Entries for August 2005
August 4, 2005 at 6:01PM Beannacht Dé, a Chorcaigh.
I’m moving out of Cork at the end of this month. The lease on my flat will expire at that time, and my attachments are few enough that this is mostly a matter of handing in my notice here at Digital Crew, packing up my stuff, and heading back up to Aclare.
Strangly, when I was searching for a decent link for Aclare, I stumbled across this album by a neighbour of mine, Colm O’Donnell. Excellent a flautist as he is, I hadn’t expected or heard that he’d released an album. Nice to see!
August 10, 2005 at 3:41PM JavaWorld Really Needs a Redesign.
Cormac has my laptop, and I’ve gone as far as I can with the work I can do without it, so I started catching up on some reading.
One of my stops was JavaWorld. It always has a couple of interesting articles, and one that caught my eye was one on writing custom appenders for log4j. It’s an old one, but one that I haven’t read before.
There was something odd about the first paragraph in the article, something that didn’t quite sit right with me, and then I realised that the dropcap, rather than being an actual letter, was an image.
Just in case it was a matter of that being an old article and that they’d fixed this in more recent one--each article is after all just a HTML page and they mightn’t regenerate between design tweaks--I check this one, which is only a month old. And what do you know: it’s using images for dropcaps too.
Now, in this day and age (or at least since around 2000), there’s no reason why anybody should be doing dropcaps like this anymore. Not only is there a CSS pseudo-element called first-letter specifically for this that’s been around since CSS1, and all you need beside that are the float and font-size properties to do the rest of the work.
Why are people still doing this crap?
August 10, 2005 at 10:37PM A Java HTML Scrubber
In preparation for possibly adding a WYSIWYG editor to the site--mainly because people don’t seem to read the formatting instructions--I’ve written the best part of a HTML scrubber to ensure that the HTML markup returned from the poster’s browser doesn’t contain anything dodgy and to attempt to ensure a minimal degree of validity and well-formedness to whatever gets posted up. It’s written in Java, and I’ll be wrapping it in a custom tag to make it easy for me to invoke from ColdFusion. It will, however, be usable from anything capable of instantiating a Java class.
It uses a simple DSL to describe which tags are allowed through, and which attributes are safe. It knows nothing about which tags can be nested within each other, or which are required. After all, it’s a scrubber not a validator. The closest it comes is trying to balance tags which aren’t.
As I said, it’s mostly written. But what I’d like to know is if anybody else out there would find this useful, or if there’s anything already out there like it. I’ve looked and I can’t find anything like it, not written in Java anyway. But I don’t see the point of writing it if somebody’s already done all the work. Frankly, I’d rather contribute to what they’ve done than waste my time reinventing the square wheel.
So, thoughts people?
And on the topic of ColdFusion, I wrote replacements for all the ColdFusion mock objects for testing Java CFX tags. The existing ones are, ironically, buggy themselves, so having grown sick of them I replaced them.
Though I haven’t released them to the wild, they work well enough for me, though I’m replacing some of the internals of DebugQuery to make it a wrapper around a more general and faster implementation of the Query interface than how it’s currently implemented.
I’m bringing this up because I’ve extended DebugQuery and DebugRequest to be able to return implementations of the Swing javax.swing.table.TableModel, and javax.swing.MutableComboBoxModel respectively, allowing them to be edited in a UI as part of a test framework. This should suck rather less than doing all the fiddling in Java, especially when you want to be able to scroll back and forth through returned Query objects. I’ll post up the code once I’m finished reimplementing DebugQuery and the code is solid.
August 17, 2005 at 6:26PM I’ve Got My Electric Picnic Tickets!
I’m definitely not screwing up this time like I did for Oxegen earlier this year. Of course, the only crappy thing is that it’s in Laoise, a county with only two rather dubious claims to fame. First is that it’s doubly landlocked by virtue of bordering only landlocked counties. The other is that it’s mostly populated by BIFFOs, such as Brian Cowen.
Laoise is the idiot brother you keep locked away in the attic. We don’t speak of it much.
But it’ll be fun. It has to be. I mean, just look at the lineup! Mind the Flash. Well, what do you expect from Laoise: accessible, bookmarkable websites?
August 18, 2005 at 3:22PM XP and Big Design Upfront
Joel Spolsky posted on his site about several instances where where he needed to modify the Project Aardvark (Copilot) Functional Specification.
It was all fine, and stuff I agree with myself, up until close to the end where he wrote: “I can’t tell you how strongly I believe in Big Design Up Front, which the proponents of Extreme Programming consider anathema. I have consistently saved time and made better products by using BDUF and I’m proud to use it, no matter what the XP fanatics claim. They’re just wrong on this point and I can’t be any clearer than that.”
Now, I’m neither a hardcore XP person, nor a hardcore BDUF person, but that’s a bit of a mischaracterisation of XP if I ever heard one. There was me thinking one of the core mantras of XP was “design a bit, code a bit”, meaning you create a rough spec up front, and then refine that over each iteration/milestone/phase/whatever of the project.
I know there’s people out there who look at XP and say to themselves, “yay, no planning!”, but that’s not XP. And I think we can all agree that those people aren’t so much XP fanatics as XP idiots.