I know, I know, I'm a terrible blogger. I've all but ignored this blog, and given up on LiveJournal as well. The last couple of months have been insane on top of insane, but I'm finally digging out of it. Between dealing with Christmas, dealing with minutia and fallout from moving here months ago, and a second contract that I really shouldn't have taken, I've had absolutely no free time. This means no side projects, no new shiny things, and no blogging.

That being said, it is now 2009, and I have a whole list of things I want to get accomplished right now. My wife is in Russia for two weeks, so I now have no excuse for not doing any of it. My first priorities are my abandoned Android application and whatthefuck.com.

ElJay is going to see a new release in a few days fixing a lot of the difficulties people are having. There's a 25% reduction in memory use, a huge increase in speed and responsiveness, and seems to take care of much of the network connectivity issues people have been coming up with. Once that's out, work will begin on a new application that posts not only to LiveJournal, but any LJ-based site, Movable Type, Wordpress, or Blogger site. It's the number one feature request besides specific LiveJournal stuff, so there will be some parallel development. I will likely be maintaining both applications separately, so those who only use LiveJournal don't have to learn a new tool, but both applications will benefit from the use of some shared code.

The old wtf has been running quite well lately. The number of exceptions being passed back to me have dropped considerably, and people seem to be using the site without too much difficulty. I have a huge checklist of crap I need to finish before I start mail bombing old users, but I have to say, things aren't bad right now. What's coming? Mostly style and behind the scenes changes. The code needs to be cleaned up quite a bit, as there is something like three years of start and stop development in there, and it needs to be tightened up a bit. Data management and cleanup needs to occur, as some older board posts are missing and/or corrupted, due to an old bug. The mobile site at m.whatthefuck.com is going to be filled out with some of the user options and an email notifier, and promoted to a top tier service out of wtf. Some basic blog functionality is going to be added as well, due to popular demand, and support for it is likely going to be rolled into the above "new blogging application".

From there? Who knows. I have big plans for 2009. As for the freebies? "Things I Hate About You" is going to get some social features, comments, and Facebook integration, TwitterGrowl is going to get a GUI, and is going to get a new storage engine and a new home site.

Things that aren't free? Well, you'll see. :)

Forgive my long absence, been so busy with work and other projects that I haven't really taken the time to update. I really need to find a better way to remedy that.

For now, though, the homegrown project of 'gheibot' has, erm, "matured" into whatbot. Designed as our IRC channel's replacement for infobot, we're looking to expand its appeal and get a few more eyes on it as it actually starts working. It's currently written in OO perl5, on top of Net::IRC, and communicates with SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Designed to be rather IO and database agnostic, in theory, it can be adapted to protocols such as AIM, or other databases such as BDB or Microsoft SQL Server.

As of right now, there is a basic extension system, and attempts to duplicate the basic learning and karma capabilities of infobot. Needless to say, it has a while to go.