Milestones

Going to pay for the last of the new carpets, had just turned to 20000 on the dial as I parked.

The showery weather continues to make a cycling less than fun option, so just as well I hadn't booked a holiday for this time of the year.

Following up

This starts to explain some of the Bokurano before and after from yesterday…

And the drive in wasn't too bad. The "main" road through Kingston was being marked as closed, and the lake was still there at the first turn off into Bourn; but the rest was free of standing water. There was still running water in the usual bits in Bourn; and a lot of mud and gravel washed onto and across the roads.

By this evening even that standing water was gone; though the rest persisted.

Links for 15-Jun

HTML5 differences from HTML4 -- draft

WMD -- what you say is what you mean "mark-down" editor for semantic HTML

More issues with Safari Beta 3

Anime — Narutaru (Shadow Star)

Pokémon, as realised by Mohiro Kitoh.

As noted earlier, as I'm watching this season's Bokurano, I thought I ought to go back and watch him do to the monster-trainer genre what Bokurano does for super-robots, which is to add a lot of damaged children and death.

As expected, the anime bottles out from the bleakness of the manga (though it is still a lot less jolly than the misleading OP might indicate) -- both softening for TV what it does cover; and then just stopping dead half-way through the story, not even going as far as the Dark Horse translation which got 3/4 of the way before being lost.

Now I guess I have to just go look at the pictures for the last couple of volumes, with that weird sort of fascination normally found when examining a wound.

Also…

Bokurano is, as I'd been expecting, bottling out too. OK, some of it was bound to happen, like showing Aiko interrupted doing her hair (top left), when it's hinted in the manga (lower left) that, well, maybe she might possibly have been using a hairbrush, but certainly not a dryer; and skirting around the more extreme parts of Chizu's plight. But having Kako die in friendly fire (top right), rather than having Chizu cut his throat (lower right) for scrapping with another of the kids when he should have been piloting starts to make it far too close to being nice.

And more…

To the earlier list, add Dennou Coil -- an Augmented Reality cyberpunk-ish school story/mystery. I don't know where it's going, but it's being fun.

H4x0r-granny has to do some debugging.

Summer Weather

We were in a meeting room with no exterior windows when the thunder started. Half an hour later, I emerged to see the rain absolutely hammering down outside, and it kept doing so for the next half hour.

There were a few inches of water on the road in Bourn, but not enough to be a problem, with an engine nice and high -- and the brook hadn't flooded in the valley. But getting through the village, there was a car stuck in deeper water. Turn around, try the other way out, onto the B1042. No problems there; a bit of standing water to cross turning onto the road into Kingston -- but over the first hill, and more trapped vehicles. Turn around, carry on to Toft. And immediately after the Comberton turn, see another blocking flood, and a driver phoning for rescue.

Amazingly, the brook was not flooded at Comberton -- so back to the old main road, and finally get to cross at Coton.

The journey in tomorrow is not going to be fun.

Links for 14-Jun

Outlook clone in WPF

Unicode for CSS class names -- a neat use of the fact that they aren't restricted to ASCII.

How to design software from bad requirements

DuplexBook -- Martin Fowler on his new book xUnit Test Patterns, and textbooks in general

Font Rendering -- respecting the pixel grid

Pro JavaScript techniques (book review)

Links for 13-Jun

NetRenderer -- a service to check your page under IE 5.5, 6 and 7

A public Ubuntu/Ruby-on-Rails image for Amazon EC2

Ruby's other ternary operator

The problem with C++

Really, there are two big problems with this language

1. How it is taught -- or more often, self-taught, as universities these days seem to teach Java (and that not very well, in my experience supervising undergraduates).  Too often it is introduced as 'C'; then the syntax of classes and templates introduced.  The most important parts of the language -- the Standard Library, and the expected idioms -- get short shrift, most time and energy spent on the (admittedly complicated) grammar.  One of the few books that makes a good stab at the topic is Koenig and Moo's Accelerated C++.
2. The compiler support -- while gcc and Borland compilers have kept abreast of the language, Visual C++ 2005 is the first Microsoft compiler that has enough template support to compile things like Andrei Alexandrescu's Loki library that Borland handled around the turn of the century -- and the vendor compilers on some of the Unix platforms I have had to use were seriously stuck in the early 1990s (the developer tools suite on AIX, c2001).

Between these two, we accumulate a lot of 'C'-with-classes -- which gives the language an undeservedly bad reputation in many circles.

Links for 12-Jun

volatile -- The Multi-threaded Programmer's best friend (or, how to get the C++ compiler to detect race conditions for you)

Safari on Windows -- and this is the nearest thing there is to an iPhone SDK, too.

Who killed the desktop application?

ASP.Net + Dynamic Client Script -- Silverlight set-up from a single control

IronPython, Unicode and ByteArrays -- strings are not byte arrays

Top 10 tips not to follow

Links for 11-Jun

ECMASCript 4 (JavaScript 2) reference implementation

WCAG Samurai Errata published -- Updates for the 1.0 accessibiltiy guidelines

JRuby goes 1.0  -- for Rails in your JSP enviropnment -- and, with Swing, probably the least-worst GUI tools for client-side use

CardSpace control for ASP.NET 

Links for 8-Jun

Is Object-Oriented Programming the problem? 

Developer Patterns -- a rejoinder

The High Cost of Management Indecision

Designing for informavores -- the berry-picking model of information acquisition

Making Wii-friendly pages -- designing for the game console's browser

HTML 5 and Accessibility

Links for 7-Jun

A $99 PC with all state stored on Amazon S3 for $12.95 / month -- maybe the time is now ripe for the network PC.

Don't ask -- Observe -- usability, complexity and culture

Stroustrop on the history, philosophy and evolution of C++ -- fascinating reading.

Links for 6-Jun

Inlining a schema into an XML document

gotAPI -- API search engine

Getting started with the DLR : ToyScript -- worked example of adding support for a language to the DLR.

Python Binding: a SharpDevelop (IDE) Addin

Following up from the IronPython URL's post…

Alas, as noted on the #develop wiki, the current 0.5 beta of PythonBinding doesn't play with the 2.1 release of #develop; and there is no archive release link on the obvious #develop download page.

Alas, the refactoring that seems to have taken place between 2.0 and 2.1 has made major, non-trivial and non-backwards compatible API changes to a number of crucial classes used in the Python Binding build. It's not just a matter of classes having moved assemblies (needing more references), or namespaces; and having to guess which IDocument interface is meant.

I think MSBuildProject has become MSBuildBasedProject — but what has become of ParseProjectContent CreateProjectContent() I cannot tell; nor of the MSBuildEngineCallback type in the argument list of PyCompilerService.Compile(), itself an abandoned seeming method signature.

This is a level of backwards-incompatibility I personally would reserve for a major release increment. And there isn't even a porting guide obvious on the site or in the #develop code download. And the above is not an exhaustive list of things needing fixing to make the old code play with the new IDE APIs, or even of the first wave of compiler errors.

[Now playing - Planet Rock]

Links for 5-Jun

Microsoft Surface -- touch-screen desktop

Reasons for code bloat -- "More is Less"

Removing the Login Barrier -- another aspect of security vs usability & why SSO is so important.