Personal - Offline

I've been offline since my last post because of a hardware failure. I'm still offline. With luck, the part will be replaced (my computer's advanced age (4.5 years) makes finding compatible parts very difficult, and I have no wish to buy a new system) soon. It has not been as hard as I thought it would - humans are truely very adaptible creatures.

Web Tech - behaviors

Well, I've ditched moz-behaviors (which remains a brilliant tool for enabling legacy proprietary code to be used with the Gecko family of standards-compliant browsers) in favor of a cleaner vanilla-javascript implementation. It gives me more control, is much easier to debug (exceptions fire in your code, not in the wrapper, so you know where they are) and works in other browsers (currently Opera users can enjoy almost full functionality). Fortunately, the refactoring process was surprisingly painless.

Now I suffer from integration difficulties (what's good for resizing UI is very bad for sorting performance) and the CTS from hell.

I'm contemplating a blog redesign (long overdue, I'm afraid). I don't want to do anything drastic, but I want the main page to have only titles (so crawlers correctly point to the entree and not the ever-changing index.html) and add history and memories sidebars. In the memories sidebar I'll link all posts with unfinished business, whereupon I'll kindly request your attention to some outstanding issues.

If you're wondering about FFDB, no work has been done. I blame lack of encouragement and participation - if it is to ever move forward, it will be because other people want it to. And it will be implemented before it is designed, because I don't want to get into over-engineering (after all, I'm a coder, not a systems architect). An IT person from work suggested I could use VMWare to have both the Linux server and the WinXP client on the same machine - sounds cool.