Well I just cleaned up some bugs in the site, mainly in the static content area (so stuff in the Software and Content sections works now!!!)

Also I got some comments. For some reason I was scared of having comments on the site back in the day, but now... whatever. So I have some comments about good old FractalTreesX here and here.

Now I just need to restore all my old tags... and fix the previous/next navigation system so it's more prominent... and see if my google rank recovers...

I'm a terrible person. When I upgraded to Rails I totally broke a zillion URIs on this site, in particular most of the weblog links. I also probably lost a lot of google juice in the process. Well, now I have restored all of the weblog archive links in accordance with Cool URIs don't change (and I should practice what I preach...)

Incidentally I also made a number of other long-waiting fixes to the site, like installing the correct google analytics, fixing the top navigation links, adding a sidebar on the front page, speeding up the front page (somewhat.. still wrestling with that one). I still need to fix the tag browser so that it's as good as it used to be. And some day maybe I'll convert all of my old content over to some new CMS (well, I probably will never do that actually...)

Wow, WYM Editor is so cool that I can just like type in a new blog post whenever I want to. Wild!

So anyway, I've been saving up a whole load of links and stuff for months until I had this new site all sorted out. So here's something.

Hmm... where did my "stuff to blog about" folder go?

Oh, here's an awesome one. Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad. These guys kick ass. Watch as they take apart a MacBook Air and declare "No Waste Outside, Nothing but Waste Inside".

About 30 screws were used to attach the keyboard alone. "The total number of screws in the MacBook Air was several times the number used in a PC we make," one of the engineers said.

Burn, baby, burn!

OK, here's another one from the files. Nathan Fawkes Art. He's part of a network of film animators and illustrators and concept artists who all have their stuff up on blogspot.

And I'd like to remind myself particularly about this post about science fiction.

Hi there.

Well, I'm back. I was running this site on really ancient technology — AxKit — so 2001. Now I'm running it on modern technology, i.e. Rails 2. And doesn't it rock. Now I have a cool GUI editor to type into, I have easy programming in ruby, and I have of course polished both my design and my CSS/XHTML skillz considerably in the mean time, hopefully making this all easier to look at and navigate.

So I'm running on SimpleLog here, but it's not "stock". Oh no. Stock SimpleLog right doesn't run on Rails 2, but this one does. Also, I made it even MORE simple than it used to be:

• Support Rails 2.0 (no need to freeze an old rails)
• no themes—annoying to use anyway, and no one was publishing themes either
• replaced the editor/preview panel with WYM on Rails, which is by FAR the best WYSIWYG / GUI editor I've ever found, and the end of a long search for me

...and so on.

I just added two new features. First, now you can finally page through the posts 15 at a time (or whatever # it's set to show on the front page), using the "Previous Page" and "Next Page" links at the bottom. Second, you can save a specific post to Digg or delicious by just clicking on the appropriate little icon in the meta-data at the top of the post. As if anyone would want to do that. I don't, but I saw it on a bunch of other blogs so I thought I'd do it to.

I guess in theory you could use digg to discuss the post, if everyone used digg.

So Saxite is the new name for my siteware project. For those of you not paying attention, it's all written in XSLT and XML and it runs on AxKit.

I decided to make an icon so I came up with this icon, below.

Like it? I was inspired by a recent issue of Computer Arts Projects (one of the fantastic UK graphic design magazines that my local Indigo store carries) that was all about fonts, to do some of my own font work. So, I had a visual idea of what I wanted the logo to look like, with the X as a white space in the middle, and then I looked for a font on my system that was very blocky and thick and wound up with Arial Black. "ITE" on Arial Black are very generic, but I really didn't think that the S worked at all for me, and the A didn't fit, and the X I didn't like either (not wide enough).

So I started with the A. I actually did the A from scratch, not even bother to look at the Arial A. It's more like half of an A anyway. Next I got the X in the shape I wanted, and filled in the negative space on the right side with the I. Getting the hole in the A to look right was tricky, right now it's actually a white copy of the shape of the A!

Oh yeah, and check out the arrow in the A too :-) (it's pointing right). And check out the angle bracket on the right side of the X :-)

I spent by far the most time on the "S". I didn't like the original Arial S and wanted to replace it the most since it's by far the most identifiable letter of the ones I used. Also it didn't look blocky and aggressive enough in my opinion. There was quite a bit of variation in the width of stroke which I didn't like, so I drew my own "S" over top of it with a more even stroke (drawn with beziers). I also didn't like the flat ends so I switched over to ends on 45-degree angles. Getting it to balance was interesting ... the bottom end of the S actually extends out beyond the curve above it, while the top end is shorter than the curve below it. Weird.

I actually tried out another one which was even more streamlined, with the top and bottom strokes ending totally horizontally (like in the Star Wars logo) but that looked too, I don't know, sci-fi?

Finally I added the hole to the right of the X, before the I. And then I redrew the rest of the letters by hand so that they would all flow together. Now there's no Arial Black left at all.

Oh yeah, and post-processing in Photoshop to give it that 3d look.

I just spent a whole bunch of time sorting my tags. Because I have the best tag browser ever and so I'm having some fun going through and tagging my content and making my tags better now. For example, I had no rhyme or reason for uppercase, some were mixed-case, some were uppercase, some were lowercase. I decided to make them all lowercase.

So, a bunch of tags were renamed which will break links but too bad, backwards-compatibility is for losers. Also, I don't think people have really linked to my tags yet. But they will....

Anyway, I also added some new tags and went back and tagged a bunch more old posts too. Have a look at original/prediction (my "original work" making predictions about the future). Or how about computer/wi-fi (lots of developing world stuff in there...). Or how about just meta (navel gazing fun). Yum.

I came up with this image yesterday when I was thinking about Disney's role in the fantasyland movie that ABC just broadcast (Disney owns ABC and apparently backed the film).

To be honest, I just like the colours. I always thought this was a cool logo. But anyways, no more Mr. Nice Guy or whatever. I had a look at the font on their original logo and it looks to me like Rockwell Light so I had a go in PhotoShop and changed "Pictures" to "Politics". Now Disney can put this up on the front of all their political propaganda pieces.

It didn't make much of a splash when I posted it in my diary so I figured it wasn't that good, but I guess that there really isn't any proper correlation between Recommendations and actual merit on DKos—at least in the "long tail" of non-superstar diarists. I think that has something to do with their horrible, horrible tagging browser.

Well now I've got an even better tag browser . In fact I think it's the coolest tag browser ever. It's better than the flickr tag browser and the technorati tag browser and amazingly, even then del.icio.us tag browser . And what is delicious for if not tag browsing. Well.

Anyway, I used a sort of crazy CSS-float-left thing to make the big and small boxes all go inline together. It would have made more sense to use inline-block but it's not supported in Mozilla yet (weird).

Also, you will note that this new browser really brings out the awesomeness of my two-level tagging scheme because now for the first time you can see how the levels work. And I'm discovering that maybe I have some duplication oops, and I'm also completely inconsistent in how I capitalize. Hmm. I might edit my tags (I suppose that's bad for google though, oh well).

Anyway, the big names in the filled-in boxes are the "categories" and the names in the small white boxes are the "tags"... some day I might allow to view just the tags but I'm not quite sure what that would mean.

Note to self: I should add some category browser on the left side there.

I just can't get enough of these ravenblack.net quizzes! They're so awesome! The author is a genius!

Wait, the author is also really weird and has a RavenBlog !

While I'm here and screwing around, here's a Googlewhack: aquaplane wimax

Also, I'm redoing some fundamental bits of the XSLT that runs my site, so things might be a bit haywire for a few days.

I recently decided to customize the CSS style sheets on my Sympa mailing list manager -based semacode.org forums . It wasn't quite as easy as I think it should have been. The "instructions" in the Sympa docs are not exactly friendly. However after puzzling through it myself I found that it wasn't too hard. Here are the notes I made in the process.

set css_path in robot.conf e.g. css_path /var/www/lists.semacode.org/css #filesystem path css_url http://lists.semacode.org/css/ #fully-qualified URL! then set chmod the css directory, chmod a+rw so that sympa can change it then on "skins admin" page do "install static css" (static = not generated on the fly by tt2, I think) it will install style.css and some other .css files in the css directory then set the css directory back to whatever permissions you want it to have then modify the "static" css files however you like 

...and there you have it. So far I haven't done much, just a little bit on the archives view . Ultimately I hope to steal all the good looks from projects like phpbb and others.

Also my next appearance on Call for Help should be in episode #416, whenever that airs.

I've thought before about putting in a two-level tagging system on my blog. I guess that it comes from that I'm dissatisfied with "tags" per se. They're just not rich enough. With a simple tagging system, it's hard to organize your tags into groups, for example, which to me is a big problem.

I'm not the only one to do something about this: see also tag bundles on del.icio.us , and also "meta tags" (which are tags about tags I guess).

I think that the common "solution" is to give mix tags together, so if you're talking about developing software on OS X you'd tag with "development", "software" and "OS X". But that's an implicit, not an explicit relationship. Also, designing a tag browser that lets you see which articles are tagged with all three of those tags is a hassle. Finally, there's no sense of hierarchy.

On the other hand, going to hard in the other direction (totally formal hierarchies) is also not viable in my opinion because it's too much work. You can get stuck with a specific hierarchy that doesn't always work (like in a library catalogue), or you can get confused by deranged mazes of hierarchical relationships (like Wikipedia's categories ).

This is a problem in software development too. I remember when working at Apple. NextStep always had a single-level namespace, which meant that each and every library and application class had to have a unique name. This is a really big hassle and so people wound up prefixing their class names with two uppercase letters in order to prevent collisions. So NSThis and NSThat were the names for "NextStep" classes (provided by the system), and your own app would be MAThis and MAThat (for "My App" ...). Then of course what if two people choose the same prefix. Or what if the name of the app changes, and your prefix becomes historical and a little spurious. (Like in OS X, all of the system classes still start with NS...)

Apple introduced a two-level namespace at some point in 2001 I think, which made the problem go away (although the NS prefix remains). I think that two-level systems are good. People can remember two levels of hierarchy very easily, it's a sort of natural relationship (like having a filesystem with files and folders but no sub-folders ... wouldn't that be simple??).

So I decided to put into place a two-level tagging system here in my blog. The "top level" tag is the category and the "second level" tag is the tag . Top level categories include links , original , and a big one: dev (for software development). You can see all the categories by clicking "Browse all tags" at the top to take you to the categories and tags browser .

There's a couple more things I want to do. One is to integrate the rest of the site into the system, so that any of the pages on the site can be tagged and included in an overall tags-based browser for the site.

Also I need to improve the UE a bit ... one thing is to have the ability to see a list of each category and its sub-tags. Also, I need a page-overflow paging type system to deal with huge pages like the one for the "dev" tag.

Does that seem like a lot to you? It seems like a lot to me.

My CLEVER little blog now has a better tag browser , more like the one you are used to seeing in flickr and so on. Also the tag browser is finally fixed so that it actually displays all of the tags that I've used... the previous one had a little bug in it, which I will totally blame on the XSLT FAQ s article on Grouping which completely didn't work for me in this case. And their technique made no sense.

Will I ever release my siteware as open source? It could happen.. I won't say I'm not unmoved by gifts of small and valuable precious stones. Actually, I really ought to just do it. Bleh.

And finally, I still need to go through and tag some more actually.. but what I'm thinking of doing now is tagging the whole site and making RSS available for the whole site as well.