Lately, I'm in one of those rutts where I feel like there are so many things I want and need to be doing that I'm not really making any discernable progress on anything.

I spent a lot of time this last weekend hacking on the new fozzilinymoo.org website... and I'm just not happy with it. Initially, I just put up static pages but I want a lot of stuff to be dynamic. For example, I want the sitemenu to be generated dynamically like Iodynamics' site. I pulled the SVDCH perl/mod_perl code that I'm using on Iodynamics over and configured it to work with the fozzilinymoo.org site on my file server. It worked good - except SSI tags inside pages were being ignored. For this, I tried to construct a mod_perl handler chain using Apache::Filter or Apache::OutputChain and Apache::SSI or Apache::SSIChain. This only kind-of worked. SSI tags like worked fine, but tags just did all kinds of crazy stuff.

I read up on the Apache::SSI stuff trying to figure out why it was acting so weird and discovered that there's nothing I could really about it. The Apache::SSI code apparently calls the underlying C routines to handle the SSI (and output parsed SSI directives) so once you hand it off, it's out of your control. The only thing I could think of was to write my own SSI-like parser, but that seems really redundant.

The "component-based" aspect of Mason looked intruiging, so I read up on it. As cool as Mason is it unfortunately works by embedding Perl and Mason code inside the HTML files. I hate that kind of stuff. I used to do a lot of PHP development and learned that PHP/ASP/embPerl/Cold Fusion types of web scripting usually means incredibly ugly code (because of the mixing of HTML content and script code) and projects which are difficult to organize and maintain. So... I don't know how fond I am of using Mason.

I guess I'll continue to search for a solution for this.

I've been working on my basement bathroom. When the house was built, some idiot(s) didn't leave a wooden box where my bathtub drain went so when they poured the basement floor, the drain pipe was covered with four or five inches of concrete. So... our first order of business was sledgehammering and chiselling through the floor to find that pipe.

My buddy Dave came over to help with the hole-making in the basement floor and brought his big manly sledgehammers. It took us a couple hours, but we got through. We didn't know how much work it would take, especially since we only had a ballpark idea of where that drain pipe would be. It ended up pretty close to where we thought it would be.

I also hit the home improvement stores and got an exhaust fan, a circuit breaker, some GFCI recepticles, switches, 12-2 cable and boxes for recepticles and switches. I've still got some framing to do before I can finish the electrical and start drywalling. I'll probably do that later this week... unless I get sidetracked. :-)

My older daughter Maya is sick with a coughing cold. I don't think she was as miserable today as she was yesterday, so that's a good thing.

I think I have a dentist appointment tomorrow... Just a regular check-up.