REM State

So, as Windows XP is moving towards end-of-life, I’m collecting together bits and pieces of software and consolidating them together into a nice bundle. Why? Because that software might become unavailable at some point in the future — and not only is my hardware not doing Vista, but there’s a slew of old software that probably wouldn’t play nice with Vista anyways. Old software is the sole reason I’m not a Linux-only guy anymore (Wine couldn’t quite cut it for me). If Vista broke that software, it would pretty much completely defeat the point of having Windows at all. :)

I’m going to be scouring the Microsoft website (and to a much lesser extent, the Internet at large) looking for interesting freebies to put on my disk. Furthermore, I’ll be analyzing and tweaking installers to get them to deploy silently and to the location that I want. The end-result will be a DVD with the latest XP + patches, with automatic installation of all the goodies I happen to dredge up (disk imaging is too fragile for my taste; auto-installation might be slower, but it’s more robust).

I’ll do my best to include all the links, (self-written) scripts, and step-by-step instructions for how to build your very own version of the disk.

Well folks, I think it’s been a fairly decent run, but I’m throwing in the towel for In Series. I’ll be around to answer questions and hammer out some bugs here and there, but the release schedule of WordPress has thrown me for my last loop; it’s just too much work and not enough reward. I also don’t seriously use my own plugin — I’m not exactly an avid blogger :) — and I think that’s a big missing piece for any internal motivation that I had.

I’d like to thank Lorelle VanFossen for the inspiration she provided — she is ultimately the reason I got started with this project. I’d also like to thank Scott “Skippy” Merrill for the original codebase, and his support in transitioning the project off to me. Of course, I’d like to thank my users for not only using my plugin, but being so kind as to report bugs, translate, and even leave a donation now and again.

I would very much like to find a new maintainer for this plugin; however, if you would like to pursue a developed alternative, Organize Series is also available, and now has many of the features of In Series.

Unfortunately, WordPress 2.5 completely breaks my tests — specifically, my automation can’t seem to get a sane post ID back after saving a new post. So, In Series is, and will for the forseeable future, remain untested with WordPress 2.5. It should work; use at your own risk (and please report back with any issues).

I just stumbled across this little gem…

I found this plugin very easy to use. [It’s] so easy that I thought I was using it wrong. I kept checking it to make sure it was working. It is a great plugin for writing series posts.

– Robert

I’ve heard “easy to use” come up before. But “[It’s] so easy that I thought I was using it wrong” made me grin ear to ear. :)

Thanks Robert, you made my day!

P.S. — I really should thank the author of the article here, too; I generally do that in the comments of the article itself (this case is no exception). However, it seems a bit rude to thank the commenter here without also acknowledging the article writer. Thanks Cowboytf!

… I really don’t count this blog. ;)

My article on using source control systems is available over at linux.com. And for the curious/speculative, yes — this is my late Sunday post. :)

I’m extremely tardy with the Sunday post this week; my apologies. I’ve been rather busy with some other events going on in my life, and I’m hoping that things will settle back into normality schedule-wise over the next couple of weeks.

In any case, there is good news — I’ve written a few tests, in this case, for the %first and %last tokens. This was actually a rather large change in the end, through the accumulation of a lot of little details that had to be updated. However, the tests are written, working and passing, so that’s one fewer thing that needs to get done for an official 3.1 release. Furthermore, all the bits for testing are finally checked in (for 3.1 anyway), so anyone interested in running these tests themselves (or maybe helping to write new ones :D) should be able to set up an environment mostly like mine to work in.

Finally, just as an FYI for those who hadn’t noticed, I have an RSS feed available for my checkins. It doesn’t automatically update (yet), but it should keep interested folks roughly up-to-date with what I’m working on.

Ugh. Woke up on Friday, and thought that I might be having a heart attack (chest pain, shortness of breath, nausea, dizziness). Thankfully, it seems to have been just a nasty flu, or possibly food poisoning. In any case, I’ve spent the last two and a half days confined to rest and recuperation, instead of working on new tests. I did manage to finish getting synced up with the latest SVN version of SimpleTest earlier in the week, so hopefully I’ll have a little more progress on new tests by the end of this week.