears

I got a whole mess of errors that stemmed from some header file or other that couldn’t be found. From the errors I figured it must be something from a python-dev package or something, so I did an apt-get for python-dev. After that was done, I tried installing TG again — and still with some lameass compile error!

That’s it. I know all these hacker-wannabes would probably say, “hey look at the error, you must need to install some other thing first or whatever”, or something else along the lines of “RTFM”. You know what? I DO NOT HAVE THE TIME NOR INCLINATION TO DICK AROUND WITH STUPID INSTALLATION ERRORS.

Quite frankly, I’ve had it with half-baked open source projects. I’m plenty smart to figure things out myself — got the resume, the 11-year experience, the Physics undergrad and the MS-IT degrees, and one Java cert to prove it — but having your user work out the kinks of what is supposed to be a simple, no-brainer installation, defeats the whole PURPOSE of having an easy-to-use web framework in the first place!

Anyway, so much for Turbogears. I’m sure the stuff is cool. Hell, I loved the magazine article about it! I’m just going to wait a bit longer until they work things out a bit more.

Ok, so they come out with this anonymous browsing thing. I read this news article, and I think, ‘hey, cool!’ And I go over to their download page, and then — all their installation files are exe’s? All Windows installers, not a linux installer in sight! Heck, even the source code is supposed to compile to a Windows exe file!

Bah. Just plain ol’ Firefox will do for me, thank you very much. At least on linux I don’t need to worry about viruses as much as I’d have to on Windows!

So I’m checking out Writely right now. UI looks alright, even if the icons are a bit big, almost cartoony. They say you can publish to your blog with this, and the drop-down list you get when choosing which blog to publish to, lists a lot of blogging services, including Blogger (naturally!), LiveJournal, and WordPress. I don’t care much about the others, but I want to try out posting to WP.

Before posting, however, I want to check out a couple of things first….

1. The quick brown fox jumps over the
2. lazy

• dog, er bear

The bear ate the fox. Wasn’t quick enough!

Saving to Word document format…. Cool, it works! Well, that’s not really much of a test, but for basic writing and exporting to MS Word format, it works just fine.

There’s options to tag a document, but these don’t have any counterpart in Word, so they really aren’t saved to a Word document. They’ll be used in posting to a blog, though.

So far writely seems cool. It’s still in beta so I’m sure there must be some bugs somewhere that I haven’t encountered yet. But for now, I’m happy with it and I think I’ll use it more.

Update: will try to update this post on WP from writely….. Hmmmm. Apparently, you can republish your post from writely, but the date will be changed to the current date instead of the original date of the post. Not quite I had in mind for a re-post; I was hoping it’ll allow me to edit my post without changing the original post date. Ah well.

I’m currently reading Google news via workfriendly.net. Workfriendly.net is cool — it’s a web proxy that opens a browser window that is so… “Web 2.0-ed” or “AJAXified” that it looks like an MS Word window! It allows a user to look like he’s reading a word document instead of reading some website. Of course, the site’s original formatting is lost in favor of a more Word-document-ish appearance, but all the content remains intact. It’s great for uhm, pretending appearing to work during a very well-deserved break.

Standard forms still work on the Workfriendly MS-Word-lookalike renedered webpage, but so far I haven’t been able to login to my WP account and post from there. Must be something with the WP login UI not really being a standard form, but some fancy-shmancy AJAX thing.

I haven’t been able to use Yahoo! Mail or gmail via Workfriendly either. Too bad. Still a good effort though!

There’s also a “Boss Key” at the upper left of the Workfriendly MS-Word disguise window. Putting the mousepointer over it instantly replaces the page you are viewing with some HR motivational mumbo-jumbo that talks about time management and how to overcome procrastination. What boss doesn’t want his peon reading up on stuff like that? Heheh. And when it’s finally safe to read your web content of choice once more, just mouse over the “Read” key, again on the upper left, where the “Boss key” used to be. At which point you can resume reading your google news or whatnot to your heart’s content.

Now if only they’ll let people log into their mail or blog accounts, that would be just perfect! I know, it would probably be a coder’s nightmare to do (assuming it is at all possible in the first place), but still….