Anthology of Interest

We went to Calgary for a funeral last weekend. The thing wasn't until Tuesday, so we had a change to visit people and do other things as well. We watched the Little New York Days parade on Saturday, and went to the Zoo with Katalin, Lisa and Bill on Sunday.

I managed to visit LEi on Monday, and they liked the speed and utility of the new database, but I have some things to fix, as always. They aren't using it yet.

Tamara and I have started to build the little bags that will be put on the tables instead of candles. They have two yellow LED's and one red LED inside them, so they glow with colour similar to a candle flame. One reason for going solid state is that Tamara's Grandfather is on oxygen, and fire is a hazard to him, from the oxygen helping the tubing burn and thus melt to his face. We also want to see what happens when our siblings don't have candles to play with all night. I assume they'll just take the lights apart or something.

Anyway, they seem to work ok, and should last long enough. We left one on all night (~11 hours), and it's definitely a lot dimmer, but they should be ok for the 8 hours they are required.

I came across an interesting interview with Seymour Cray, who was the guy behind the Cray supercomputers. It's more about the guy as a person than his computers, but interesting nonetheless.

Stuff I wish I had come across a long time ago:

It's too bad Futurama is done for. Only a few more episodes to air, and then no more. There two were pretty good.

Oh my yes.

Adaptation is an interesting movie. It's by the guy who wrote Being John Malkovitch, and it's just as weird, in a certain endearing way. He really did write himself into his screen play. Movies like these are fun for me, because it's not always clear where reality ends and fantasy begins, but I'm pretty sure that reality ends at the point where I started wishing the nothing would continue to happen.

My favorite line: It's not what loves you, it what you love.

Or at least it will save some of my webpages from being 1.6 MB in size! I'm in the process of finishing a web application which has some dependent select boxes. You select a customer from a list of customers, and the address and contact boxes are supposed to change to the relevant items for the company you've selected.

So of course there are no shortage of ways of doing this. One common way is to use JavaScript to do another page load, which then gets the appropriate data for the other select tags. I don't like this because of the page refreshes; all that flicker action degrades the user experience.

Another way is to generate JavaScript code to insert the options into the select tags. Lots and lots of JavaScript. My preferred methodwas to load all the data into different div tags and select boxes, and use clever tag id's and DHTML CSS to hide the select boxes that aren't supposed to be showing. This works ok, for relatively small lists. But, it can result in extremely large pages if you happen to have oh say, 2000 customers, 3600 contacts, and at least one address for each customer.

XML-RPC saves the day

I'm using Turbine to do this application. It can make use of Apache XML-RPC. This spiffy little server manifests itself either as a separate server running on it's own port, or you can pass things to it from your web application. I tried the former first, since it required less code (~20 lines less as it turns out; I'm just lazy). Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well because of security restrictions turned on by default in Mozilla and IE alike. The second option worked much better.

There's a couple of JavaScript implementations of an XML-RPC client, but the one that works the best (or at all, really) is jsolait.xmlrpc. Using it is quite easy. As long as the server you need to contact to make the XML-RPC call is the same one as the current webpage (including port number), then everything works great.

Incidentally, if you need to contact a different server (or port), you need to turn off some security settings. In IE, it's in the security tab, custom, under miscellaneous, the one about getting data from a different domain. In Mozilla, add these to you prefs.js:

user_pref("capability.policy.default.XMLHttpRequest.channel", "allAccess"); user_pref("capability.policy.default.XMLHttpRequest.open", "allAccess"); user_pref("capability.policy.default.XMLHttpRequest.responseText", "allAccess"); user_pref("capability.policy.default.XMLHttpRequest.responseXML", "allAccess"); user_pref("capability.policy.default.XMLHttpRequest.send", "allAccess");

ENABLING THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY LARGE SECURITY HOLE; there is a good reason why it is off by default. This was originally enabled by default in both browsers, but someone made a fuss about it, because it can be used to read files off the local file system and send them to an arbitrary server. JavaScript is just that fun.

Ok, I'm off to add features and re-factor code and stuff.

My 4 month old KDS monitor died the other day. So I called customer service to get an RMA number, and of course they want the original receipt. I lost that; forgot to file it, then moved, and probably threw it out by accident. Doh! I needed a new monitor, so I bought aViewSonic from NCIX, and my eyes thank me. I had been using my old, very blurry Samsung after the KDS died...

I immediately put the invoice in the filing box with the rest of the reciepts for computer stuff!

Came across a few wierd things on the web today: Hitler vs. Stalin, which is a comic in Russian with English translations on the bottom, and Creatures in my head, which is just wierd. But also cool. So there you go.

Tamara and I went for a little hike in East Sooke Park on Sunday. Probably only about 10 km. There were some copper mines near the trail. I took some pictures. One was filled with water, so I just snapped a few pictures, and the others were just short tunnels into the hillside. When I went in one, Tamara asked if she should try to dig me out or go for help if it caved in.

I have pictures, but I have to take some out, so they haven't been posted yet...

I should probably be working right now, but oh well. Finished Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix. It was another real page turner. Didn't actually take to long. The print is and margins are fairly large, so it's not really as long as the number of pages would suggest. Our hero is growing into the angsty teenage years. Probably so that the angsty 15 year old target market can relate.

I read somewhere that Harry's not really a very good hero, because he just automatically has all these skills and doesn't have to put any effort into anything. This is true to a certian extent, but lot's of kids can relate to that, and those that can't can relate to some of the other characters. Ron and Nevil in particular, who have to work pretty hard and don't seem to have any great identifyable intrinsic skills. Even so Nevil becomes proficient in something, and Ron finds hidden strengths, not for the lack of wanting to give up.

Anyway, my point is that more kids reading is good, and taken together, the core group of characters offer role models and are people kids can relate to and learn from, in a positive way. So it's all good.

On another note, I'm learning some solid state physics, crystals and the like, for work. I may end up working with optics, but on the computational end of things. I've also resumed work on a large database project I've been meaning to finish. MUST get that done before the end of the summer.

Also, new photos: Convocations and plane ride photos, and Victoria Day photos.