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Hello, denizens of the Interweb!

It's been a long time (more than a month!) since I've posted, and this post isn't going to try to cover all that; that's what the next one will be for. Instead, I wanted to point out (for those of you who don't look at my site, or those of you on feedreaders) that my layout has hugely changed; this is because I've switched from Wordpress, which I've always used, to Movable Type.

Why did I make the switch, one might fairly ask? Well, I've been bothered by Wordpress' speed issues for a while now. They're partly due to the fact that I use shared hosting, sure, but honestly, it was driving me crazy to have to wait 15 seconds for the front page of my blog to load, and over a *minute* for a post to finish being posted.

Secondly, I was actually convinced by Anil Dash's very funny (and not a little informative) post, "A Wordpress 2.5 Upgrade Guide." It went through the list of advantages of Movable Type, and showed how with the impending release of WP 2.5-- the best choice was to leave WP entirely. Obviously it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek-- but the WP community appears to have taken it as pure evil. Matt Mullenweg, a man who I thought would have made a rational and insightful riposte, instead replied in the blog comments with an ad hominem not related to the article-- and that's setting aside his Twitter response. With advocates like that-- MT seemed like a more fun place to be.

So then, how was the actual changeover process?

Well, first, Movable Type's import functionality leaves something to be desired. Having exported my blog in the WXR format as requested, I imported it into Movable Type-- and found that MT lost all my tags, and all of my paragraph breaks, from all my previous blog posts. This isn't good-- they're in the XML file (I checked), so this isn't WP's fault. I've gone through and restored the tags, but I haven't gotten around to fixing formatting; it's a much larger job.

Other than that, the changeover went quite well-- and I'm pleased with the results. My blog loads much faster (due to the static generation in MT), but even the long-form publishing to make static pages (basically the slowest thing you can do; it has to recreate every part of the blog) is faster than it takes WP to push out *one* post. How great is that?

The administrative interface is much more responsive generally, too, allowing me to make the changes to add Analytics, for instance, much faster than WP can even show me where that code is.

My plugins are mostly unneeded with MT-- OpenID support, for instance, is in the core. So "it just works," not "it works as soon as I fight with it for a couple weeks," which was my experience with OpenID on Wordpress. (Admittedly, that was partly because the original OpenID plugin for WP stopped maintenance, so I had to switch over to a new one.)

So we'll see how this goes; if nothing else, I hope the new, slicker interface will encourage me to post a bit more often. :-)

So it's been awhile since I last posted, mostly because of a rush of work. As I write this, I'm sitting on an Amtrak train to New Haven, CT, as I'm going to visit Quinlan at Yale. I can't post from the train, unfortunately-- while I'm eyeing the Sprint wireless broadband dongle of the person next  to me, I doubt he'd be willing to share. This last week, in addition to finishing a variety of homework (some of it interesting, all of it required, unfortunately), I was also asked by my nominal boss, Dr. Houlahan, to teach the Java lecture, as she was sick. This was all sorts of fun for me; while I have taught a lab section for three semesters now, teaching the lecture is ordinarily not possible (both because Hopkins forbids TAs from teaching under normal circumstances, and because Dr. Houlahan likes teaching). So finally, I get to talk to all the students, and make them really learn, right? Well, after teaching two classes, I have to hand it to the real professors; it's hard to keep yourself upbeat, looking out at a lecture hall filled with scared kids. No, my students weren't bored; I was that entertaining, at least (being able and willing to explain language features in depth, including some fairly amusing history of computing, kept them interested, it would seem-- or at least, my willingness to admit that certain language vagaries of Java were made radically inconsistent with either logic or good sense). However, since all my public speaking training is in debate, it's tough to have no reaction from an audience. In APDA (the style of debate I did earlier in college), it's a wild ride; people yell out praise (or criticism) in the middle of your speech, your friends pound on their tables to applaud you, and your enemies whistle or cry "for shame!" when you blow it. Even in the more-sedate NFL format (National Forensics League, not some football thing; the high school debate league), you still get reactions from your audience. By contrast, most of the time, the Java babies appeared to be frightened, or at least too jaded to talk back. Maybe I'm too used to my upper-level courses (where there's a 10-1 student-faculty ratio, or less), but aren't you supposed to participate in your education? I found it difficult to keep going, and ever-more-radical thoughts popped into my head.

• "Pick the most-scared looking student and throw candy at them."
• |Call out 'Can I get an AMEN for the POWER of the LOOP? AMEN!'"
• "Improv a song on control structures in Java."

And so on. I didn't actually *do* any of those things (I was really tempted to do the Baptist preacher one, but lacking a backup choir, I decided against it), but it was frustrating, not being able to get students to react. I'd much prefer they say something, even something drastically wrong, than say nothing at all, and stare back at me like I'm some Rodin they don't really get. I did have lots of positive comments after the class, though; many students said it was the most interesting Java class they've had. "So why didn't you speak, when I asked for a comment?" "Oh... I don't really do that." Is that common, I wonder-- and is it college as a whole that makes students sit down and be quiet? Is it the frightening breadth of their professors' knowledge and experience? Or are most Hopkins people really just this quiet, not to say boring? I hope not. In the meantime, though, I'll go on making a ruckus in my classes-- and I hope that my professors appreciate it, not as disruption, but as my attempt to bring some life to education. Update: Now at Yale, in my brother's dorm room; this is a happening place!