Nyanko CMS

Today marks the first day that Nyanko Content Management System (NCMS) is in actual production use, running a commercial site. After starting the project a few years ago to replace the 'lite' CMS the Nyanko.ws site was (and still is) running but never making much headway, I got the opportunity to finish developing it just over a month ago when my cousin gave me the go ahead to use NCMS as the basis for her company's website.

Since then I have spent weeks analyzing the existing code, rewriting some parts, debugging many lines of code and encountered some rather silly glitches such as not using mysql_real_escape_string() on a string I had to insert into the database, which would hilariously result in query execution errors when you least expect them. Another favourite error of mine is the one when opening files in PHP, using a function like fopen(), or file_put_contents(): "[..] failed to open stream: No such file or directory in [..]", which basically comes from the fact that while these functions can open and create files, they can not create directories in the path provided which aren't there. You have to create those yourself.

The CMS itself is pretty advanced in many respects: fully modular, PHP-based, limited to a MySQL backend but easily extended, with separate development and production website instances for the more demanding enterprise situations. It also features an AES-encrypted link between the development and production sites making the use of HTTPS and an expensive SSL certificate unnecessary. Finally NCMS employs a powerful and highly configurable caching mechanism, allowing it to scale to even the largest sites.

Why didn't I pick another, existing CMS? Why not go with Joomla, Drupal, or one of the dozens of other PHP-based CMSs? Primarily their complexity and wealth of bad design choices which resulted in limitations. The focus with NCMS from the beginning has been to make the design as uncompromising as possible, with only the most minimal set of requirements on each module. Template files need only the most basic adaptations to use them with NCMS and modules communicate using strict APIs and protocols.

At this point NCMS is essentially still a prototype. Particularly the administration section is still kind of basic and many more tasks need to be simplified and automated. What I'm considering is porting the current purely PHP-based administration section to a C++-, Qt-based desktop application, mostly for ease of installation and use, as well as for performance reasons.

I'll be using NCMS for future client sites, as well as my own sites. Once it's more developed I'll also consider licensing the CMS itself, commercially and maybe a free license as well. Open sourcing it is not on my list of options at this point, however, as I fail to see the point of doing so.

*dodges incoming flames*


Maya

Change Comes From Within

Today was my appointment with a lawyer regarding the change in my first name. The lawyer was a young woman, who seemed quite friendly and understanding of my situation. As she said repeatedly, she couldn't see me as anything but 'Maya' either, and could definitely imagine why having the official identity I have now would give issues, both practical and emotional. During the appointment Pieter, who accompanied me, suggested that a photo of me should be included with the request sent to the judge. The lawyer thought this was a good idea and thus she'll have a look at my site to pick out a suitable photo. She also requested I would get a letter from my psychotherapist to further reinforce my case.

Even better is that she'll also look into getting my official gender changed, which may be a possibility since with the upcoming law change this will turn into a definite possibility and a judge may be lenient enough to grant such a change in the knowledge that it will soon become possible anyway. I also learned that the total costs of this name change will be around 127 Euro, instead of 308 since the court costs will be partially paid for me as well. The only negative thing about this all is that it's unlikely everything will be settled before the end of this year. Even if things go smoothly it can easily take half a year. I guess I can wait a little longer...

In other news, I have installed Windows 7 Enterprise on my workstation PC last Saturday, and after a long and epic struggle with its many idiosyncracies, I think I got it more or less working as intended. Highlights are the default user interface which was designed by retarded monkeys on crack, the control panel which has been ripped into pieces and shattered throughout the operating system, making it a chore to hunt down where to change a particular setting, and the non-Aero, non-GPU accelerated basic theme performing noticably worse than the GPU-accelerated Aero interface when the GPU is used by an application like Folding@Home's GPU client.

Another change is the realization I had thanks to a remark from Pieter that my work on the new content management system (CMS) for the Nyanko website isn't immediately required now that we have decided to not have our own webshop. Instead I'll be focusing on setting up a temporary website, with the new site based on the CMS won't be needed until a month or two from now. This gives me time to work on putting 3D models and other resources for the ECD game together. I hope to start churning out results within two weeks time. I got the new 3D Studio Max 2010, by the way, and am liking it a lot so far. It's a definite improvement over version 9.

As a final small tidbit, last Sunday I went from taking 50 mg (one tablet) of Cyproterone, which is the testosterone blocker I use with my hormone therapy, every other day to taking 25 mg (half a tablet) a day. This should make its result more balanced and most importantly reduce the strain on my liver which has to process it all. Not that it's much of a strain compared to the 100 mg (two tablets) male to female transsexuals have to take daily to get their testosterone down to a feminine level, though. On a sidenote, having long nails is a godsend when splitting up small tablets :)

I still wouldn't mind having my testicles or whatever they really are removed so that this all won't be necessary any more.


Maya

Soreness Galore

Today has been a very trying day for me, although mostly on a purely physical level. I must have pushed myself at the swimming pool last Sunday more than I had imagined, as all day today I have been extremely sore. Mostly my upper arms, shoulders, sides and my legs and back a bit as well feel like they got mangled. I have rarely felt this sore.

I got some really nice news today, even if it was expected. The journalist of 'De Telegraaf' who had interviewed me today sent me an email telling me that the magazine in which I'm appearing is ready and will appear on Friday as scheduled. I was asked to send my address to someone else who'd then ensure I'll get a copy or two of it sent to me. It makes me feel somewhat less nervous now that I at least know for sure it'll get published. Now the wait is on to see what kind of effect it will have.

The past weekend and today I have been busy trying to install forum software to allow the rapidly expanding Nyanko development team to communicate. One of my requirements was that it would use a PostgreSQL server as database backend. First up was eGroupWare (eGW), which turned out to be some bugs in its PostgreSQL implementation, causing me to strand during the configuration stage of the installation, as it refused to save the configuration to the database.

Next up was Small Machines Forum (SMF), for which I used the 2.0 RC2 release (Release Candidate 2). This one turned out to have even more serious issues with a PostgreSQL backend, some of which had been introduced in RC2 after it worked perfectly in RC1 if I am to believe the bug reports and forum posts at the SMF site. This left me with two failed installs and as an act of desperation I turned towards phpBB, which I found out to my surprise supports a wide range of SQL database servers, including MSSQL and Sqlite.

PhpBB installation was downright painless. The PostgreSQL GUI-based management tool was very easy to use as well and in total installing phpBB took me about 5 minutes. Configuring it and setting up the forum categories and everything took me a few hours, also because it is meant as a private forum, with no user registration by users themselves, and phpBB needs to have an add-on installed to allow the administrator to add new users. The #phpbb channel on Freenode.net was very helpful in pointing me in the right direction, however. ACP Add User was the right module and was also quite easy to install.

Tomorrow I'll add the other members of the development team, and I hope it'll be a huge improvement over the email communication used so far. It should all be far less disjointed and distant this way. This week we'll see how it works out.

Also tomorrow I'll get a haircut and undergo a hair-removal torture session. I can really see how the latter treatment is having effect at this point. With another six months large parts of my face should be virtually hair-free, which will be a huge relief.

Anyway, it's time to go to bed again. I hope I'll get a good night's sleep.


Maya

Early Hope

Medical progress: on Monday Pieter wrote an email for me which I then sent off to the doctor at the UMC Groningen (UMCG) who leads the gender team there, Prof. dr. W.C.M Weijmar Schultz. Pieter had found his email address the day before. Today I got a response, which was quite positive. In it doctor Weijmar Schultz expressed his interest in my case and requested from me all medical information I had lying around. I sent the German and Dutch (Erasmus MC) MRI analysis reports in addition to the report of the physical examination at the AMC. I also described the reports from the VUMC and the second German clinic in it, plus the urgency of my case due to the intense emotional pressure this uncertainty about my body places on me.

I got some emails from my mother too, regarding the handling of my case by her therapist, Engel Vrouwe. Vrouwe had shown the emails he got earlier to a colleague and requested more medical information. I sent the same information to him as I did to Weijmar Schultz. It'll be interesting to see how those two leads work out the coming weeks.

The past few days I have been suffering from a rather painful cough, forming a nice friend for the headache and feeling of exhaustion I have been playing around with for a few months already. I think they'll make nice friends.

I'm working on a quick refresh of the Nyanko.ws site prior to a full upgrade to the new custom CMS. It'll be nice to see a list of games with up-to-date release dates, I guess :P The site will feature a 'contact us' page for the first time too. Kind of makes for a more realistic company site, I guess :)

I also started on the new Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time chapter (number 2). I'm not promising a release date beyond somewhere between next month and the end of this year. The responses to the first chapters so far have been overwhelmingly positive, which is nice :)

Alright, back to work with this little kitten...


Maya

Work

First of all, I finally updated the 'About Me' page on the main MayaPosch.com site. I added a list of facts as well, as a sort of FAQ. Hopefully it'll be more clear than the old version.

Secondly, to recap my mood and such the past weeks: about two weeks ago the continuous headache I already had began worsening, the past few days it seems to develop into a splitting headache during the day, incapacitating me, requiring me to take painkillers and try to sleep it off. It reminds me a bit of the year(s) at High-School when I had constant migraines (1+ times/week). Like then, there's no question that this is fully due to increased stress levels.

My mood during the day hovers between optimism, fatalism, depression, intense sadness and frustration, plus stoicism. I think it covers about the entire spectrum, including bouts of intense desire to commit suicide and despising oneself for being too chicken to just grab that knife or so. My only stable moods would be when I'm doing useful work.

The past weeks I have come to despise the compiler chain GCC with such an intense hatred, it could lead to manslaughter if it was alive. While working on a project for a German client (nicely behind schedule due to GCC's quirks), I managed to get the mixed C/C++ to compile on both the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler (MSVC) and MingW 3.4.x (using CodeBlocks as IDE). The 'extern "C"' statement is hereby a crucial key to making it work. The fun part starts with GCC (used 4.3.x) on Linux, which does not seem to recognize the 'extern' keyword and happily ignores it, instead throwing errors at me because it tries to compile the C code as though it was C++. My only recourse at this point seems to be to rewrite the C++ bits into C. I really dislike C-style strings :( Ah well, anything to be done with this project.

During the project I have come to loathe the Boost C++ extension libraries as well. I have tried to integrate the Filesystem, networking (ASIO) and some other libraries. The issues with it are due to the heavily embedded namespaces in some libraries like ASIO, poor documentation, and it being an absolute hell to compile. I spent a week attempting to make the filesystem library (two LIBs) link, only to have it demand time and time again an old, decripit version of one LIB while ignoring the LIB it should use. Disabling auto-link, recompiling Boost, plus hours of googling and trying solutions had no effect at all. Trevor couldn't get it to work either.

At this point I'm writing my own filesystem library, and employing Nyanko's existing standard library (SWL) for things like networking, threading and so on. I'll also use my own hybrid encryption method instead of OpenSSL for secure links within client-server frameworks, as OpenSSL is pretty much the pinnacle of a poor software project, with non-existent documentation, a backwards and non-intuitive API and the near-impossibility of the bloody source code ever compiling correctly. Its BIO I/O library I have the most experience with, and I must say that it has been an absolute horror to work with. Just astounding what kind of crap sometimes ends up in production systems. Leave poor closed-source, proprietary code alone for a change and see the horrors of open-source...

*coughs*

Anyway, one big project I'm working on at the moment is a hardware simulator, named Lilium, to be used with VHDL/Verilog and other hardware description languages, to simulate the design before it is loaded onto an FPGA or turned into an ASIC. It's a fairly involved project, but despite warnings from Pieter that it may be hard to pull off, I'm confident that I am capable of successfully completing the first prototype I'm working on. I hope that such demos will attract the attention of potential customers and/or investors. It would be a very welcome change.

Finally, I'll be going swimming again in an hour at the indoor pool at Almere-Stad (Almere-City) from 9 AM to 12 PM. Anyone is welcome ;)


Maya