Older blog entries for IainLowe (starting at number 8)

I added a Quick Search to Firefox today and thought I'd share it. Just create a new bookmark, set the location to the following code snippet (removing any line-breaks your browser added):

javascript:x=new
String(%s+'a');while(x.length<5){x=newString('0'+x)};x=x.substring(0,x.length-1);document.location.href='http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-'+x+'/'

And set the keyword to pep. Now you can type

pep <pep-number>

in your location bar to be taken to the corresponding Python Enhancement Proposal.

Fun, eh?

In keeping with my new trend in using my different sites for different things, I'll be resurrecting this to use as my technology-related blog.

I just did a round of updates to all the different sites so I figured I would update here too.

Work is almost done on DarachWiki version 2.0. I got sidetracked a bit this month working on a new OODBMS that I want to use for the wiki. I should be able to get a release out sometime next week.

I broke DarachWiki completely yesterday and spent most of today trying to get it to work again.

Been working pretty hard on Beetle the last couple of days. We had to release this friday so the end of the week has been a bit hectic. Not much in the way of work on my own projects.

3:49AM EDT

There is something so stubborn about developers (you know, the part where you stay up until dawn just to get that one thing working). Anyway, I got the changes to DarachWiki done and should be able to remove the last references to the Jakarta regular expression library sometime tomorrow (after I wake up).

I've migrated all the formatting stuff to use the JDK 1.4 regular expressions package and everything seems to be working OK.

I've also changed the way that formatters work: they used to be classes that were compiled into the package. Now I've split them off to be JavaBeans so that I can serialize them and make a repository. I just have to figure out what to do with the ones that need context for their formatting.

10:54 EDT

OK, I got the Jakarta stuff removed from DarachWiki today. I replaced it with an interface and a factory. I hope this works out better. It sure has cleaned things up.

I'm going to tackle the page persistence issues next. I have to consolidate the two methods of persistence (PageStores and the plain Hashtable from the context) and make the move from Hashtable to PageStore.

DarachWiki was freaking out again today when I got to it. Somehow it tries to save it's backup database and fails. This makes it go into an infinite loop where it just munches CPU cycles.

Started making the changes in DarachWiki to support the new release of the JDK. I've changed the WikiWord formatter to use the new regexp's and I'm hoping it won't cause trouble. If everything is OK, I will start to move the other formatters to the same thing tomorrow.