Andrew's diary

Tuesday, 28 February 2006

Since Commas is progressing well, have written a cronjob which'll update the source, build the WAR and deploy it to a demo site for anyone to play with.

Monday, 27 February 2006

Apparently "all of Australia" are reading this. That's about 20 million people more than I expected, TBH.

Monday, 27 February 2006

Finally got around to testing Google Page Creator - it seems to work quite well and, apart from not being XHTML, passes my structure test well.

Sunday, 26 February 2006

Not particularly long, but very tiring, drive back from Macclesfield. Watched Stargate and Enterprise from earlier. I particularly liked the fact that Daniel's camcorder employed technology different to that currently available in the alternate timeline: it showed that the ripple effect was more widespread than just the discovery of the gate and otherwise-SGC staff. Three possibilities spring to mind:

• The SGC's mission of acquiring alien technlogy had filtered, legitimately back to mainstream life,
• The Trust were using alien technology within their own businesses for a commercial advantage,
• It was a step-on-a-butterfly:change-the-presisdency type side effect of chaos theory.

Admittedly all of them appeal to a sci-fi geek: the first two show the beneficial side effects of using the gate rather than just being constantly at risk of annihilation; the last shows the writers have been reading Ray Bradbury (and/or slipping in more Simpsons' references). All of them show a care of writing that, despite Manny Coto and the Reeves-Stephens' best efforts, Enterprise still lacks.

Saturday, 25 February 2006

Took Alex up to Macclesfield to show him off.

Saturday, 18 February 2006

Dad's got some contract work, so I'm in charge of the website. Did the mockup with pure CSS, DDA-compliant goodness pretty quickly and started on a J2EE-based CMS inspired by the ease of deployment found in VQWiki. It'll be small, lightweight, easy-to-deploy and configure but powerful and expandible. Initially designed for relatively static websites, it'll embed Unverse.net's Whizzywig rich-text editor: it was the best one I found for providing a style-, rather than appearance-, based input and fully-complaint XHTML output. The easy test for any Javascript rich-text editor is:

This is line 1.<Enter or Shift-Enter>
This is line 2.<Enter or Enter-Enter>
\n
This is paragraph 2.

This should result in the following HTML, anything which doesn't has failed the test and should be discounted:

<p>This is line 1.<br />
This is line 2.</p>
<p>This is paragraph 2.</p>

With the aim of it being small and lightweight, I've written a custom persistence layer, with currently JDBC- and XML-backed persistence engines.

Sunday, 12 February 2006

Dinner at Mum & Dad's for Dad's birthday and David's trip to India, for which he leaves tomorrow.

Saturday, 11 February 2006

Took Alex down to Folkestone to see his family down there.

Saturday, 04 February 2006

A good day: sorted MRTG & Analog data on bleb.org in preparation for expanding the number of people sharing the box; set-up Tomcat and integrated it with the existing virtual host set up and wrote a Maemo-wiki ApplicationCatalog -> RSS feed Perl script.