Archive: 2002-05
AOTC
I went to see the new Star Wars film yesterday, Attack of the Clones. I don’t think that the web needs yet another review, so I’ll just give my impressions of it in brief.
Coding
Sun in the sky, Miles and Trane on the playlist, lapsang souchong in the teapot. A perfect coding environment!
Status report
It looks as if there’s very little going on here at the moment, but there’s a lot of invisible activity taking place. I want to use mod_rewrite to give me static URLs for each page, so I need to make a few modifications to the site engine. Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. I wrote the code in a day or so, in a frenzy of activity. It is not very beautiful code. It’s documented reasonably well, and I know what is going on, but it is not elegantly written. It uses so many global variables that it is difficult to modify one thing without wider effects. I’ve been going through the code, isolating each function so that it obtains all its required information in the calling statement, and the only variables changed are those passed by reference (in the few cases where that is desirable).
No more exams for me
I had my last exam of university today. It was also one of the nicest exams I’ve ever taken—I really felt that I understood everything I had to answer. It’s great to finish on such a positive note.
Minor improvements
I’ve tweaked the site logo at the top to make it a bit smaller, so that it doesn’t take up so much screen space. I’ve also added a background to break up the expanse of white that was there before. I think it’s rather nice! The background is based on the same image as the logo at the top of the page to give some thematic consistency.
Progress
I’ve made a lot of progress today. I’ve populated all the sections, and it all works as expected. I’ve added functionality as I’ve gone through, to match the features I needed as I put the pages in. I specifically added bulletted lists, inline image support, and file downloads today. It’s really coming along.
More tests
I’m trying to implement automated bulletted lists:
Exam
I had my exam this morning. I think it went OK, but I can’t really be sure. My hand cramped up after an hour and a half of writing—in the middle of an answer about speech-to-text systems. I really could have used a speech-to-text system at that point! I ran out of time attempting to perform Viterbi decoding on a 7x4 state trellis, but not before I was dealing with fun-to-write probabilities like 0.00001126. Viterbi decoding is exactly the kind of exercise that should not be undertaken by hand.
Suspicious mail
I found this message from a friend among the spam in my Hotmail account today:
404
Take a look at my custom haiku 404 Error page!
Revision and development notes
I’m taking a break from revising for tomorrow’s exam in Spoken Language Processing. I’ve been studying Hidden Markov Models. There’s more to do yet, however.
Testing
This is a test of the new improved ezhtml routine.
bold not bold 2*3=6 and bold again.
bold not bold 2 * 3 = 6 and bold again.
italic but this_one_is_not and this is.Facelift
I’ve just played with the site logo a little, changing it from flat colour to this slightly tubular-looking version. I think that I might have been inspired by Mosfet’s Liquid theme for KDE.
First dynamic version
The dynamically generated version of the site is up and running. I’d crack open the champagne if I actually had any. Now, however, it’s time to get back to more prosaic things. I’m hungry, which means it’s time to cook some dinner.
Internet speed?!
I’ve got hosting, but it’s going to take a while (24-48 hours) for the DNS settings to be updated and to propagate across the net. Until that takes effect, I can’t execute CGI programs, so I can’t get the dynamic content generation working until then.
Marathon coding session
I finally decided on a back end format for this site, and set about implementing it. As I don’t need concurrent updating or anything like that, I’ve decided not to use a database. This is a lightweight site builder.