ShinyPlasticBag

Hurray for me! All that's left to do on the admin part is the template editor and password protection — the old entries list works like a charm. It took me a while to get it working, with many frustrations, but it's finally done. Javascript is a hard language to learn, simply because the reference data on the Internet is so poor. I have been unable to find any sort of reference pages, so I'm learning by reading other peoples code. How frustrating.

Anyway, yeah. Bye.

• Written on 14 November 2002 & posted at 11:49 AM.
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Yep. I did just that. << will now appear only as <. The funny thing is, to get the double brackets to appear, I actually had to type <<<<. And to get that explaination to appear, I had to type <<<<<<<<. And so on. It took 16 brackets to get the last thing to appear. =P

Anyway, Mike will be happy to know that he can do his bracketfish now: <")))><

• Written on 13 November 2002 & posted at 04:31 PM.
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I'm such a knob. I forgot to protect against HTML entities in the publisher! And it's still messing up quotation marks.

Now I'm in a bit of a mess. Do I allow HTML or not? I guess it'll have to be an option. I don't think I want it, but on the other hand, I want to be able to include links. Frig. Maybe I'll make it so that < and > will be left alone, so tags work, but << or >> will get converted to the appropriate HTML entity.

Later.

• Written on 13 November 2002 & posted at 04:28 PM.
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Well, things are progressing at least.

I've got the code to handle the <%JOURNAL.ARCHIVES> and <%JOURNAL.ARCHIVESL> tags, which are used for including links to old posts. The first has a dropdown box, and the second generates the code for the contents of a dropdown box, but the user has to supply their own <SELECT> code. This makes it much much easier for people to customize the look of the <SELECT> box, since the default code is rather simple.

I am, however, running into a wall: how to get the filename from the combobox? I can do it, of course, but I mean, how do I do it gracefully? The items in the box are nicely formatted, like “November 13, 2002”, whereas the script is looking for something like “20021113”. I think I might have to make an unprettyDate() function that can turn that back into the right format. It should be easy...convert to lowercase, explode it on spaces, and have a giant if statement for the month part. Sigh.

Anyway, yeah. I'm very pleased with the progress. I think I'll have the rest of the tags implemented by tomorrow, and I'll get the admin part done (all I need to do is make the template editor and add password protection) by the end of the week. Yippie!

In the real world, I got an A on my psych midterm. I'm so reet.

• Written on 13 November 2002 & posted at 04:20 PM.
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Note to self: add timestamps (as an option) to posts. This can be implemented as part of the post body.

Check out the new layout of the blog. It's not bad — I got it from blogger.com. It's rather simple to convert Blogger templates to Pennyware templates. I think I'll write a program to do it. And should I bother writing a Windows client? I really like the web interface...

• Written on 12 November 2002 & posted at 10:54 PM.
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Today was a big day for Pennyware. I got a surprising amount of work done on it. The control panel is really shaping up — the post editor works, for example, but the interface to it isn't quite done. When you go to the Postings section, you can edit posts by entering their date, but the existing posts list doesn't work yet. The Settings section, however, is totally done, which is nice. It even has error checking and pops up warnings as needed. Now, all I have to do is add the existing post thingie and the template editor before that chunk is done. Oh yeah, and password protection. Yippie!

I have to figure out how installation will work. It's not hard, in my eyes, to extract the files from a ZIP file and CHMOD a few files. I don't think most people would really want to do that, however. So I have to learn how to write scripts for Unix.

Wait...

Alright. Done learning how to write scripts for Unix. So easy! =)

Anyway, I'm off. See all y'all.

• Written on 12 November 2002 & posted at 10:29 PM.
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I got tired of Blogger and it's slowness. I got tired of MoveableType and it's bugginess. And I just hate LiveJournal. So, what's a guy to do if he wants a decent, easy to use journal? Write one.

This is Pennyware. The name comes from the fact that an online journal represents your two cents on the world. So, this blog and Pennyware itself are my two cents. Pennyware will be open source freeware.

I started writing it the night before last, although I didn't really get into it until yesterday. The displaying part is pretty much done (I'd say about 98%, barring optimization and such), however, there isn't a publishing interface at the moment. Posting is done by editing text files, but that will change. At lunch today, I will either write the publisher or finish the remaining 2% of the reader.

Anyway, in the real world, life is going well. I had such an insanely great day yesterday. Although nothing particularly interesting happened, I was just in a great mood. I had a CS assignment to do when I got home, and fortunately it wasn't very hard. The task was to write a merge sort — an interesting way to sort a list. I never would've thought of it. It's the sort of thing where it is sort of hard to get your head around the concept, but makes lots of sense once you get it.

Basically, you start off with a list you want to sort. Let's say my list is {7, 2, 4, 1, 5, 6, 3, 8}. To sort this list, I split it into two lists: {7, 2, 4, 1} and {5, 6, 3, 8}. And then I split those two lists — so on and so on until the lists I have are down to having less than two entries each. Then, I merge them back together in sorted order: let's say I've got {7} and {2}. When I merge them, I get {2, 7}. Then I merge that with the sorted version of {4, 1} — {1, 4}. And I merge those two lists to get {1, 2, 4, 7}. I combine that with the sorted version of the right side {3, 5, 6, 8} to get the sorted list: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}. That's even cooler than the bubble sort!

However, I'm sure no one else cared. I'm going to go. I should be working, after all. Stupid laptop distractions. =)

• Written on 11 November 2002 & posted at 11:41 AM.
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The first snowfall of the year happened last Saturday, November 2nd. It was beautiful — not much snow fell, but the way it swirled around the streetlights was beautiful and made me remember how much I love the sights of wintertime. It's my favorite season, despite the flu and the shoveling.

Last night it fell for the first time in any great amount. Lots of snow, actually — I think, so far, we've gotten about 15 cm and five more are on the way. It, also, is very pretty, but it's wreaked havoc on the city. No one was expecting so much snow so early in the year. The power was on and off all night at home, and the drive to Halifax was extremely horrid and scary. I'm now sitting in the Computer Science building at Dal, and the power is out. Classes are cancelled. It's weird — all the buildings are pitch black here, especially the library, because there are no windows, except for the skylight in the Atrium, which is covered in snow. The CS building, however, is somewhat surreal, because it's practically silent. Normally, it hums with the activity of 500+ computers. Now it's just me and a handful of other people sitting in Ground Zero.

The coffee ladies are here.

And I wanted coffee.

And there's no electricity. Sigh.

• Written on 07 November 2002 & posted at 11:41 AM.
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Sorry. ShinyPlasticBag.com is down until I get less busy with school.

Find files here. Find programs here. Email me here.

• Written on 05 November 2002 & posted at 10:45 PM.
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