Older blog entries for stevecassidy (starting at number 1)

Finished teaching finally, just 250 perl assignments to mark now...

Some nice results with www.assta.org this week using Zope. Zope looks very nice but getting it going on the rpm based server was traumatic, installing python modules for postgresql access wasn't straightforward. Somehow through the process the ownerships of the entire zope installation became wrong causing zope to refuse to let me manage anything. Changing everything to be owned by zope fixed it but lord knows what happened. Some interesting discussion on comp.lang.tcl about using tcl via zope. Zope provides excellent infrastructure but I really don't want to learn python to be able to extend it.

Tcl/Tk proved it's worth this week; wrote a simple text editor for Emu in a couple of hours and ~30 lines of code. I've got an urge to code up an answerphone script in tcl even though there's an existing package for perl on offer. I've really started to actively dislike perl after teaching it this semester.

Hmm.. I've been wondering about keeping a diary for a while. Not being an organised person I don't know if I'll be able to manage regular entries but who knows...

Teaching is just coming to a close and so I'm hoping to be able to get on with some coding (that is coding things other than perl CGI scripts for student's assignments) in the midyear break. Many things have piled up but now we've got some money to pay a couple of people to help out we might be able to make some useful progress.

Met with Jonathan last week to discuss the future of Emu. It was good to externalise some of the plans that have been floating about in my head for a while. I really need to write a planning document since there will now be others involved directly in the project but I always want to code rather than write stuff like that...

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