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, the weekend was fun. No, really. It decided to be winter again (went from low 70s on Thurs to mid-to-low 20s on Sat) and also rainy, so you can probably figure out where the hell this is going. I had to work on Saturday. This was not a bad thing initially, because I looked out my window and Everything Was Clear. For some reason the area outside my window was clear, and nothing else was. I got to my car and spent 30 minutes breaking my ice scraper. (Although, to be fair, the roads had de-iced themselves enough to make travel relatively easy. They were good enough to go near-limit in and at-limit back, so that’s not too bad.) Deceptive, the street outside my window be. To make matters worse, I’m also nursing a really stupid cold, and have been since late Friday or so. (It’s stupid because it’s just there and annoying, and not necessilarily bad.) So, to remedy this, I played racquetball tonight. Did better than I usually do. It all works out.

I’m trying to work in some Ajax-y stuff into this project I’m working on at work. To date, I’ve spent a few hours trying to coerce Dojo into doing a tab view type arrangement, which it evidently does. . That didn’t work out, and neither did trying to get Rico to do accordian stuff either, so I gave up and wrote it myself. I know basically shit-all about JavaScript - I spent some time trying to figure out how to declare a variable - but it worked. It probably won’t work in IE, though. I must be missing something, though, especially in the case of the Rico accordian thing, because nothing looks wrong. But there’s shit-all for documentation, so I’m really just comparing my page against the one with the stupid demo on it.

(Side-rant: Why are there so many cool toolkits and stuff available with no documentation? It sucks, cuz they’re all like “hey, we do cool stuff here!” and you look at the demos and you’re all like “wow, that is cool! and the snippet looks pretty simple, too?…. where’s the docs?” and they’re all “hey look at this wiki that only has one library function of 5,000,281,191 documented!” and you retort with “damn you”. I realize that a lot of these things are totally “I like to do cool stuff!” type projects, but could you please take a minute of your time to at least write down the function names and what arguments they require? Jeesh.)

I’m still using qcodo for the project, and it’s working out pretty well. Still getting used to just saying “object, load thyself” instead of writing SQL. I implemented group authentication in about a 40-line, probably way inefficient function. Now I have to shove it all into the template I came up with and make the tabs work and add form controls and ba-da-bing. Hopefully I can get bits of the admin thing up by the end of the week or next week. Damned project is taking too long. Stupid lack of planning.

So it decided to be winter for a day. Proof here! Hopefully it’ll stay wintery and there’ll be snow tomorrow, so I can take more pictures and have some that actually turn out.

Getting more used to the Linux thing. I made some changes to my desktop arrangement and it’s a bit better. I still feel lost without Quicksilver and Gaim just doesn’t compare to Adium. But, I have two screens that look about the same now and more total desktop space. Can’t complain too loudly. Would like to have my music, though.

update: most of the snow melted overnight. boo.

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!

Having more and more trouble staying awake at work. it’s weird. not really going out, not really staying up late, but at work it’s hard to focus.

Been playing with a new PHP framework lately. It’s called Qcodo and it’s basically What I Was Looking For. I don’t believe I’ve written about what it was I was looking for, so here it is: most of my Web stuff is plug-and-chug with no real thinking or business rules or anything of that nature, so instead of spending a lot of time writing get/set methods in classes and re-implementing the same constructor over and over again, I wanted something that’d take a database definition (I wanted XML personally) and Just Deal With It and give me some classes and stuff to work with the data. Qcodo does that, but with some minor differences. The database definition is the database, so you have to have the DB created firstly. (I’d rather an XML DDL or something, just for the portability aspects of it.) Qcodo not only makes the data objects but also spits out a rough draft set of forms and such so you have an interface to work with the data Right Now. Plus, it has a templating engine thing called Qforms that encompasses things like editboxes with built-in data validation and grid views that automatically give you sorting and pagination and stuff.

It does have its niggling bits, though. The big huge one is the absolute lack of documentation. I can’t remember things so I usually have to have the PHP manual up or something when I’m starting on something new until I’ve got enough memorized to be comfortable. There’s nothing to have pulled up in Qcodo yet. The second is that I’d rather the core of the framework and stuff not be in the webroot. There’s a third too, but it’s not big - I’d like to have the Qforms controls be AJAXy but that’s coming. For something that’s still pretty early in its beta stages, though, it’s pretty impressive. I’m hoping to use it more as soon as I get more used to it.

Work needs naptime.