2nd Appendix

The second appendix is done.

I've also been a wee bit busy with my camera and these pictures are of the Cam during a lovely sunset a week or two ago:

I'm bloody lucky to live in such a gorgeous place TBH .

Slow going

Ajax is doing my poor likkle head in! I did loads of work last week on my days off and I tried, I really tried, to do some while at work - but I justcouldn't do it! Don't know what was the matter but it really did mess my poor head up a lot.

Decided to do some collation work instead and got the 1st Appendix in shape (Imaginatively called Appendix01.pdf). Basically it is all the old stuff to do with the dissertations development. Basically it is old and nasty and I don't like it - not least because it uses txtdb, which in and of itself isn't such a bad thing as it uses a .txt file as a database, but it is so very slow... of course my noobie knowledge of coding didn't help much in terms of making the programs run faster, I'm so much better now - yet I've still got such a long way to go (I even noticed that some of the html outputted by my early work isn't W3C compliant... now that simple wouldn't do today! I'm so happy that I then converted to MySQL and thence to SQLite... Just goes to show you ehh?

The 2nd Appendix still needs a little work as I've not quite sorted out the files that'll need to go in it. But I'm getting there slowly, I guess I'll stick that on when I'm at work next as I dare say I'll not feel up to working then either .

What else is happening? Not a lot really... coming up to January the 23rd, so look after yourself ehh? I'm not Catholic but that was about the best link I could find .

Rounded corners with tables

	This is a test of creating rounded corners using tables. It took me ages but I figured out that I needed to define the first row even if it was 7 repititions of a 1 pixels block of the same colour. Browsers use that as a starting point for the rest of the table. Basically what I've got here is a 3 by 3 table with each corner holding a 7 by 7 table with a nice progression that I worked out not so long ago whilst carrying out another project. I've put it beneath but I think you'll be able to see the progression as being nice and consistent. I think so anyway.

This is just a test of the onChange thing for drop-down lists. It seems to work so far .

Option1Option2Option3

This is another way of doing it, from here:

Simple Corners

Four walls makes a house, four corners makes a rounded rectangle. That's all there is in this example.

Cool buttons!

Created these with the amazing 80x15 Brilliant Button Maker. I had a nice txtdb one that is available on their site but I couldn't find one for MySQL, SQLite nor Ajax so I just had to make some. The MySQL one uses the colours from their logo. The SQLite one has the logos colour on the left and the default on the right. The Ajax one has the colour of the cleaning product logo, which is just red really ! Excuse the table but that's the colour scheme on the old page where they were displayed and I wanted to do a nice mock-up of what I think they should look like. Except that the real page is residing on the server on my mac and the hosting here doesn't support SQLite and txtdb was so slow on here that I had to take it off ...

The button maker is really cool and I'm well impressed. I found it as a result of messing around with the Stumbleupon plug-in for Firefox... I think that that is quite enough links for now!

I just couldn't resist this:

Slight Update

Updated Literature Review, (My tutor suggested that I password protect this, email me for access if you feel you really, really need to read it ) gone back to Mellel as NeoOffice/J was sooooo slooooow it was painful! Besides, I figured out how to do foot-notes! And it produces pdf files as well! Not sure that I like foot-notes but they're not too bad an idea really.

Couple of nice icons which I've come accross as well, think they were from dA:

Fairy	Squirt

Also been using Inkscape on the good old Mac and I'm generally impressed. I used it to create the figures in the literature review and I like the mix of freehand stuff and the ability to get to grips with the underlying XML as well... particularly useful when you need to place things exactly in line and such like. I used to use it on the PC and used Sodipodi prior to that (I think Inkscape is a branch of the Sodipodi stuff...?), but now that it's available for the Mac I'm not looking back! Did crash a couple of times but you gets what you pays for and it's free !

Update

What a really cool idea Oxfam Unwrapped is! There was a thing on radio 4 yesterday morning slagging it off but I think it is the bees knees. You can buy something for someone that'll do some good somewhere else! If it's the thought that counts then it is a pretty neat thought I think... but then again I guess I would wouldn't I

What I'm also doing at the minute (apart from justifying myself in a blog), is listening to computer science podcasts. They're brilliant and I'm enjoying 'em (the podcasts) as much as I did the first days of my course... if not a little bit more really.

I'm also getting to grips with NeoOffice/J for the mac as my tutor likes footnotes and Mellel just won't play with 'em I'm afraid. It's a crying shame as well as I love the program and it's as fast as lightening on my machine. I'm not overly happy with the complexity of NeoOffice as it seems to be as feature rich as Word... something I'm not overly pleased with really.

Progress

This is where my literature review is living at the minute. I'm aiming for about 3-4K words on the bugger as its worth about 25% of the mark for my dissertation. Enjoying it so far but will need to be done by Xmas. Will finish off the internet thing soon then going to have a look at the browser wars... then gonna have a squint at AJAX and look at the state of the literature there... I've finally managed to find some references for it but they're mostly in low grade sources such as .NET magazine. Not that .NET magazine is pants, quite the opposite really as I get it nigh on every month, it's just that it's not exactly an academic journal.

There are a fair few references in newspapers as well but mostly we'll be looking at blogs and podcasts (Still need to look at how to reference a podcast .)