Irregular Verbiage

The rest of coralbark.net just got a make-over – it now uses some custom code to create a windowing system in Javascript! There are still loads of bugs but now I’ve taken it live, I’ll be more motivated to improve it.

The windowing system is not yet ready to host something as complex as a blog so I thought I’d find a fresh new theme to celebrate (I didn’t write the theme – it’s called Papillon by Beng Hafner).

I seem to have been posting about 1 entry per release of WordPress at the moment though I think that’ll increase now that the rest of the site is less 1997.

A long time ago on a computer far, far away I used to use a Word processor called KindWords. If there was a way of opening the files for that word processor nowadays I might get a giggle from the nostalgia value but not a lot else.

In 50 years time however I do want it to be possible to open documents containing minutes of government meetings or the first draft of the (then historic) eighteenth Harry Potter book. This is part of the reason why file formats that only one company can change (or can even completely understand) are bad. What if they disappear?

The other part of the reason why open standards are so good is that you should be free to choose a word processor because it is the best word processor, not because it is the only one that can open the files with its secret sauce.

Well rejoice, there is an open standard, the Open Document Format, and there are Office Suites that use it, for example the free OpenOffice 2.0 which runs on Windows, Linux and (in an altered form) the Mac. Shouldn’t you use it or another program that supports the standard? If such a standard becomes established it’ll not only drive competition in office suites it will also allow anyone to help create a whole array of little utilities and add-ons

In other news, if you are obsessively reading info on the debate about open standards (and specifically whether public organisations like the government of Massachusetts or the European Commission should mandate that their employees use then) then a key source of info is the Standards Blog. What I find most intriguing is that you never see the Standards Blog’s Andy Updegrove and the Guardian’s/Radio 4’s Simon Hoggart in a room together.

Simon Hoggart or Andy Updegrove, who can tell?

Things are ticking along nicely. I’m currently not programming very much outside work – the desire to do so comes and goes. I’m still fiddling with computers though.

I was trying to make a spreadsheet with a few formulas in. When I copied them into each cell in a column Calc “helpfully” updated the cell references. Some of the cells I was refering to were fixed i.e. I wanted all the the cells in the column to refer to the same cell. I found a page explaining how to fool the software so none of the references in my formula were updated but I wanted some of them to be. Simple – but not obvious if you don’t know how

The concept I was missing (or had forgotten – it has been ages since I used Excel but presumably it works the same way there) was absolute and relative addresses, (which you can look up in Calc’s help). Basically a $A$0 will always refer to A0, $A0 will always refer to the A column but the row will be relative to the cell it is pasted into and A0 is entirely relative. (A much more complicated way of doing it would be to use the ADDRESS function).

I just tried to post a comment on the Inside Firefox weblog and it won’t let me. I don’t think I’ve tried to say anything too stupid there before so it must be taking issue with the fact that I was suggesting using Eclipse (with the C++ extension) as a C++ IDE. It can be a bit slow on older hardware but not as bad as you might expect seeing as it is Java-based. Presumably it is even faster if you compile it with gcj as clever people have demonstrated recently. It does still use the gdb debugger as the back-end but the interface is pretty and it integrates nicely with CVS.

Things are going really well at work, I’m really enjoying it. I’m working on an internal IBM project that has a web-based interface as a front-end, so I’m playing with both C and Javascript. At home I now have broadband at the flat and I’m busy catching up with emails and bills and things but will soon start to put some serious effort into B:V. I must also spend some time away from a computer though, I’m almost in front of one 24/7 at the moment

Things have been progressing fast, I’ve now put down a deposit for a flat in Winchester, so much has changed since a week ago when I had no job, no car and no house. However, as I haven’t started my new job yet, I still have time to surf the web in a relaxed way.

Daniel Glazman has been calling for an improvement to CSS (the method used to style a web-site for non-authors) and it seems to have sparked some debate in his comments. I would particularly like to see his points 1-8 happen, we’ll see. I’ve also read this essay about improving web browsers which reminded me about the word eudemonic which I had seen on the web before but forgotten. It definately could be used more often!