Blog

I’m a couple of days into the Plone snow sprint 2006. Before we arrived at the sprint location, the netsight contingent took a couple of days snowboarding. After half a day of falling on my backside, I just about have basic control of the board now, at least I can carve down the slope quite comfortably if the run is wide enough – there were a few hairy moments on a narrow forest road where I couldn’t quite make the turns quick enough and wiped out at least one skier (luckily I don’t speak enough German to understand what they were shouting at me!). I’d definitely like to snowboard again, though it is an expensive hobby.

We then attended the opening party for the newly formed lovely systems in Dornbirn. Free bar, Live band, games involving hammers, ’nuff said.

I’ll be working on a few plone multimedia projects during the sprint. Myself and Tom Lazaar [Broken link removed] will be trying to sort out some kind of solution for blogging in plone. Currently we are examining the available options to see whether we are better off cherrypicking the best features from each and putting the together into something new, to “finish” one the existing ones off, or whether to work on a set of adapters (xml-rpc, trackback) and products to enable plone itself to be used as a blog application (using, say, news items instead of blog entries, and having a customisation policy to set a plone instance up as a blog).

I will also hopefully be working (or at least shadowing someone else working on) a flash media player (a bit like google video thing), including server-side video transcoding. This should be useful for the online skate zine i’m working on!

Hopefully I can also finish off what I started for ATAudio, tidying up the templates ready for a release, using so called “five views”.

which is why I walked to work today.

If you are reading this upside down then chances are you are looking for information on how to get your display to appear the right way up. I had this problem the other day when one of my cats was wandering around on my laptop keyboard, and suddenly the display was upside down.

This won’t work for all displays as it is driver dependent, but CTRL – ALT and either the up or down arrows flips the display over on mine.

I’m sitting here with my arm in plaster. some people are being sympathetic, most aren’t. after all, I am too old to skate

Article over at Digital Web Magazine discussing the "Behaviour Layer" of a website.

In summary, a typical web page has three layers: Content, Presentation and Behaviour. In this context, XHTML is the content Layer, CSS is the presentation layer and Javascript is the behaviour layer. The article argues that it is important that the site functions with various combinations of these e.g (content + presentation + behaviour), (content + presentation) or (content + behaviour). Essential behaviour such as form validation that has been added client-side using Javascript should also be replicated server-side ("belt and braces")..

Recently i’ve been using Bloglines [link removed] news aggregator to subscribe to all the RSS/RDF enabled websites which I visit regularly. This has completely changed my browsing habits. Bloglines works in much the same way as an email inbox – you can see which sites have been updated from a list in the left pane.

So now rather than trawling through bookmarks and tabs only to find that a site hasn’t been updated since I last looked, I only visit sites that have new content.

Depending on how the RSS has been set-up you either get a list of new headlines, a list of new headlines and summaries or in some cases the whole article. Whichever way, clicking the title will take you straight to the article on the actual site.

will pervasive computing become too pervasive?