my so-called blog (redux)

I would like it to be known that Chris sucks. Said “friend” introduced me to a song called Heartbeats done first by The Knife and then covered by Jose Gonzales. So yeah, that’s totally all I’ve been listening to. Over and over again.

Qcodo’s built-in Ajaxy stuff is rocking, though a bit slow. I have my tabs and an editable DataGrid element and It Works(tm). I just need to use iframes (blecch) to get everything to work properly where it needs to. Hooray automagic pagination and sorting.

So the tabbed view I wrote works. I’m gonna try to combine it with sliding doors to make it purty. Maybe I’ll even nice up the code and release it. It Fucking Works(tm) so if it’s on the Web maybe I won’t lose it.

As I said before, I’m trying to integrate more Ajaxy stuff into this project. I’m focusing on the admin console right now just because I need a good interface to edit stuff before I develop the client front-ends. It’s come to my attention that prototype.js ends up being Really Cool since I found some third-party docs for it, that authentication with this kinda stuff may not be quite as hard as I figure it might’ve been, and that I really don’t know what I’m doing. Right now I have some code that kinda works in Safari and doesn’t work at all in IE or FireFox. It’s weird, though, because it breaks in the same fashion in IE and FireFox. It’s actually kinda scaring me a bit.

I really want to write an iTunes library synchronizer tool. There’s already one - syncOtunes - but it relies on ID3 tags for matching. I’ve been kinda thinking up ways to do it by comparing the files themselves. The big problem with this is that you may have two songs that are the same song but, for example, encoded at different bitrates, or that are extended versions of the song. I had some ideas on how to chunk up and process the file to come up with a signature, and then compare them with a bit of uncertainty thrown in to make things interesting. Something to add to my list of things. Haven’t decided yet if it should be before or after learning Java/J2EE/JSF/etc.

Actually managed to wake up early this morning. Like, 7. I never wake up before 8 unless I *have* to and even then, 8 is usually a struggle. Ah well. Life sucks at the moment, work is scary, yadda yadda yadda. At least the team is doing well.

So I made the jump back to a regular desktop at home today. The difference in screen brightness between my actual monitor and the screen on my old TiBook was getting to me so I slapped Slackware Linux on my Athlon and set it up. I now have another computer without any music on it. I spent a good hour fucking around with sound on it so I can listen to something (at least Rhythmbox has some decent net radio stuff in it.. btw, Now It’s Overhead is good and indie). All the menu text and stuff is Too Big. Evolution doesn’t connect to my fricking Exchange server at work. But I’ll get used to it. If it keeps working tomorrow. On the plus side, XFCE is nice. Liking that better than I like Gnome or KDE. X did at least kinda figure out that I had 2 monitors (to be fair I added the 2nd after the fact - Slackware’s xf86setup is the way to go there).

In other news, at the recommendation of a friend I started checking out Ferret/Gerwin for doing entity relationship diagrams. Gerwin lets you graphically lay out the database, then make relationships. It’ll spit out a SQL script in SQL92 format or PostgreSQL-specific or MySQL-specific formats. It’s handy and gets all the FK stuff done easily and amazingly is more stable than trying to deal with phpMyAdmin (which I think is getting too “smart” with the Web features for its own good) or MySQL Administrator (which only really works right on windows). It’s a little rough around the edges - there’s no provision for setting random fields to not null, for example, and MySQL auto increment fields I have to do by hand - but even those minor niggling points are, well, minor.

Also, Qcodo’s 0.2 preview beta came out today. The new examples include a nice bit of AJAXy goodness, and you seem to get it For Free(tm) when you use the Qforms thing it comes with. Looking forward to using that more now that I’m a bit more comfortable with the framework.

Finally - good luck to Will on his move to California!

Idea I’ve been tossing around: instead of coding your class (assuming PHP here) around a framework (propel, db_table, etc. etc.) or just hard-coding data management into your methods (calling PEAR DB directly, f.e.) why not have a kinda proto-DB wrapper that uses reflection to examine which variables need to be saved, and then does such and makes proper SQL (in whatever dialect) and then passes it on appropriately? The wrapper could thusly be modified to support other storage types including XML or memcached or whatever, or just banging things out in an array. Kinda like LINQ but for PHP and without all the making of the language syntax.

In the future I shall try to be less melodramatic. My PowerBook lacks an AirPort card at all; I confirmed that it was supposed to have one so now one’s on order and I may get it soon. In the meantime I’ve been screwing around with various third-party wireless drivers. There is one called WirelessDriver (imaginative, I know) that is free as in speech and beer, and two others that are neither but support 802.11a/g cards. The pay drivers are fairly inexpensive ($15) and the one I liked actually worked out of the box on my Proxim 802.11abg combo.

The problem I have with this is that both Linux and FreeBSD support most Atheros/Intel/etc. 802.11a/g chipsets (but less so Broadcom), and darn near all 802.11b ones. There’s no real reason why my Senao Prism2.5 card should not Just Work(tm) in OS X. Or why I should have to resort to a pay driver or fairly flaky free one to get support. Granted, it’s a small market - iBooks can’t take PCMCIA cards anyway and OS X supports Airport natively - but it can’t be that hard to port an existing driver. So, that means I’m thinking about trying it. I did at one point have a bit of a replacement keyboard driver working to an extent in OS X. That was 10.1, though.

So I finally got my PowerBook back. I bought a 1GHz Titanium back in august and due to a comedy of errors it took two months for it to come back from the repair center. It’s cool and all but my Airport card doesn’t work. And I was like a day away fromg etting a new machine. Oh well. Getting it going was pretty painless, though. TinkerTool + Growl + Quicksilver rock your boxors.

A project at work is going to lead me into my first forays into AJAX development. Needless to say the fact that I need to interface my project with Campus Standard Database(tm) means that without using AJAX certain choosy elements would be horrific to use. (It’s an inventory thing, you need to choose the building/room and the list of such in the Campus Standard Diddlybobber is like 1300 entries long.) So now I’m looking into which frameworks I want to use for the thing. There are a few frontrunners at the moment. AJAX still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on the implementation level, though; that’s got more to do with my general lack of understanding of what JavaScript and the DOM can do for me.

I’ve got Google Desktop on my work PC; the Sidebar feature is really handy. Don’t much care for the rest of it (mainly because I use my Mac for most everything; the PC is just for VMs and Outlook really) but that one feature I wish was available on the Mac.

Trying to think through the data persistence thing I wrote about - not going to use PHP for the next Really Big Project(tm) I’ve got going on (probably Java, actually) but it’d be neat to get it going anyway just for the challenge. I may not use memcache like I thought though, since there’s not really any security in memcache. The code is pretty easy; I may just prototype a PHP-based solution and backport or something or whatever.

I’ve got an amex card now. Kinda interesting - like, credit without the credit. Other stuff abounds!

So I went ahead and got the Mighty Mouse. The buttons are a bit hard to get used to - the case plastics for the mouse (with the exception of the scroll nub) are exactly like the ones for the regular Pro Mouse, meaning the entire top shell moves when you go to click. This is not a bad thing. It is however somewhat easy to misplace your fingers and click and miss the touch sensor in the mouse, or be off and left-click when you mean to right-click. And I’ve activated Exposé too many times by accident. Other than that it’s a good mouse - the scroll nub is very useful, though it requires some time to get used to as well.

so I bought both the Mighty Mouse and the PowerBook so I’m now pretty officially broke. Then I have that speeding ticket to pay and hey my license plates are expired too! So, all in all, I’m glad I’m working the couple jobs and dealing with the contract work. I am quite looking forward to being able to work mobily, as my couch is far more comfortable than this dumb student desk thing.

Interesting stuff: the “mini-ERP” that I’ve had to work on/implement on and off over the past 3 years is coming to a head again and hopefully this time around I might be able to do some really cool stuff with it. It’ll be my first time (^_^~~) working with web services and SOAP so that’ll be exciting. Debating whether or not to use WebObjects for development of it - it’d be a good in to get an Xserve in the rack over here, as well as getting a lot more comfortable with Java development. I’m also going to force in some time to get some work done on WebCash. I really really need something like it. Really. Badly. Lucky I’m not overwithdrawn every month badly.

So I was reading kuro5hin (yeah, don’t ask) and came across this article. Basically, through judicious use of JavaScript, browser lock-in and document rewriting tricks, you can have a server-side app do everything through the browser, including interact with a database (using the MS Jet engine). Intriguing in a kinda car-crashy way, but not much more: why not just, y’know, write something using a proper client-side app language? If you’re an adept enough programmer you should be able to pick up the syntax of a new language pretty simply; you could even do it in C#. Otherwise, why not package up a little Web server and distribute it? I honestly think that’s not a bad idea, at least for the low-end (however, I will admit to wanting to make everything a web app). There are obviously problems with running critical apps on desktops but for 10 or fewer users it’s not too bad of an idea, assuming you can get at least the person hosting the app schooled on security. Maybe I’ll come back and look at this tomorrow and decide that this was a really really stupid idea after all.