30 November 2008
Failure of imagination
I really wish I knew what to do.
For the last week, I really wanted to code something up, something new and fresh, and I couldn't figure out what. I periodically feel like this, and I'm reminded that there's tons of things (started and never finished) which would need attention... and even finished ones, like kdelicious, really need some maintenance. But these are boring things; since coding for me is just a hobby, I should really spend it on something fun, right?
Eventually, I decided to install dbxml, something I had postponed for a long time. Following Zeth's excellent guide, I avoided the horrendous pitfalls (typos in testing code? Left there for months?) and managed to set it up properly, even though checkinstall failed to debianize it. (BTW, why don't we have a .deb somewhere? It was originally released in 2003, one would expect that in 5 years somebody would have come forward...)
The good thing about Oracle products is that they come with plenty of documentation; it can be terse, but it's there. (b)dbxml is no exception, so I went through the (excellent) introductory tutorial in a few minutes. Fine. Then I thought "this seems cool, I wonder how could I use it for, maybe some webservice or something"... and the thought died there. My mind had a complete (and utter) failure of imagination. So now I have a very cool xml storage engine with good python bindings, and I don't know what to do with it.
I ended up playing MAME for much of the day.
Bring on Christmas, I need a reboot.
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