One problem with ASP that I’ve discovered is that a lot of the web controls do not produce W3C compliant HTML. This is an issue for me. I think it is very important that all new web sites adhere to the relevant standards. I don’t know if this problem is only in Visual Studio 2002 (the version I’m using), but I do need to find a way to solve the issue if I want to use ASP in any sites Brett and I do. Hmm…
Brett would be so proud of me. Over the past couple of days I’ve been learning C# and ASP. C# has that Visual Basic tinged Java feel to it, while ASP seems unlike anything else I’ve worked with before.
While I’m not a big fan of Java, I think I might be able to tolerate working with C# and ASP. Brett has talked about us doing some Windows application, so these technologies should make that part easier than coding with either MFC (shudder) or the raw Win32API. The part I’m not thrilled about is the 25MB .NET download. I know it will be part of future Windows releases, and that most people have already downloaded it through Windows Update, but I still have a problem requiring a 25MB download just to use an application I write for Windows.
I guess it’s trading a huge-client size download against the lowered development time and effort. Maybe I’m just being old fashioned. In this age of multi-gigabyte hard drives, 25MB doesn’t seem that bad. There is definitely a contrast between when I develop for Windows and when I develop using industrial micro-controllers (like the Microchip PICs, often with less than 16KB of total program space!)
I looked into Ruby on Rails a few weeks ago after seeing it discussed on Slashdot and Perl Monks. There are some interesting ideas in Ruby on Rails, so I thought it would be a good idea to explore Ruby itself. It feels very much like Perl, as members of Perl Monks have mentioned in other posts there.
To get my head around Ruby I looked at the free online book, Programming Ruby. It’s a very easy read, and I think I got up to speed fairly quickly. I don’t think Ruby will replace Perl as my language of choice right now, but I do admit to being intrigued by the idea of passing blocks around. It feels very natural.
I’ve stolen a few ideas from Ruby on Rails that I have now reimplemented in my Template Toolkit based webapp framework. Good ideas are good regardless of the language.
Kuro5hin has an article, Pimp my Firefox, about performance enhancements for Firefox/Mozilla browsers.
Today I had to fix another computer infected with spyware/adware junk. Along with the usual Adaware SE and Spybot - Search & Destroy I’ve been using HijackThis
I would not recommend HijackThis to a novice, but for some of these insidious infections, it’s about the only tool to remove the BHOs and other deeply embedded junk. Recommended.
I spent some more time tweaking my Template Toolkit templates and scripts to allow me to generate the update entries in a consistent manner. I have one WRAPPER template fragment that generates the blog-entry HTML and then the index.html template for the site grabs the five most recent entries to display on the page.
I also added a new Emacs binding to help generate the timestamp for the entry. Two key-strokes later and I have the correct entry. The Emacs Lisp I use in my .emacs is:
(define-skeleton datetime-in-t-format
"Return the current date/time in T-combined format"
(interactive)
(format-time-string "%Y%m%dT%H%M%S"))
(global-set-key [?\C-c ?\C-w] 'datetime-in-t-format)The entries are placed in the blog directory and then my index.html template processes the five more recent with the following Template Toolkit code:
# Grab the five most recent blog entries
USE dir = Directory('./src/blog', recurse=1);
SET count = 5;
FOREACH subdir = dir.dirs.reverse;
FOREACH file = subdir.files.reverse;
NEXT IF file.name.match('~$');
SET blogpath = "blog/${subdir.name}/${file.name}";
PROCESS $blogpath path = blogpath filename = file.name;
count = count - 1;
LAST IF count == 0;
END;
LAST IF count == 0;
END;It’s a nice easy system for me to update the entries on the site.
Finally, an updated design and logo for WormBytes. Every since I spun the consulting part of my job out of Flarenet, I’ve felt I needed a new design and unique logo. Well, today I found a spare few minutes to develop the little worm in the corner to go with the updated colour scheme and layout. Everyone seems to think he looks cute. I haven’t named him yet of course.
The updated site is a collection of static pages. However, I do use a bit of programming to bring everything together. To ensure a consistent look I use Template Toolkit to process a bunch of HTML fragments. Since I already use TT for dynamic websites, it makes sense to leverage the same technology to produce this site.
I have plans on updating this page often (like a blog, but let’s not call it that.) If you have any suggestions on what I should post, let me know.
These plugins are used daily by the Flarenet ISP mail server, but I have not submitted them to the Qpsmtpd maintainers. As always, use these plugins at your own risk. They work for me, but as far as I know I'm the only one using them.
The following patches have been sent to the Qpsmtpd mailing list, but are not currently part of the Qpsmtpd distribution. The date in brackets is the day I submitted the patch.