Blargh.

Insomnia is a bit of a pain. Having trouble sleeping two nights in a row is bad news all around.

On the plus side, got a new side project done. I rewrote my homepage. I developed a new look and wrote it up using CakePHP. It took a few tries, but I got it todo what I wanted. Some portions were fairly underdocumented, like using the webroot to serve files. Once I figured out how webroot worked, my last piece fell into place. I have reached a little beyond parity with the old site.

I have a few ideas that I may want to try next.

• Set my reading list as a database
• Modify a version of quoteurltext to save to a Cake Plugin.
• JavaScript updates -- rollover previews of menu items from the mainpage

Also have some cleanup to do, including fixing the stylesheets, and tightening up some of the html. Still, pretty happy with the effort and the time it took.

I keep looking for new projects to undertake in new languages. Learning the nuances of new languages gives me a new headspace to think about things. The patterns that a language provides gives some new insight into old problems. Perl, Java, PHP all have very different intents, strengths and weaknesses. Each makes a subset of problems very easy to deal with. Perl is whiz at system administration, Java for making standardized modular code and PHP for whipping out web apps. It can be an interesting challenge to push those languages to other domains to see how they swim or sink as the occasion arises.

On the other hand, there is something to be said for trying out new frameworks for old languages. There are subtle differences in execution that can make all the difference. For instance plumbing together WebSphere Applications on a J2EE stack has a completely different model than running some PHP apps or a Ruby On Rails application. But something like Project Zero gives a fusion blend of Java with PHP in Rails like framework. Still very course and working it's way to maturation it does have a few possibilities to play with. I'm looking to build a few apps in the next few days. This may be a good time to brush off a few project notes and find a good language or framework to measure against these apps.