This Week in Review 11 Jun, 2005
I like sitting on items for a bit to see if they’re still of interest before I subject others to their randomness. It does a good job of keeping things in check although sometimes it does ruin the effect that an immediate posting would have.
Monday
Had to boot into Windows, eww. My desktop (the dualie) has been stable on
Gentoo for the last several weeks and I really dread using Windows again.
I have to use it at the office, and miss having a “real” shell when I’m
using it. The zsh
port from unxutils
is passable for most cases but I have to consciously remember that I can’t
use paths with trailing slashes because it doesn’t grok them. I’ve got my
FAT32 Windows XP install (thanks to a Knoppix boot cd since WinXP doesn’t
let you pick FAT32 when formatting a disk) mounted via an internal USB
adapter under Linux, so all my photos, etc on it are still accessible.
Went to Bagheri’s (a really informal Italian place) for lunch with Cameron and my dad. Heard the Apple announcement on the television and was in shock. The proprietor even turned it up for us (it wasn’t really busy) and lunch discussion turned into a lot of “Has Apple betrayed us?”-type questions.
Tuesday
Still in shock. Realized that I’m secretly jealous of the reported performance of the P4-based OS X. I want one.
Wednesday
While discussing Apple’s switch at 10pm (notice a pattern here?), realized I hadn’t eaten yet. Called up Cameron and L.A. and grabbed a pizza (Hawaiian, of course). Observed that Kroger is really a nice place to shop when there are no people in it.
Thursday
Spec’d a new news system at the office (screenshot and design logs
coming soon) which is vastly superior to the old one. The “old one”
was implemented at a time we were switching OS platforms for our
webserver and didn’t want to rely on any specific database (e.g.
BDB/mysql), so rolled our own psuedo-database using var_export
and a bit of custom code for caching/grouping of items.
We’re working on a loose taxonomy based on a tag system, rather than a rigid system with a predetermined set of categories. Tags will allow us to specify multiple categories much more like metadata to go with an item rather than making it multi-homed (“existing” in multiple places). Tags allow us to handle it much more like a search than a directory index.
Friday
Got data imported from previous news system at the office (it wasn’t badly designed, just inflexible), and the basic browser is now about three times as usable as it was before. To measure this, we counted the number of times someone could get “stuck” while trying to use the system. The old one (being file-based) would not allow the movement of a news item from one month to another, but in the new one, it’s just a field (conveniently indexed, and editable by the user) which determines the “location” of an item in time.
Had to deal with disambiguation of peoples’ names since I refuse
to allow arbirary numbers (the uid) to appear in urls. We’ll be
allowing people to be represented by tags. We’ve tentatively
settled on a system somewhat like IMDB
and refer to people as john-smith-1
(john-smith
would give a
disambiguation page, i.e. a wildcard tag search for john-smith-*
).
We’ll probably end up with another table just for this purpose, partially because it’s really a lookup, and partially because it’s not a 1-to-1 mapping — say someone’s last name changes or people know someone by a nickname rather than their given name. We’ll end up with forwarding to the “primary” tag no matter what the tag they visit. This will probably end up being a rediculously long sql query, but thank goodness I’ll only have to write it once.
I mentioned a glitch I was observing in the Firefox nightlies…
someone reported it on my behalf over lunch and I’d verified it
a problem with the HTML Validator Based on Tidy rather than one
in firefox-trunk before evening. Oops. Moral of this story? Let other people
make rash decisions and report your notabug
s for you.