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Private wikis for personal organisation
I’ve been struggling with different methods of staying organised for as long a I can remember, but I think I’ve finally found something that works. A couple of days ago I set myself up a password protected Wiki (using my own slightly modified version of WikkiTikkiTavi) to see if a private personal Wiki could help me stay on top of things. It’s already proving remarkably useful. I’ve set up the front page as a to-do list, split in to University, Work and Personal sections. Any tasks which involve writing or developing ideas are wiki words linking to a page where I can develop them further. I’ve also got a section devoted to things I plan to blog (hence the recent surge in blogging activity), a bunch of links to useful sites and the beginnings of a collection of phone numbers and contact details. I also finally have a good place to keep all of those irritating but essential pieces of information such as my National Insurance number.
[... 219 words]Applications in Java
My opinion of Java as a platform for developing GUI applications has generally been that it results in slow, clunky, ugly software that is a pain to install, feels unresponsive and fails to behave in the way I expect a GUI to behave. I based this on my experience with Java applets (ugh) and Mediasurface, a content management system I had to struggle with for two years working for a dot-bomb in London.
[... 387 words]Absolute positioning on the wiki
I’ve put together some notes on constructing CSS layouts using absolute positioning over on the css-discuss Wiki. If you have any suggestions or improvements, just make them :)
Bill Kearney responds
Bill Kearney posted this comment in response to yesterday’s semi-rant:
[... 187 words]Site moved
I’ve just finished migrating this site to a new server. Everything seems to be working, and the site appears to load noticably faster now.
Letting off some steam
I spent most of today knee deep in RSS, writing an aggregator for a project at work. It has been quickly becoming apparent that “Really Simple Syndication” is anything but! There are currently three major (and goodness knows how many minor) specifications doing the rounds, and the majority of feeds seem to pick and chose between the three at will. Even the three core elements that describe an item (title, link and description) are both optional and heavily overloaded.
[... 716 words]The blogging MP
Could Tom Watson be the blogging world’s best kept secret? He’s the Labour MP for west Bromich East, he’s been blogging apparently since since July 2001 and posts updates several times a day, including an almost daily “Today in parliament” entry. I’m surprised I haven’t seen him linked to by someone before. I wander if any other UK MPs have frequently updated blogs?
PhotoPal
PhotoPal is a new PHP image gallery system by Noel Jackson inspired by the Photos section on Textism. The way it is implemented reminds me somewhat of the Blosxom philosophy—the album’s structures is defined by the directory structure, with simple text files adding additional descriptions, and metadata is extracted from the photos themselves using PHP’s exif_read_data() function.
Bjørn Borud blogs
Bjørn Borud (a Senior Software Engineer at AllTheWeb) has recently started blogging. His thoughts on wikis make interesting reading. I also rather liked his description of something he calls the “Hansel und Gretel” mode of browsing:
[... 296 words]Interview with Steve Champeon
Meet The Makers are carrying a great interview with Steve Champeon, author, web standards advocate and founder of the Webdesign-L mailing list (which I re-subscribed to today). Steve’s explanation of the concept of “progressive enhancement” is particularly interesting:
[... 202 words]Lively discussion on SOAP
If you get the basic idea of web services but are still looking to get your head around SOAP (I know I am) the lively discussion currently taking place in Sam Ruby’s comment section looks like a great place to start.
Closures and continuations
Thanks to Dan Sugalski (designer of Parrot, the next generation Perl VM) I finally understand what continuations and closures actually are. He explains them as part of a comparison between the forthcoming Parrot and two popular virtual machines already in existence:
Better DHTML navigation
Adrian Holovaty demonstrates how standards compliant code and effectively written javascript can decimate the size of a clunky navigation interface, and make it more usable and accessible to boot: Web standards improve 2theadvocate.com navigation.
Three column layouts in CSS
ThreeColumnLayouts in the css-discuss Wiki currently lists 24 freely available three column CSS layout templates.
css-discuss archives back online
After several months spent offline, the css-discuss archives are back and better than ever thanks to the hard work of my colleagues at Incutio. As well as updating the archives with all of the missing posts from the past few months they’ve improved the URL scheme to make things more search engine friendly (hopefully Google will start indexing the archives now).
Fixing quotes with Javascript
Marek Prokop has a cunning way of getting Internet Explorer to style <abbr> elements (IE, for reasons unknown, usually ignores their existence both as stylable elements and through the DOM). A comment by Mr. Farlops on diveintomark inspired me to have a go at fixing IE’s equally faulty quotes behaviour using javascript. Rather than detecting IE by checking for the presence of document.all, I decided to use a Microsoft specific proprietary extension: DHTML Behaviors.
Mozilla changes focus
The Mozilla project is shifting focus to concentrate more on standalone apps such as Phoenix and Minotaur. Cool. The full story can be found on MozillaZine, with further details on the Mozilla.org Roadmap. See also comments from Blogzilla and mpt.
The power of Javascript
Spotted on paranoidfish.org/links, JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language dispells some myths about Javascript and shows how it is actually a very powerful and expressive language. The comparisons made to Lisp are particularly interesting.
[... 128 words]Glastonbury sold out
Bloody hell—Glastonbury 2003 has sold out within just 24 hours of tickets going on sale! My first thought was that this must be an April Fool’s thing, but it seems extremely unlikely considering that Glasto fans are already being driven to paying double the price of the ticket from ticket touts (if it is a joke, it’s gone horribly wrong). Luckily the main group of friends I’m going with all got there in time, but any hopes I had of convincing other friends to go are well and truly squashed.
[... 122 words]getElementsByClassName() rewritten
Andy has rewritten getElementsByClassName, resulting in much cleaner code and a method which can be called on any DOM element, not just the document object.
Playing with REBOL
Yesterday, inspired by Keith’s Programming page, I decided to take a look at REBOL. REBOL is a very high level scripting language designed for working with the internet. It has the interbnet built in to its very core—its 45 core datatypes include email addresses and URIs and it includes support for 14 standard protocols including HTTP, FTP, POP and even finger.
[... 209 words]Getting Linux to talk to an iPAQ
I’m playing around with a borrowed Compaq iPAQ at the moment. Unfortunately I don’t have permission to go the whole hog and install linux on it but, as the next best thing, I’ve been working out how to get it to talk to my Linux box. A quick Google search brought up SynCE, an open source project providing all kinds of software to allow communication between *nix and handhelds running Pocket PC. So far I’ve got the command line tools working which allow me to transfer files to and from the iPAQ and start up iPAQ programs remotely. The next step is synchronisation with Evolution.
I can’t believe its not a table
Via Craig, Big John’s new CSS layout “I can’t believe it’s not a table!”. I’ve played with the key concept of this before: using a background-left image on the body and a background-right on an all-encompassing div to create the illusion of two columns stretching the length of the page, but I never got it working quite as well as this. Big John’s layout uses that trick and a few others to get it rock solid across all browsers, then explains exactly how it all works in excruciating detail. Essential reading.
Sitepoint XHTML tutorial
SitePoint are running an excellent new tutorial series: XHTML Web Design for Beginners. There’s little there for non-beginnners, but I’ll certainly be sending new learners in that direction.
Glastonbury does CSS
Cool—the new Glastonbury Festival website uses a CSS layout! Unfortunately it completely fails to validate as XHTML Transitional, but comes to within an inch of validating as HTML 4.01 Transitional (they just need to change the doctype, take out a few XHTML specific attributes and clean up a misplaced <b> tag).
Smarter CSS positioning
Daniel Glazman’s proposal for smarter positioning in CSS (see also this blog entry) makes a lot of sense.