One year older
April 27, 2004
It was my birthday on Saturday, and one of my presents were a surprise visit to Hammersmith Apollo for a Norah Jones concert. I didn’t get to know where we were going until we were well underway, which was just as well as it looked for a while like we were going to be a bit late. When we finally got there it turned out we still had oodles of time left though (the difference between “start” and “opening of doors” was lost on us philestines). It was a pretty good show, I think. It was a bit more upbeat than I had thought it would be; we were even treated to a cover of AC/DC’s “Ride On”…
Have been trying to keep away from keyboards (at home) for almost a week now. My fingers and the back of my hands are quite sore. Went to an osteopath on Thursday last week, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with my hands. So, the good news is that I probably just need rest them. Maybe I’ll finally get around to read some more…
Validation
April 19, 2004
Spent a little while making my projects page and diary validate to XHMTL 1.1 Strict again. Pages tend to occasionally drift out of valid mode when left alone for too long. Anyway, they’re back where they should be now.
New menu
April 18, 2004
As you can see, I’ve just revised the navigation menu on this site. As you drill down from the index page you now lose the ability to navigate directly to the other main sections. The menu on some of the pages were starting to become a bit cluttered, so something had to be done about it. I’ve also cleaned up the implementation somewhat, so I’m much happier about that too now.
I’ve been thinking a bit about adding some functionality to my diary. I don’t yet have a clean picture of what I want but a few things have crossed my mind:
- default to only show N entries, and have option to show more
- search on titles and entry bodies
- add topics and enable browsing by them
- increase this size of the textarea I use to type this entry
- add ability for (a selected group of) people to add comments
It has also crossed my mind to use one of the existing blogging tools around. However, it is quite a learning experience to write my own, so I think I’ll stick with my guns for now. I don’t actually need anything more fancy than what I got now, and anyway, this is easier to integrate with the rest of the site. :)
Playing with xml
April 17, 2004
Been playing with XML a bit today. I’m normally a LaTeX-person, but it may not be the best choice for what I have in mind, since I want both plain text and html output in addition to a printed document. Also, XML would be another skill to put under my belt.
`options’ on Freshmeat
April 17, 2004
Last night I released options on Freshmeat.net. I’m curious as to how it will be welcomed. Will people find it useful, or is everybody using popt already?
In other news: I’ve changed from using h3-tags to h2-tags throughout the site for pages which previously used only h1 and h3 tags. A few tweaks to the CSS for headings were required to accomodate this. I’ve also updated the GGTL introduction somewhat.
Real banana cake
April 11, 2004
- 100 grams fine brown sugar
- 100 grams butter
- 100 grams self-raising flour
- 2 medium-sized ripe bananas
- 1 egg
Whisk egg & sugar until nice and creamy. Juice the bananas and stir into the mix. Add melted butter, sift in the flour and mix well. Pour mixture into 18 cm (7 inches) round pan and cook in the middle of the oven at 180 degrees C (350 Fahrenheit, Gas mark 4).
Braindead PHP benchmark
April 5, 2004
I just did a quick search for “switch vs if else” benchmarks in php and found this switch-vs-if benchmark at the top of the Google’s hitlist. I really hope nobody makes any decisions (other than to not hire the creator) based on that benchmark. (If you’ve been programming for a while and can’t figure out why this benchmark is worthless: consider a change of career.)
Options update
April 3, 2004
Today I finally got around to hack a bit more on options, my simple option parsing library. The work I did was mainly stripping out debugging output and cleaning up comments to keep doxygen happy. I also made a new Debian package for this new version and updated the online docs to the new version. I’m wondering whether it is now mature enough that I should put it on Freshmeat.
