I am l33t! Smell my funk!

[elfs]

Well, this is a fine how-do-you-do. The client loves the website. All I have are a few minor changes, but what I really need to do now is get her code under CVS control, and then much will be well. I'm a big fan of CVS control, although I don't use it enough when I'm writing. I should. Can you imagine what the Changelog for a story would look like, though?

2006-05-02 17:17  elfs

        * 03261_181_Honest_Impulse_C08.txt: Finally figured out how to get Shandy and Linia into bed.

Yeah, that'd look wonderful. Actually, there's a lot of metadata about a story that I should start to capture more seriously.

I've figured out how to use Scriptaculous, and written extensions to the Ajax.Updater() class to allow for the updating of multiple on-screen elements with a single XML payload, thus making monitoring pages without any accursed Java in them very possible. Having one general-purpose language interpreter in the browser is enough, but two is one too many. If you write HTML and you haven't seen Scriptaculous, you have no clue what you're missing.

And now the bad news: my beloved laptop Kusanagi is already dying after only three months. The video card is acting as if it's received either heat or electrical damage; the screen will go completely white with no chance of recovery. Sometimes, it comes back, but it's not reliable. I think it's heat, as it seems to stop if the machine is given a long chance to rest.

And Star One is one of Arjen Lucassen (aka Ayreon)'s side projects. At first, I thought it was his typical mix of cheesy 1970's sci-fi themes, incredible studio talent, power guitars and amazing production values until I realized that the song I'm listening to right now (High Moon) is even cheesier than most: it's a rock-opera retelling of the 1981 sci-fi bomb Outland, the Peter Hyams/Sean Connery vehicle, making it cheese about cheese! I feel so meta.

Comments

[creepingcrud.livejournal.com]

Man, I love the Star One studio album (there is a live album also that draws from that disc and the Ayreon back catalog). It is totally over the top, without any shame whatsoever. Have you heard Blind Guardian's Nightfall in Middle-Earth? Symphonic metal Silmarillion. It's awesome.

[(Anonymous)]

Out of curiosity, have you looked at the IBM Workpad Z50 as a possibility? I bought one on ebay once and it turned out the unit I got was flaky, and I haven't tried again since... but they're cheap enough, used, that I really don't mind having had the experience.

To me it seemed like the perfect laptop for geeks who don't care about having lots of pixels, gigahertz, or gigabytes, but do want something they can run netbsd or linux on (it has WinCE in ROM, but can boot netbsd/hpcmips off CF media, and I assume linux would work just as well) that they can take with them. I'm a bit sorry that I haven't tried again to find a working one. The battery life is nothing short of amazing.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The problem is that I actually do care about all of those things: I watch movies on my laptop, do my Japanese lessons, and run Thunderbird: all of those things take gigabytes and gigahertz. I can live with the 1024x768 monitor, but I still need it at least that big for the graphics work I do for my clients.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Have you ever considered insurance for your laptop? We use Safeware
( http://www.safeware.com/ ) and insure ours completely for about $70 a year. That covers everything. Parts, repair, and replacement. It even covers pixel loss in the screen, and water in the keyboard. Accidents, power surges, and acts of deity, no problem. It's a very, very nice thing to have, and beats hell out of retailers' "Service Agreements" and such.

[ex-parasyte688.livejournal.com]

Ok, now I'm probably just stalking you.....

Question:
I'm want to 'periodically' update the data in a table with XML. Can you give me a lead on how this is done. periodicalUpdater doesn't look like it's going to do the trick. So then I started looking up PeriodicalExecutioner and now I'm just all confused.

So, yea. Any help would be helpful.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, using a PeriodicalExecutor with Prototype 1.5 would be about the right way to go, but you'd have to use AjaxPeriodicalExecutor. But what you really need is to write a Javascript function to update the cells "on demand," using JSON as its input, and then register it with the AjaxPeriodicalExecutor as a JSON handler.

If that doesn't make much sense, write back and I'll try to walk you through it.