Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Last week Cam pointed to an O'Reilly weblog entry on Open Source Tools and the Process of Programming. The author is William Crawford, who I worked with at Invantage. He's been blogging on the O'Reilly site for three months, and has a personal weblog (Blogger, sans RSS feed) as well. 11:21:37 PM | reply [] Stage one of my migration away from a UserLand-hosted blog is finished: I've got http://web.sabi.net/log/ hosted on my ISP's Web server, instead of redirecting to radio.weblogs.com. Stage two is to replace all the internal links to radio.weblogs.com, stage three is to write an upstream driver that replaces each file on radio.weblogs.com with a redirect page pointing to the corresponding resource on web.sabi.net, and stage four is turning off upstreaming to UserLand. At least this way I can be sure that my Weblog updates without fuss. Of the last 18 upstreaming attempts in my events log, 12 of them failed. That's unacceptable. I hope UserLand's able to fix this apparently Mac OS X-only problem eventually; for the first few months of my Radio usage, I never had any issues with this. Thankfully, Radio provides plentiful hooks and callbacks in addition to a complete static rendering. 4:36:40 PM | reply [] A thread in the dealmac forums invites people to mention their favorite Jaguar features. Many of them I hadn't seen before. I especially appreciate the improvements to Classic: I never thought non-HFS/AFP filesystems would be supported, but now they are (even FTP!). Someone there mentions that Classic has mouse wheel support now, but my mouse wheel does nothing in Classic. Oh well. 3:24:38 PM | reply [] UIC's registration system continues to impress me with its ease of use and implementation (not). At orientation last week, we were given a number of not-so-subtle hints that the grass is not exactly greener at the Chicago med school... i.e., we're lucky to be here. I've already documented one of the worst Web interface designs I've seen (it's still there), but this one is good too: Programmer 1: We need to tell the students what their registration time is when they can't register yet; here's a time field we can use. Programmer 2: Just display it, then. Programmer 1: It's in 24 hour format. So we need to convert that into AM or PM. Here, I've got this code that takes the current time and displays AM or PM. Programmer 2: No, don't bother, we're already behind on this project, people can figure it out and this will save us some time. Just use your existing code. Programmer 1: But that'll give the wrong answer half the time! Programmer 2: Just add a "P" to confuse people so they don't actually try to interpret the AM or PM but still realize it's a time. Programmer 1: Uh, sure. 1:02:43 PM | reply []