Jack Kilby, inventor of the microchip, rest in peace, and thanks for providing me with a career. He was humble as well as brilliant:

“It’s astonishing what human ingenuity and creativity can do,” he said. “My part was pretty small, actually.” Whenever people would mention that Kilby was responsible for the entire modern digital world, he liked to tell the story of the beaver and the rabbit sitting in the woods near Hoover Dam. “Did you build that one?” the rabbit asked. “No, but it was based on an idea of mine,” the beaver replied.

Right now I have copies of WordPress, Movable Type, Serendipity, and TextPattern living at my hosting account. I’ve set them all up, and have found it pretty straightfoward in every case. Unpack them, make sure the permissions are correct, and point them at your MySQL database where they can create a bunch of tables. Not much more to it than that.

The only product that I’ve really delved into customizing so far has been WordPress, so I don’t have much to comment on in that regard. One thing I have done is to start digging into the source code for these products. I’m a bit surprised that nobody codes to the PEAR Coding Standard, which is a decent enough standard for PHP coding. If you’re starting an open source project written in PHP, you may as well go with the PEAR standard. Not only does it give you a coding standard that somebody else already wrote so that you don’t have to think about it, but if you do want to contribute libraries to PEAR or integrate PEAR code into your application, you’re off to a good head start.

I give Movable Type the award for most interesting code organization. They basically put each library function in an individual file. It looks very clean, but I wonder what the overall strategy is there. Without giving it too close a look, Serendipity, WordPress, and TextPattern all seem to be a morass of equal proportions. (I haven’t looked at Movable Type beyond noticing the highly organized code.)

GoDaddy.com CEO Bob Parsons has graced the world with a little screed explaining why we should not only keep our detention center at Guantanamo Bay open, but that what we really need is more torture. My problem with his position is not only that it’s offensive, but that it’s completely dishonest. Parsons repeatedly says that our interrogation techniques are mild, but it just so happens that today the papers are reporting on a lawsuit filed by a US soldier who was severely beaten at Guantanamo during the course of an exercise in which he pretended to be an uncooperative prisoner. Even though he was able to stop the beating by letting them know that he was a US soldier, he had to be discharged from the military and is disabled, probably for life. Contrast that with the Guantanamo that exists in Parsons’ imagination. Needless to say, GoDaddy.com will not be getting any of my business.

Parsons imagines a Guantanamo where all of the people imprisoned are actually hardcore terrorists. He argues that everyone at Guantanamo is a sworn enemy of the United States, and probably has been since the beginning, even though many detainees have been released. He bookends his arguments by referencing the horror of 9/11. I would like to point out to him that it’s possible to remain outraged by 9/11 and to want to make sure those responsible are held to account and at the same time hope that our country could live up to higher ideals.

Jamais Cascio has a good roundup of games that teach us how the world works. He mentions Balance of Power, which I always wanted to play back when it was released. Unfortunately, it wasn’t available for my trusty Commodore 64.

Another reader who has actually done performance benchmarking on weblog software mentions LightPress, a lightweight front end for WordPress, and recommends TextPattern as his favorite blogging tool. Truthfully, I have never given TextPattern a fair shake, mainly because one of my regular lunch compatriots uses it and has not gushed with praise. I also worry that the pace of releases for TextPattern has slowed down.

A reader writes to suggest Serendipity, another blogging tool written in PHP. I’m going to give it a look as well.

Let the shootout begin. Yesterday I downloaded Movable Type 3.17 and got it up and running. I already had WordPress 1.5.1.2 installed and running, and was maybe 40% of the way to getting it ready to migrate my site to it. Before I get into the technical differences between the two, let me give my overall impressions of each of them.

When I decided to forget about my dream of building the ultimate weblog publishing tool and use something off the shelf, I had to decide what I wanted to use. Although I had heard good things about Typo, a blog publishing tool written using Ruby on Rails, I was committed to using something that would run in my shared hosting environment at pair.com. I thought about things like Drupal, but while I’m interested in adding community features to the site, it seemed a bit excessive.

My first thought was to go with WordPress, in large part because it’s free and open source. The idea of being able to make some improvements and submit them to the authors was appealing. Movable Type is a mature, well regarded product, but that’s usually not what I’m into.

More practically speaking, I like the idea that WordPress is an extremely thin layer over the database. I was under the impression that while Movable Type could store its data in a relational database, it required you to publish all of your pages to disk as static files. (I’ve since learned that you can set it up so that Movable Type publishes its archives directly out of the database.) That said, there is no “publishing” phase with WordPress at all. Since that’s how this site works right now, that strategy is what I’m most comfortable with.

Movable Type has some features that WordPress doesn’t offer, like support for multiple weblogs. You can install multiple copies of WordPress, one for each weblog, but that’s obviously not as nice as having one console from which to manage all of your weblogs. MT also provides TypeKey integration out of the box, and they get bonus points for coming up with it in the first place. In general, Movable Type seems to have more options for thwarting spammers, and when I open up this site for comments, I will do whatever I have to in order to keep the site from getting cluttered with spam.

One thing I like about WordPress is that a “theme” is just a bundle of PHP files and style sheets that call PHP functions supplied with WordPress to render the site. If you want to customize a theme, you just copy it and start hacking on it the way you would any other PHP application. I imagine that for some users, that’s really off putting, but if you already live in PHP land, then getting started is simple enough. On the other hand, I feel like you have to learn Movable Type if you want to customize it, and I don’t speak Movable Type yet. Over the next couple of days, I’m going to figure out whether that’s a worthwhile hill to climb.

Bryan Caplan explains how to attain your ultimate goals through backwards induction using the example of Darth Sidious. This is probably the most useful way of thinking about goals I’ve ever read. What do you want, and when do you want it? Once you’ve figured that out, work your way back to today, figuring out the steps required to get there. Sounds simple, but I’ve never thought about it that concretely.

Needless to say, my project for this week is to figure out my goal, when I expect to attain it, and then what I need to be doing right now to attain that goal. Unfortunately, the odds of my posting the results here are low.

Applepeels runs the numbers on Apple opening up Mac OS X to cloners, and offers some numbers that seem to favor the idea. I fall into the group of people who believe that the only reason for Apple to refuse to license the operating system to OEMs is spite.

I had started working on customizing WordPress so that I could migrate this site to it, but then somebody asked me to at least give Movable Type a fair shake, so I’m going to install it as well and see which I like better. Expect a discussion of what I like and dislike about both of them soon.