Say what? Another blog??

I realize at first it seems counter-intuitive, since I'm rotten at updating this blog to begin with (which probably explains my essentially zero-person readership), but I've spun off a second blog.

Why?

Because I'd like to discuss web development (and to a lesser extent general programming concerns) in a space that isn't cluttered with personal cruft. Likewise, I'd rather not loose my opportunity to dump my personal cruft into a giant blog-shaped barrel for the world to occasionally stumble onto. So, The Angry Waffle will be my personal blog, as well as my place to ramble about games and things along those lines, and Bloody Great Leaf will (surprisingly?) be just a bit cleaner, and devoted primarily to discussing issues that one way or another influence my professional life.

Facebook's bottomtooth problem

Lately I've been on Facebook fairly often -- I think they've made some good changes recently, and one of them is a generally spiffy-ing up of the layout of the site. But there's one thing that's been driving me nuts:


What is the deal with that little pokey extra bit on the edge of the content area for the pages? Is that designed that way? Is it some kind of flare or flashyness that's supposed to be cool? Well, all it does for me is make my eye keep drifting to the little notch that's been slashed out of the side of the page, so I wrote a greasemonkey script to fix it: here it is, if anybody else wants it.

Vista: Bad with Turtles

So, it turns out that the reason for Vista's incessant Explorer crashes was TortoiseSVN -- the very nifty application that extends Explorer to handle Subversion source code repositories. Problem solved with a minor upgrade.

Now Vista is as stable as a... slightly wobbly but well set Jello mold. Today Explorer crashed as soon as Vista started, but it hasn't done it since. I guess that's "better".

I gave Ubuntu Linux a shot as well, after a job interview asked me why I didn't use Linux, since I am a self-proclaimed geek. What I found out (err... remembered) is that while I am a geek, I'm a utilitarian geek, and Linux just doesn't seem to offer me much over Windows. Sure, stability and programmer friendliness is nice, but obnoxious configuration files, holy-war-style communities, and out-of-the-mainstream applications don't help me get shit done fast(tm) which is, after all, the point. At least, it's my point.

I almost signed up for Flickr, but remembered I already had a photo album at Picassa, so that won. I'll probably regret that, but Google either scares me less or does a better job of scaring me into submission than Yahoo.

I also took the time to write this little C# app:


It's pretty rough around the edges right now, but all it really does is display the album art and title for the track I'm listening to iTunes... but it displays the title in BIG TEXT. I don't know why I can never get this functionality right out of the box with a music player -- WinAmp didn't do it either.

I like to be able to read the track title from across the room. Sometimes I'm doing stuff when the music is on -- why should I have to get close to the computer to see what I'm hearing?

Moreover I use my TV as my second monitor in a dual view setup (I know this is weird, but I only have one monitor and sometimes you really need a second screen to debug DirectX / XNA apps) -- and a standard TV has a resolution of crap x shitty, so I can't even read the standard size font in iTunes on my TV.

I should probably sell iTunesBiggieView... but it just doesn't seem like I put enough work into it to ask for money :b

Oh, and Zelda in a browser: totally reasonable. I'm tinkering with the map editor now.

AJAX Ho!

I was playing Zelda Classic this weekend when a realization struck me...

Perhaps it came to me because of all my recent fiddling around with the Google maps API, 37 Signals' Basecamp and Backpack, the Dojo Toolkit, and all other manner of Ajax goodness.

Perhaps I was just very bored and lulled into a strange state of super-consciousness by the endlessly looping Zelda theme.

Regardless, it occurred to me that there is no reason I couldn't play Zelda in a browser nowadays. PNGs would do a fine job of displaying sprites, and things like Google Maps have demonstrated that you could certainly scroll around a massive overworld map pretty smoothly, and JavaScript has really come of age lately with object-oriented-ness and all that jazz.

Ok, so the control scheme might be annoying, being that browsers so far don't seem to have very strong joystick / gamepad support.

I bet there are still lots of games you could play in browser though. In fact, ironically, a modern rogue-like would be pretty nifty and is certainly suited for a heavy-weight server, light-weight client arrangement -- sort of getting back to the roots of it all, really.

Perhaps with the addition of fully-functional SVG (we're not quite there yet) the wave of "Web 2.0" JavaScript-ness and Ajax-iousity will finally pound the first chinks into the armor of the mighty giant Flash...?

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

With enough eyes all bugs...

Apparently succumb to that obscure phenomenon "diffusion of responsibility". At least, that seems to be the case with OSCommerce, a very useful and functional open-source shopping cart solution. Unfortunately, it's also clunky, messy, and somewhat out-dated from a code and usability point of view.

In the era of "Web 2.0" the constant reloading for every tiny change in the admin area is unconscionable and the table-based layout of the entire thing is astounding. Where's my AJAX-based admin tools that never reload a page? Where's the elegant, 100% CSS-based page layouts that I can change with the flick of a JavaScript-wired drop-down list? Why, o-why, are there single lines in the source code that are 500 characters long???

According to the OSCommerce website, there are also nearly 4,000 "contributions" (read: plugins that don't plug in very easily)... but they don't seem to be finding their way into the trunk of the OSCommerce build any time soon. Really, would anybody mind if tracking quantity by product attribute was a default option? Or customizing meta-tags?

The whole situation isn't helped by the fact that there isn't a plugin architecture of any kind. Installing a "contribution" amounts to following a long list of steps like

around line 220 of the products_info.php file find the following code: ... and replace it with ...

That's a real hoot when there are 20 steps and a dozen files to modify for a relatively small update.

And I know the whole thing is open source, so I could shut-up and do something about it; the problem is the whole thing needs a total re-write, and that's just not a one-person job.