Blog up, Surrogates

One of the things I’ve been missing is a good blog that does all the fancy stuff I’ve been needing: categorizing, easy editing, RSS, etc. I figured I’d install the ever popular WordPress and be done with it, but it requires MySQL and I’m pretty alergic when it comes to databases. Not that I have anything against them, but I like the surety of seeing my content as files somewhere that I can backup. When searching for alternatives, I discovered that it is really quite hard to find a blog that doesn’t use MySQL. All the ones that do look terrible and have lame features. I finally hunted down NinjaBlog which appears to be a modified version of WordPress that uses flat files as the storage mechanism. Hurrah! Anyhow, we’ll see how it does. EDIT: It goes really poorly, I had to go ahead and swap to WordPress, which is actually quite nice, even if it does hide all my data away in a database.

On a more personal note, I saw Surrogates today. I had been excited about it for a while, but recent reviews have not been kind so I went in with low expectations. I found it quite enjoyable, if predictable at times. It makes one think about life and the lies we use to reassure ourselves. But the best part was it featured Takeo Kanade, the professor at CMU/Robotics Instititue that is largely responsible for the field of robotics. Way to go Takeo! With Randy Pausch in Star Trek and now Takeo Kanade in Surrogates, perhaps being featured in a major Hollywood film is closer to me than I think 🙂