Author: Nick Hodge

My Next Car

Mini Cooper, my next car Its all about the style. Yeah, baby! my car, a new mini cooper s

How did I miss out on The Smiths in my younger days? Morrissey and Marr rock! How Soon Is Now is a classic I remember from the 80s, but their music is really, really… good. The line I am the son/and the heir sounds almost like I am the sun/and the air – a completely different meaning and spin on the song altogther. This creativity in lyric and music is equally only by early Lennon/McCartney and of course, Neil Finn.

I just love it when the software you create does something that you don’t expect! In the Adobe PDF & Acrobat section, I’ve added the links to the updaters to Acrobat 5.0.5. They now appear in the overview for this section – and the navigation on the right handside. The layout of these areas are automatically created from the content in the database. This wasn’t designed, and not the intent when creating the feature. But works the way you would (sort) of expect. Cool.

Last year I purchased a baby Firewire hard drive. I’ve plugged it into my Windows XP Dell Latitude C800 (which has built in Firewire) and reformatted the 10Gb drive. I selected FAT32 as I know that MacOS X can read this, too. Backed up my data, and mounted the same drive on the Titanium PB. MacOS X can see the FAT32 volume (albeit not reading the volume label/name correctly) and read/write data too! I don’t think I would trust all of these devices plugged in together at the same time…

WindowsXP Likes: faster hibernation, neater hardware removal interface, hiding service icons, new control panel interface and ‘helpers’ on the left in explorer windows, nesting of windows for an application in its icon on the start bar. All minor.

Oh, also some work related stuff. The MacOS Acrobat 5.0.5 Updater is now available. (Most) of the components are MacOS X native.

WindowsXP works

I’ve just installed WindowsXP. Just installed over the top of a pretty stable Windows2000 – and it just worked. Even the local Apache and PHP install are working fine. The DirectCD software and ZoneAlarms software barfed up their cookies – but both of these have a duplicate in WindowsXP itself. It must be difficult for utility vendors in niche areas to compete with the Microsoft OS juggernaut.

Its pretty, and I have yet to find “the one thing” that would never make me use Windows2000. I must say it feels faster. It’s difficult to spend time looking at all the new features at once; but coming from Windows2000 everything seems in its logical place

The Christmas/New Year break is nearly upon us. I think that my projects will be related to C# (the Microsoft language & environment) and some other “unannounced Adobe products”

SVG

Added support for object embed style elements; these include SVG and SWF elements pulled from the database. Need to get code working to read the default size for these elements. I attempted to do this with SWFs, but found munging 5-bits to make an number of significant bits in the twips of width and height a little too much like hard work (read openswf.org to see what I mean!) SVG will be easier; just use an XML parser to read the data out of the stream. If its compressed, decompress.

I am not alone on this PHP journey. wes crusher is doing coding, too

InDesign at ACP

For those interested in InDesign. The ‘engineer’ mentioned is, err, me.

How the mungenetengine works is a quickie description of what is going on behind the scenes.

There’s another rewrite in my head. In my features database, there are 21 to-dos. So many ideas, so little time. The more I think about mungenetengine, I realise that there is a better way. At the moment, the render engine is tied up in one object- not the best way to create a OO application.

When you ‘write’ your own application, and run it live, its easy to see how difficult it is to create large applications like Photoshop or InDesign. Let alone an operating system…

mungenetengine

Welcome to Mungenet 6.

This one is a little different to the previous versions – the page fragments are stored in a MySQL database and dynamically created using a 1000-line PHP opus called the mungenetengine. The structure of the site is also stored in the database, too. This permits the navigation to be dynamically generated. Links to external sites (or static files on this server) are stored, too. One change will results in easier management. Also stored in the database are any binary files: images, PDFs and ZIP files.

Why dynamically build this site? It makes it much easier to add elements on the fly, without having to change and upload many static files – which is especially the case with navigation elements. Normally, if you add another sibling page (a page in a directory that is related to the other pages) – you have to update all pages in that directory to reflect the new entry. I believe that navigation gives you, the user of this site, context. So keeping this syncronised is important.