Whoops

Hmm, I've been lacking in updating the diary a bit... Oh well. Today I am at home nursing a yucky cold, so I thought I'd write an entry.

Work is getting better recently - less assembler, low-level C and debugging, and more Java interface coding. I used to like Swing, but after using GTK+ 2, Swing has some really annoying features. A total lack of a single decent layout component, for starters. To help in the future I am planning on writing a clone of libglade for Swing, so I can design a UI using Glade, and then load it at runtime in Java. I'm not entirely sure how all this would work though, but I will at least need to write clones of the GTK+ layout components.

Book wise - I finished the The Return of the King, The Time Machine, started to read War of the Worlds (which bought back many memories of listening to the vinyl when I was 10). I'm currently re-reading Use of Weapons, and have Iain Bank's latest, Dead Air, sitting on my desk. I hope it's good, The Business didn't really do anything for me.

The best news I've seen for a long time is that Babylon 5 series 1 DVDs are being released in England, contatry to some people. I found play.com does them, with a very respectable discount.

Web Site

I finally uploaded the new layout (stolen from MovableType) to burtonini.com. All I need to do now is find a suitable smalll PHP based content server, which also does URL re-writing. I'd like to use AxKit but my hosting side doesn't run mod_perl. This looks interesting though, so I'll wait for mglazer to unveil the demo site.

URL re-writing is an essential part of the system, as the most annoying part of the dynamic web for me is seing URLs such as http://www.foo.com/page.pl?content=welcome. Totally uncachable by any proxy servers on web browsers, as the content could change every second. Of course, the appropriate cache control headers could be added as well, but then my objection is the vile URL.