Andy McKay's blog

From the Django mailing lists... The Vietnam of Computer Science

It represents a quagmire which starts well, gets more complicated as time passes, and before long entraps its users in a commitment that has no clear demarcation point, no clear win conditions, and no clear exit strategy.

While many DBAs will faint dead away at the thought, in an increasingly service-oriented world, which eschews the idea of direct data access but instead requires all access go through the service gateway thus encapsulating the storage mechanism away from prying eyes, it becomes entirely feasible to imagine developers storing data in a form that's much easier for them to use, rather than DBAs.

3 months, 1 major renovation, 1 house sales, 2 truck rentals, 2 trips to storage containers, 1 shipping container and we are ready for the last bit, flying to England. Phew. Next it's time to find a place to live England and all those minors things. Be intermittent for a bit.

Congratulations for Blue Fountain. The best write up is here, I should say "we won..." but I had absolutely nothing to do with this one.

It monitors incoming signals for any anomalies, transmits warnings to a bunch of alarms wired throughout the factory, has a parallel system working in backup and runs matching between Futaba data and Toyota data to clarify the end of month invoices between the two companies. It provides status screens for both those in Futaba and those in Toyota. It works day and night with the Toyota shifts and has a weeks break during Toyota shutdown in the summer and at Christmas during which times we usually prepare it for it's next incarnation.

This is just a simple upgrade to the latest version of S5 from Eric Meyer. If you've got skins based on the old ones, I did rename all js and css to be s5_ to be consistent, but all old skins should still work.

Download: PloneS5

There is lots of blogging software out there for Plone and a lot of is very complicated. I don't need any of these things in a blog. I don't need custom skins or ui. I don't need a workflow. So all I really need is what NaiveBlog gives me. A content type that's a copy of News Item and a smart folder that shows them. It's called NaiveBlog for a reason. Download: NaiveBlog 0.1 Or alternatively just run the recipe in Clouseau: naive-blog.py

Any recommendations for moving my blog to Django? I'd rather not write my own...

I've started collecting in SVN recipes that I use in Clouseau. Thanks to the load from URL feature of Clouseau, we can now start to re-use recipes for each other. If you've got something useful, then click save and mail the saved recipe to me and after a quick review we'll add it in. Yeah should probably start some sort of content management system thing for these one day. Anyway they are at: http://svn.clearwind.ca/public/plone/recipes

Presentacular allows you to add in all the script.aculo.us visual effects to your slideshow. I've already got a script that executes on showing a S5 presentation so it was a simple matter of adding in a class to say all my h1's. Now my headings smoothly fade in.

function addEffects() {
    var elements = document.getElementsByTagName('h1');   
    for (var k = 0; k < elements.length; k++) {      
       var element = elements[k];      
       element.className = element.className + " appear";
    }
  }