Damned if you, damned if you don't and other observations

Blogging has been slow primarily because I have been working on learning the ins and outs of how Movable Type's innards work in between slowly working on a plug-in for Movable Type 4. The more that I look under the hood, the more impressed I am with the way that Movable Type was designed. Aside from the still fairly confusing user interface aspects of developing with Movable Type, the framework is really tight. Therein lays the "damned if you, damned if you don't" nature of writing software that extends either WordPress or Movable Type.

WordPress is, in my opinion, better documented. Maybe this is a function of the fact that WordPress is much simpler and less powerful than Movable Type, but it is easier to hit the ground running with WordPress. The problem with WordPress is precisely the fact that it is not as complicated and powerful once you get the hang of it. The plugin development process for Movable Type is, in my opinion, simply a better software engineering process by design. Now WordPress does have its advantages, namely that it is still easier to get up and running, and it has a far, far more active community of content designers than Movable Type has these days. You might say that these two suites are, when compared across all criteria, evenly matched insofaras they beat each other in an equal number of different categories.

Personally, if I were to suggest the next killer feature set for Movable Type, it'd boil down to two features: an entire release devoted to fully fleshing out every aspect of the developer and designer documentation, and creating a flood of good styles. Six Apart should at least hire a good intern, and task them with making at least two new good styles every week and adding them to the free repository on Six Apart's website to gain back a little bit of the ground lost there.

On a different note, Rachel and I were playing Acme Arsenal on our Wii and it's proven to be pretty addicting. CNet gave it a 3.0/10.00, but I don't think that's very fair. It may be frustrating sometimes because they didn't put too much thought into the camera system, but as of the end of the first level, it's a fun, light-hearted game. Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga for XBox 360 is another good game to play with the spouse. Rachel and I are going to work on getting every achievement (something I am normally far too lazy to do) once we get the strategy guide. She's also convinced me that we must pick up a copy of the upcoming Lego Indiana Jones when it comes out for XBox 360, and all I can say is, how can I turn down my wife when she wants to spend time playing video games with me?

After checking out the Brussels Journal in Google Reader, I came across this article about the increasing decentralization of government in Spain, which may lead toward the breakup of Spain altogether. I think it would be stupid for a country as small as Spain, with its provinces even smaller, to breakup when a move to a true federal government is possible. This is especially true at a time when the other players in the European Union are more unified. While a federation has its problems, namely that it is an artificial binding of different peoples, the advantage of a federation is that it allows those different, but related, peoples to come together with one military, economic and foreign policy that they can project outside their borders. At the end of the day, the provinces have the natural right to secede from Spain, but it would be terribly stupid for them to do that first, without insisting that the Spanish state be formally remade as a federal government with limited, constitutional powers.