2005/07 - blog.lmorchard.com

2005 July 26

2005 July 18

Discovering WSGI and XSLT as middleware

# 3:10 pm

2005 July 12

In-browser XOXO Outliner Experiment

Testing, testing--is this thing on? Well, I do have to say that I've recovered rather well from the "stroke" last week. Things have been pretty busy since then, so I haven't had much of a chance to blather any more around these parts. However, in the spirit of a few recent experiments, I have another demo for you. Here's the URL of the latest work in progress / proof of concept: http://www.decafbad.com/2005/07/map-test/tree2.html What is it, you might ask before clicking a strange URL? It's an outliner, in Javascript. Or, rather, a first rough stab at one anyway. It's got a long way to go, and there are indeed better options out there already, but I wanted to try making one myself. A quick summary of controls: No mouse drag of items yet, but you can click on them to edit. Use the up and down cursor keys to navigate through the outline. Use shift along with the cursor keys to shift items around. Use the control key along with the cursor keys to control visibility of child items. Update: There're a few more things I didn't mention, as well as a few bug half-fixes. Hitting return when the editor is on an existing item will insert a new blank item right after it. Hitting shift-return will append a new child item to the current item. Tab and shift-tab, as well as shift-right and shift-left, are supposed to indent and outdent items. Unfortunately, they're not quite working yet and of course they semi-clobber other useful keyboard functions, so I'm still feeling around for a good way to support these. The idea is that I want to unobtrusively drop some CSS and JavaScript into an HTML page with one or more XOXO-style outlines, magically turning them into in-browser outline editors. But, like I said, there's still lots of work to be done here, and I'm pretty sure I've riddled this thing with circular references that will make your IE/Win combination leak like crazy. I just wanted to see if I could make something like this work, though. And, roughly, it seems to do so in Safari and Firefox. The next part of this equation will be coming up soon, I think. And that is: Okay, now that I've created / edited an outline in my browser--how can I save it? [ ... 1045 words ... ]

# 5:56 pm

2005 July 05

Suffered a Stroke in my Exocortex

So, this weekend, I suffered a sort of minor stroke in my exocortex. The girl and I left for a bit to get food on Saturday afternoon and, when we got back, I found my PowerBook making grinding / growling noises from the general vicinity of its hard drive. A reboot or two later, and the poor thing stopped bothering to spin up the drive and just sat there in blinking confusion looking for a System folder. Now, if you've been following along, you might be thinking, "Didn't he just go through this not too long ago?" If so, you'd be right. I'm not sure what I do to these things, since I killed an iBook hard drive like this, too. I'm very hesitant to blame Apple for this since, well, I'm just really not a careful person when it comes to hardware. I thank my lucky stars, so far, for AppleCare. The problem this time, though, is that the failure happened without warning. The past two times, I had a bit of a gradual slide into failure with an agonizing period of intermittent function just long enough to evacuate some essentials onto another machine. But this time, boom. No warning. And stupid me: I deleted the backups I'd made back when I upgraded to Tiger. So, my last decent backup of anything is about a year old, from the last time I had a hard drive crash. Thus, this feels a bit like a sound blow to the head. I've lost all my recent changes to my feed aggregator subscription list. I've lost all my Tinderbox documents. I'm still groping around for registration keys for all of my software. The arrangement of tools I've gotten used to being within finger-twitch range is now gone. It's been a long time since I had a serious failure in a machine I depend on where I didn't have a recovery plan. Ouch. The two things that are keeping me from going entirely bonkers are: The girl never sold her old iBook and I turned it into a replacement for our ailing house Linux server, so I have a backup machine until the PowerBook comes back. I didn't lose this weekend's tinkerings because I shared them here. Also, it's lucky that I've turned in all the chapters and artwork for the book, because I'd've really been strolling off a cliff if I'd've had to recreate any of that work. Of course, that stuff got zipped up and uploaded to at least 3 locations on a weekly basis, so I was at least smartly paranoid about that. I guess this'll teach me though. As soon as the PowerBook comes back, and I've reconstructed my external headspace on it, I'll be setting up nightly backups to the basement file server and plan on doing monthly archival to DVD. I can't imagine how lost I'd be if I were really living in my laptop. :) [ ... 1362 words ... ]

# 9:58 am

2005 July 02

Treemaps from unordered lists and CSS

Another little test, this time trying to build something like a Treemap, using CSS and semantic HTML. The above image is an example of what I'm trying to go for. Here's a sample of what I've got: http://www.decafbad.com/2005/06/tree.html Two things I can't seem to work around with my understanding of CSS: Is there a way to clear the floats in the unordered lists without using a break? Is there a way to even out the heights and widths of the columns / rows without some Javascript intervention? [ ... 369 words ... ]

# 2:40 pm

Drag the boxes, stretch the lines

[ ... 360 words ... ]

# 12:17 am

Month: 2005/07