Peter's Blog 2004/2

Status Report:

Status Report: haven't switched 'main' pc on for a week. Laptop is nicer to use, sitting on the settee watohing TV. It is not as noisy, it doesn't lock up and it boots quicker, especially out of hibernate. It is quicker to grab the laptop and carry it downstairs than wait for main pc to boot. Wireless networking, 2 hours battery life, I like it.

One flaw: sometimes when it comes out of hibernate it goes into 640x480 mode which is annoying.

Visiting Harrods for the first time, looking for..

Visiting Harrods for the first time, looking for something cheap enough to buy. Emu eggs, only £35.

Rejigged website using new CSS/DIV layout.

Rejigged website using new CSS/DIV layout. I'm pleased with it. For now I have a single html template file which python copies and stuffs with the body text to create each page.

I've been reading an online html course using isilo (I'm on a train) which has been really interesting: nice and concise. Unfortunately Isilox has not saved the URL so I can't link it now: I'll append it later. It is concise enough to make a nice quick reference. The online W3C things can be heavy going.

I'm going to try putting boxes around things on the site to make them look more flashy. The links on the left would look more like buttons without having to create graphics.

Woo hoo, www.bisiand.me.uk has made it onto..

Woo hoo, www.bisiand.me.uk has made it onto www.google.com. Ok, it seems to have indexed an old version and it doesn't appear to have crawled into any lower level pages but it's something. The google cache version is Thu 05 Feb 2004 but at the time of writing it is at Sat 21 Feb 2004.

Found an HTML-Kit plugin called hkDivStarter that..

Found an HTML-Kit plugin called hkDivStarter that generates the CSS/DIV style page layouts. It's output needs some tweeking but I have been able to create something I like with it. It does seem more tasteful that using frames.

I've been studying some website design and there..

I've been studying some website design and there appear to be three ways to get a framed kind of layout:

• Frames (der)

• Tables (e.g. about.com)

• Some hack with CSS (e.g. www.mozilla.org, www.zope.org)

I haven't found anyone using frames yet?? The tables thing probably allows a news-paper type layout, it is what NetObjects generated. I don't like it as it tends to stop you resizing horizontally: the table is set at a fixed size and if you don't like it then start scrolling. The CSS thing always seems to look good and does allow a useful amount of resizing. I am not sure, however, how modern a browser you need for it to work. it is possible I am being server up whizz bang CSS pages because I am using a state-of-the-art browser (mozilla) and not some ageing thing that only gets security updates (ie).

While mozilla is wonderful, the sidebar seems to use screen space that certain web designers have already reserved for their creations. It's as if when a table is told to take 100% of the width, mozilla gives it the screen width, rather than the width available for browsing.

Just tried the 'Group By' feature in the DayNotez..

Just tried the 'Group By' feature in the DayNotez custom list. I have enabled grouping by Year, Month and Date. This means that all entries are compressed into a single row for each date. This makes it easy to find an entry in particular day, I expand the 'Year' group, then the 'Month' group, then the 'Date' group. Nice. Had to give it a kick by filtering and unfiltering to get this new entry to appear.

Sorting of entries in the DayNotez Custom grid was..

Sorting of entries in the DayNotez Custom grid was always confusing because it was sorting independently on the 'Date' and 'Time' fields. This meant that entries on the same day could be in any order as they were not sorted by time. Looking through the list of available fields I added the 'Created' field which, although it only shows the date, seems to allow proper sorting by date and time.

I think the entry tab should have prev and next buttons to step through the entries.

Played with HTML-Kit and I was impressed.

Played with HTML-Kit and I was impressed. It is basically a raw html editor, the kind of thing that has shortcuts to insert the tags. However it is very well done. I liked it's seamless FTP support which makes editing files on an FTP site just like editing them locally. It has many plugins for creating the tags and stuff. It has a good html checker that even does the corrections for you. It is a nice change from NetObjects: it's me vs HTML rather than me vs the IDE.

As I was forced back to raw html I had to investigate framesets and soon found out it is just what I need and I can do my blog without needing ASP just for server side includes.

Conclusion: I won't be reinstalling NetObjects except maybe as a way to create button graphics.

Configuring apt:

Configuring apt: added this to /etc/apt/

Added this to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.debian.org/debian stable main contrib

then did:

apt-get update

to load package lists and stuff. This took a while.

Then did:

apt-get install apache-doc

to get apache documentation. This worked, although the default apache website will not display it without an access error. The link on the page appears to be wrong.

Next was:

apt-get install vim

which is running now and seems to be installing vim 6.1.

The ftp site I am using seems to be very slow.

However, vim works so joy unbounded.

I think HTML-Kit (http://www.chami.com/html-kit/)..

I think HTML-Kit (http://www.chami.com/html-kit/) is the next thing to investigate. It appears to be a very powerful html editor. From what I can make out it is also free, although you can register it and get some add-ons. NetObjects was a little too constricting for my liking. I will be working on a collaborative website project and the HTML tools are to be DreamWeaver and Notepad. DreamWeaver is just too expensive for me to shell out on so coding raw HTML is more the way to go, especially if I can get a decent tool for free. There is also the HTML editor in Mozilla to consider. HTML kit has templates and plugins and stuff to make life easier.

You can knock up a web site quickly in NetObjects but in a Microsofty way you are then constrained to having no control over what you are doing. I do not like websites that fix the size horizontally and force you to make your browser a certain width. I believe html was designed for flexibly layout and that text should wrap if the screen is not wide enough. NetObjects seems to roll out this kind of site.

IT W0RKS, I can ssh into the server from work.

IT W0RKS, I can ssh into the server from work. Happiness. 0K so it's a ssh terminal and I have to have a think about what I can use it for but I'm happy. This is going out the company firewall through port 443 (ssl) which isn't proxied. My router forwards it from port 443 to 22, the normal ssh port.

I can spend my lunch time setting it up remotely. Bliss.

I have to figure out how to trigger sounds remotely to scare my wife.

Apache is running as well.

Old laptop was sitting quietly, no fan noise, so I..

Old laptop was sitting quietly, no fan noise, so I ssh'ed into it and checked it was alive. I'm thinking of making it a central ftp server to share stuff between the other pc's. Windows file sharing is a pain, ftp would not be so bad.

I tried the dpkg-reconfigure thing and got network..

I tried the dpkg-reconfigure thing and got network going on old laptop nicely. Putty connects to it nicely, apache running.

Router set up, I'll try it from work tomorow.

Installed BigClock on palm because built-in..

Installed BigClock on palm because built-in World Clock has no second hand and I wanted to do some timing. It's a good little app. Clock with calendar, World Clock, Alarm clock and Timers. Ugly fonts but they may be replacable.

I've put a lot of linux info on the palm in Isilo format. The online docs are very texty and convert well. I find I prefer reading on the palm to pc for some reason.