So, you thought the Barbarian Invasions were great

This afternoon, on Canal D, a kind of Québécois A&E, I catched Réjeanne Padovani, oscar winner Denys Arcand's second commercial movie. It's the third time I see it, and I still find that it's Arcand's most moving piece. It's about a small party hosted by a mobster (Vincent Padovani) to celebrate the obtaining of a government contract to build a freeway. Both the provincial minister of transport and the city's mayor are in attendance. Oh, and a police bodyguard, three of Padovani's henchmen, two prostitutes & a couple of wives. And Vincent's ex-wife, Réjeanne Padovani (the late, great Luce Guilbeault.

It's awfully slow, it's awfully dark, it's awfully good.

It's kind of like La maudite galette without the first 30 minutes. But that's another story.

What to do with Mephi-fork?

There are two main things we can do with our friend mephi-fork: abandon it and let it rot, choose another CMS. I'm starting to get annoying, but I like Drupal.

Or we can try to refactor it. Hey-hey! Ho-Ho! The template system has to go. Which is kind of sad, since Tracy and Michael worked hard to make it survive the first tuning phase. I propose Smarty, because writing a template system is WAY out of the scope of this project. Also, this is the template system used by Yahoo, so you know it can give serious performance.

Fuck that template shit.

I was, earlier, relatively nice when talking about metaphilter, the software running Monkeyfilter. Well, that's a thing of the past. It blows. It's a complete mess. The template engine is a nightmare. It the worst piece of crap I've ever laid my eyes on. There, I've said it.

But hey, I'm only 24.

If we're to keep that codebase, we're better off using Smarty. It's easy to use, not hard to install, and has caching built-in. So it'd be two stones in one throw. Or something.

The nicest likely alternative to MePhi is, to the best of my knowledge, Drupal. It would require writing a mofi-module, something made from the Story Module and the Comment Module.

Or maybe not.

Blogging is frustrating me to no end.

Blogger, hosted solution, is awfully slow. Unbearably slow. I mean, chrissake, they're not exactly doing rocket science. So I tried to set up an old school account. Problem: it's on a shared Sun machine from the 90s. So I *need* to be static.

I try trusty old nanoblogger. But the Sun is running Solaris, so it's incompatible with the GNU tools nanoblogger depends on. I try the perl bloxsom, but it sucks donkey balls. So I'm back to.. blogger.

Q: would using blogger + my own host be faster?

Funny ha-ha or funny weird?

Joey: What are you aiming for, here?
Polly: Funny. I'm aiming for funny.
Carl: Funny ha-ha or funny weird?

That filler pretty much defines what I aim for when I try to be funny. But right now I'm not. I got a blogger account so I could post this table within <code>. But I couldn't, because blogger gets rid of the spaces, or so it seems. So here it is in <table>

Mefi/Mofi posts in October

day	Mefi	Mofi	diff
01	28
02	10
03	15
04	26
05	23	21	2
06	26	16	10
07	29	18	11
08	31	13	18
09	14	14	0
10	11	11	0
11	26	20	6
12	22	22	0
13	16	24	-8
14	27	19	8
15	25	22	3
16	13	14	-1
17	16	12	4
18	21	20	1
19	23	29	-6
20	24	22	2
21	20	31	-11

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm now officially a sucker.

With a Blogger blog, for chrissake. That's what I get for dropping out of college: I could start an English blog on my old school account, but it will probably be gone next month.

So, yeah, there I am, with Tiger, El Gato, a reference to a 14 years old cat at my uncle's farm. What you must understand is that on said farm, cats live an average of two years. Tiger, however, has been alive and kicking ass since 1990. He once impaled himself on a bale needle. It went all the way trough his belly. My uncle took his body off the needle and left him for dead. He was not seen for a couple of weeks, but he finally made a reappearance, and ruled over the courtyard for many years. When I think about badass, I think about Tiger.