http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/ Damian Cugley’s personal web site en-gb pdc@alleged.org.uk webmaster@alleged.org.uk http://backend.userland.com/rss © 2010 P. Damian Cugley Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0000 Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2010/03/07.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2010-03-07-atom Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0000 Work on jeremyday.org.uk, the replacement for www.jeremydennis.co.uk continues apace. I’ve used spreadsite to create a projects list (which needs updating), created a new version of the The Weekly Strip archive, and had a long talk to Jamie Lokier about how caching should work on GNU/Linux systems and the WWW in general. Also I have created a new Atom feed for TWS. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2010/02/25.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2010-02-25-git Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:00:00 +0000 One of the requests for the new Jeremy Day site was to have her LiveJournal copied to the front page. My first thought was to use jQuery’s wrapper around XMLHttpRequest to pull in the Atom feed and process that with XSLT—but I had forgotten the ban on cross-site requests. I decided the correct solution was to get my own proper server at last, so I could host a cached copy of the LiveJournal page there. (I have since been told that it is possible to instead use some gadget from Yahoo.) … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2010/01/13.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2010-01-13-spreadsite Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:00:00 +0000 Content-Management Systems (CMSs) are designed to facilitate the collaborative editing of a web site by domain experts. Unfortunately some management structures make CMSs useless or worse, leading to wasted effort. Here’s why. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2009/11/29.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2009-11-29-deploy2 Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000 This was originally going to be part of my note on porting from Windows 7 to Debian 5 ‘lenny’, but I split it off in to a separate post. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2009/10/25.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2009-10-25-deploy Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000 We use Windows desktops at work, but naturally nowadays even our customers expect web sites to be deployed to Linux servers. Here’s a couple of things I learned in the process of deploying a Django app from my workstation—running Windows 7—to a development server running Debian GNU/Linux 5 ‘lenny’. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2009/10/13.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2009-10-13-danger Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000 It is reported that Steve Ballmer said, on the subject of whether Windows 7 will succeed where Windows Vista has failed, ‘I am optimistic, but the proof will be in the pudding.’ This is strange, because ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’ is one of the rare proverbial phrases that actually makes sense without gloss from a scholar of Semi-Early Modern English. (That said, it makes more sense if you know that ‘proof’ used to be used to mean ‘test’.) … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2009/10/08.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2009-10-08-rdf-identity Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000 Compared with the overt structure of ISO Topic Maps, the better-known RDF is free-wheeling anarchy. To make sense of RDF you need to impose additional structures on top of RDF itself; these can be conventions embodied in your program code, or specifications layered on top of RDF like RDF Schema and OWL. I have found that the concepts of topic maps are useful in understanding the work I have been doing with RDF. Here’s an example. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2009/09/17.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2009-09-17-eg Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000 Writing the first draft of a style guide for my employer was rather fun—I got to pontificate. I tried to keep the points to a minimum and mostly cite my favourite books on usage: Hart’s Rules, ODWE, and Strunk & White, mentioning exceptions such as the use of ‘data’ and ‘code’ as mass nouns when referring to the muck that clogs up computers, and the writing of the time as ‘9:05 a.m.’ rather than ‘9.5 a.m.’ … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2009/08/08.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2009-08-08-just-slap Sat, 08 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000 I am beginning to get a sinking feeling whenever I hear yet another person demonstrating how they can ‘just slap some controls on a form’ to make an almost-working app in minutes, and concluding ‘and all without writing a single line of code’! … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2009/07/17.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2009-07-17-macports Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000 One day I decided I wanted to try installing RabbitMQ on my iMac. The most straightforward way seemed to be to use MacPorts. I had not actually tried MacPorts before this week, so it was interesting to see how it worked out. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2009/07/16.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2009-07-16-rdf Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000 Back in the 1990s I used RDF as the model for a metadata database of on-line resources for people living with HIV and AIDS (the SEAHORSE project. Much water has flowed under the metaphorical bridge since then, but yesterday I found myself seriously using RDF for the first time in ages and I thought I would briefly comment on how the state of the art has advanced over the intervening decade. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2009/06/14.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2009-06-14-grouping Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000 A fairly common requirement on a database-backed website (say) is to read in tabular information and turn it in to a hierarchy. Without a little bit of planning it is easy to let the code for this get obscure and difficult to read. PHP has features that should be used to keep grouping clear. …