Internal Server Error

what the voices in my head tell me to write

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

sometimes you cant see the wood for the trees

The cyberpunks in Toxia have been looking at setting up a centralized database of information for some time. As I have a few skills in this area I was looking into it for them.

For some reason I couldn't think straight and was playing with all kinds of strange and exotic toys like RDF triplestore databases and the like. Then last night it hit me. A wiki is perfect.

What really annoys me is that I have used wikis extensively in the past both professionally and personally. Why the hell didn't I realise that the solution was so simple?

Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Its been a while

But I am back.

One of the main reasons I have been away is that I have a new job. No more being the webmonkey in the corner at ingenta. I am now the slightly more senior webmonkey in the middle of the room at Patersons.

Ingenta made the very generous offer of "move to Oxford to work, no extra pay and no chance of working from home or take redundancy". Let me see now.... I could barely afford to work for ingenta despite having hardly any bills when I was in Bath. So... "I will take the redundancy please".

So after a bit of gardening leave and a few very annoying interviews and experiences with recruitment agencies I am now working for Patersons developing material for their websites and internal tools.

It's been interesting so far with a lot of new systems to learn. Hopefully some of the experience I gained at ingenta will be useful too.

Of course the other thing to talk about is the garden. The gardening leave did come in handy and its looking really good. Had some great rocket out of it the other day as a first crop from the veggies and some of the other stuff wont be far behind. The flowers were great this spring too. Well last year it was basically bare earth in the spring but this year we had tulips, daffodils, crocus, anemones and aliums in profusion. The tuilps were especially showy but I really like the aliums they almost look like fireworks bursting. Hopefully we will have some more food to eat soon. I reckon either pea shoots, radishes, lettuce or maybe swiss chard will be ready in a week or so. Possibly even spring onions.

We have been using our ingenuity too. I bought a little drip feed irrigation system from Tescos for a tenner and use that to water most of the containers. Then we noticed a length of hosepipe that had been lying around for ages. No one wanted it so I stabbed lots of holes in it and its now laid out on the veggie bed as a soaker hose. I can do most of the watering whilst sat on the new bench or better yet laying in the hammock I got Rae for her birthday.

Freecycle really came up trumps too. I got about 1/2 a ton of gravel for free to go along the bottom of the garden so we dont get muddy going to the new greenhouse and the wormery. Then Rae picked up a 3 tier planter thing and some hanging baskets the other day.

The other big bit of news is that we are moving house. Without leaving the building though. Hopefully in the middle of August we will be moving into another flat in the school. Its bigger and also more private. No more living next door to a bunch of screaming schoolgirls. Rae already has plans for decorating and has sent off for about 100 colour samples, or so it seems. The interesting thing is it actually has a lightwell in the middle. Nick and Karen dont use it for much but we are going to use it for houseplants and bringing on early plants for the garden.

Well thats quite enough of all that for now.

Labels: garden, work

Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

When to use programmatic constructs to get around browser failings.

Often when I am developing a page there are things I could add to styling of the page to increase its accessibility or graphic design. Simple things such as highlighting the first paragraph of a section by changing its color or font weight. These can add immensely to the visual impression of a page with little additional work.

In theory that is. CSS provides a simple pseudo-class for the above example :first-child. IE6 doesnt implement it. Now I am left with two realistic alternatives. Either don't include that styling element and reduce the functionality of the design or work out a way to programmatically replicate that functionality in a way that IE6 can understand.

In the :first-child example its might be possible to achieve this if for instance the text for each paragraph is being individually pulled out of a database and looped through in a templating system to create the mark up. All that is necessary is to check if it is the first iteration of the loop and add a class attribute to the <p> tag which will hook into CSS to add the styling.

This is not always possible though. Perhaps the entire text for the page is stored en masse in your CMS system and its inserted into the mark up monolithically. You now cannot add in that class to find the first paragraph using your templating language.

Ok then, now what. Javascript to the rescue. You can run a bit of javascript as the page loads which selects the <div> tag representing the section, loop through its children, test to see if each child element in the DOM is a <p> tag and if its the first child. Thats messy, complex to write and error prone.

So, more javascript to the rescue. If you use a Javascript library such as jQuery which uses CSS selectors to attach actions or functions to elements in the DOM it becomes easy.

$('document').ready(function(){
 $('div.section p:first-child').addClass('emphasis');
});

does all the hard work for you.

Of course jQuery code runs perfectly well in IE6 so now you can use CSS selectors which never implemented them in the first place. There is the overhead of loading jQuery (or the library of your choice) but that is offset by caching and the like.

jQuery and its cousins do not just enable developers to create more interactive and engaging user interfaces they also enable designers to create more attractive and therefore engaging designs that will work in a wider range of browsers than ever before.

Labels: IA

Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Monday, February 11, 2008

got my shiny new laptop

After a bit of negotiation with the insurers my nice shiny new Acer 5520 arrived today. Its only the base model so no kill em all graphics card but its looking good so far.

The main thing that you notice apart from the wierd curved keyboard is how quiet it is. My old laptop was forever spinning up fans and stuff even under minimal load in windows. This one barely makes a noise no matter what I do to it.

Its also a little smaller and a lot lighter than the old one. The power supply is tiny too.

I have spent the evening installing stuff while waiting for the windows updates to come down. One thing thats coming off asap is Norton Antivirus which is as bad as having a virus in the first place. All I need now is CS3 and the stuff to connect to work and I am done I think.

Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Monday, February 11, 2008