Yesterday, instead of my usual two train commute to work I ended up catching four. One to Central, then another to North Strathfield, then all stations to Eastwood and finally a single hop to Epping. Why? Because a bus had run driverless off the road and down the embankment just beyond Epping station. See the mobile phone photo on the right.

A messy start to an otherwise good day that saw me gain satisfaction from programming and cooking Japanese food. It's a cuisine that feels healthy to eat and tastes good too.

I see Drupal are holding an Asia Pacific Conference in conjunction with CeBIT. Not certain if I'll go or not. We have a big stand at CeBIT, but I'm seriously thinking of dropping Drupal for my own CMS. Not sure if the latest versions are supported on this webhost, though I haven't bothered looking yet.

Can't wait for the Easter break. Exhausted for no good reason this week.

The latest version of SharePoint has been a support nightmare for me. On paper Microsoft SharePoint looks great. Integration with Microsoft Office, document sharing, discussion forums, task manager, blogs and even wikis. I really like the ability to drag and drop files using the Explorer View for document libraries. The problem is that the interface is unwieldy and the behaviour, especially with permissions, seems often to be inconsistent. For the basic tasks that we are doing in SharePoint I would expect an intuitive interface familiar to Office users.

I have been on the phone constantly with users confused by SharePoint and I am no expert. SharePoint also requires Office 2003 or above and doesn't support Firefox for many administrative and file-related tasks. Unfortunately, I can't use Internet Explorer 7, which at least has tabs, because of organisational software that does not function with it.

Why does Microsoft have to make life so difficult? 

I really like Gallery2, PHP/MySQL web-based image gallery software, especially the ease by which you can upload photos from your desktop PC. Unfortunately, this web host only supports a shared installation of version 1. I tried installing it on the Windows IIS server last week, but only got a blank screen for my efforts. As I didn't have enough time to debug the problem, I installed it instead on an Apache server under Solaris without difficulty. Modifying the default theme to fit in with the intranet was easy. The only downside is the lack of LDAP/Active Directory Support without using the "Embedded" version, which I didn't have time to play with. In the end it's not a huge problem.

Now I have an easy way to share image albums on our work intranet. Feedback has been great so far.

Thursday last week finally saw the release of our new intranet, the source of much stress over the last month or so. In the end my tincaCMS Content Management System featured more fully than my senior supervisor wanted or knows. I added modules to automatically fix the links of content migrated from Drupal along with a search and replace function. Even the "static" pages now include PHP functions that generate integrated navigation menus from tincaCMS. I'm proud of the system and hope that it will get a good reception from the end users. However, I'm already thinking of improvements, especially for adding new content.

I stayed late at work on Thursday and ended up meeting B even later after she had a Japanese style haircut at Kippo in Chinatown. We waited about half and hour at the cheap, but very popular, Japanese restaurant, but after being told that we could end up waiting another half an hour moved on elsewhere. Unfortunately, we selected a Korean restaurant. They laid out a number of small dishes, including kimchi, tofu, potato salad, mung bean sprouts, cabbage and more, each with a marinade. Mains were bimbimbap and potato pancake.

It is such a long time since Sydney received decent rains that the past few days of windy and wet weather have been quite exciting. A good excuse to stay at home on the weekend, especially as the Miranda Westfield shopping centre's carpark filled early (forced to purchase more expensive fruit and veg from the local grocer - anything but Woolies!).

Celebrated a family friend's birthday on Saturday with a dinner at Caruso's in Gymea. My gnocchi with pancetta was very good, though the quality of other dishes varied. Service was excellent.

Woke up early today to jot down some ideas for the TincaCMS, then spent about three hours this afternoon trying to get the "Linker" file management plugin of the Xinha WYSIWYG embedded HTML editing tool to work. I can't get it to scan any parent directories, maybe due to some Windows file path issues. Not certain yet. I also want to try FCKEditor, the file manager looks better, but integrating it seems to be a little bit more work than the single line of HTML/JavaScript that Xinha requires. I already had Xinha running on my older versions of TincaCMS, but without Linker running. I might attempt to use FCKEditor with my ideas for simplifying page editing under Tinca.

Dreamweaver just about tipped me over the edge into full blown insanity today. It kept reverting to using the wrong library items on web pages. I like Dreamweaver, and use it daily at work, but generally I am just as happy using a syntax highlighting text editor. I tend not to use Dreamweaver's "advanced" features such as templates and libraries because I have had very bad experiences (like today's) with updating pages across a site.

Templates and library items are, in my opinion, okay options for small sites, with single or limited maintainers and infrequent updates of shared items. However, for a busy and dynamic intranet server side scripting and content management systems are far superior. However, thanks to stupid decisions by our manager I have to build all the non-news and non-events pages in Dreamweaver (he wanted FrontPage!?!) using shared library items and templates.

After a year of trying to get a usable intranet with Drupal we finally bit the bullet and decided to use a custom solution. The problem is that we were trying to force Drupal to do what it wasn't designed for. Drupal, and many other open source content management systems are suitable for a single purpose organisation or department, but do not appear to handle multiple groups are purposes very easily. For instance, our intranet was both a news site and a repository of fairly static content.  The area devoted to HR should  be discrete from the science information. But Drupal's support for 'landing pages' was poor.

I'm sure that Drupal could be modified to cope with our needs, and I am equally certain that there are open source CMS's that can handle our intranet. The problem is that these CMS's often need grunty hardware, specific software or extensive customisation. We are limited with regards to the hardware that we have access to and moreover we are severly time and resource limited. I need to get a working intranet up in a matter of a month, in addition to doing all my everyday duties.