.plan Archive 2004

Current Projects:
Joe Christensen, Inc. Web presence for family printing company
MightySETIInfo Email sig/html output based on SETI@Home progress

Previous projects:
Ripmax RC Simulator
Fighter Squadron: Screamin' Demons Over Europe

11/may/04

• Decided to use this .plan for personal and non-work stuff.
• Uploaded the Handy Dandy Doc, for someone on Openplanesim

30/mar/04

• 16:00 Giving some thought to whether templates will be flexible enough. I suppose that this is a reasonable thing to do. So I guess that's what I'm doing tonight
• That didn't take nearly as long as I had feared
• Somehow, the changes I made to give the buttons meaningful names got lost. Also, I used to have stub sub-menus in there with bogus names. But they're gone, now.
• Oh, no, they're there. But they're at the bottom. I think what happened is they got disassociated when I installed that fix about the menu ordering. I'm guessing that's when the fields were renamed, too
• Man, that was a lot of work. I did find a coupla mistakes I made in switching to the template, though. I had not copied the entire P7setMM2 line. Also, a couple of items have a single quote ' in them, which messes up the JS parsing of those strings. I don't think I need them in these instances, so I just pulled them out.
• Played with colors and decorations of links a little. The colors of this page have grown on me
• Moved includes into their own folder. What idiot came up with include file vs include virtual? I can't think of any reason why there should be a distinction.
• Adding all the rest of the pages
• Added them to the menu
• Checked in and uploaded everything
• Found one typo
• Finished navigation pages (services, jobsetup, etc)
• Started adding content, history and contacts
• Forced footer to the same width as the logo. For now I think I'm going to leave the content to stretch as wide as the user's window
• Out at 12:15

Played GTA3 for a coupla hours.  Tried a coupla missions a few times, but couldn't figure out the tricks to complete them. Then just drove around learning the city.

29/mar/04

• 15:00 Got responses to my CSS questions
• Looked at a little JS thingy to insert an email link into a page. Spambots won't get the address unless they have a JS interpreter built in
• Those seem to work. Checked everything in
• For some reason it took four tries to get the latest virus definitions
• Adding in content layer
• It's crashing Netscape 4.
• Also, the menu isn't closing when you move off of it over the content text
• The menu not closing was a z-order problem. Moved the content down to 100
• Found what looks like will be a working footer at http://www.realworldstyle.com/nn4_3col_header.html. This one didn't quite work, but maybe could have been made to http://www.alistapart.com/articles/footers/
• But NN4 is still crashing
• Hmm, it's intermittent. Only seems to happen when previewing. I'll keep an eye on it
• Moved footer into ssi and added to all the pages
• Started putting content onto the link pages
• I really should turn that into a template
• Checked everything in. Now to see what it'll take to get all these pages to use a template
• An editable region cannot encircle one half of a tag. It must contain both the beginning and the ending tag. For the body onLoad parm, you have to choose the body tag at the bottom, then do Modify | Templates | Make attributes editable. Then it'll put them in a variable up in the header
• Hmm. Gonna be some work to switch them over, but nothing difficult. Just tedious. It doesn't retain the title. Nor, does it retain the onLoad parm. I'll need to copy those over for each page. And also delete all the now-duplicated stuff. Maybe worth it in the end. I'll look at doing that tomorrow
• Out 02:00

25/mar/04

• 17:00 Played GTA3 until about 3:00 last night. Couldn't sleep, so watched TV. Just as I was settling down a little after 6:00, my doorbell rang. Huh? By the time I got pants on nobody was there. Then, about 8:30 they came to areate my lawn, which requires a loud machine. Thus, the late start, today
• Answer on the newsgroup about my ordering problem. Turns out that's a known bug in MM2. They already have a fix available. The free Bonus Interface Theme at the bottom of their themes page
• Fix didn't help. Posted followup
• Turns out they had an old version of the extension. They uploaded a new one immediately and it works
• Adjusted padding at bottom of flyouts. It's in the CSS
• Gonna work on top and bottom buttons. Make them just text? Hopefully?
• Got that done. Copied the .ssi into all the pages. I guess I need to make a rollover for for them
• From the newsgroup, someone pointed me at http://www.pacifichelicoptertours.com/pacific.css for an example of how to make the entire button clickable and with a rollover. Works consistently with the flyouts, now
• Doesn't work in Netscape 4.8. The top buttons are off to the right, partly overlapping, and only the last one causes a switch to the link cursor
• Changed the size of the buttons and the hover background switch broke. It was only filling from the bottom of the text to the top of the box. Went in and set block height 100%. Now, when it does switch over the entire background is changed. But, the hover is still only noticed in the top half of the box. At the bottom of the box it doesn't show as a link cursor. It's a small box, so I'm going to live with it
• Made border of buttons dimmer. From AA to 66. Now they don't stand out as much. They fit with the menu better
• Out 12:11

24/mar/04

• 14:30 Working on logo
• Using SSI to add it to every page
• Should I start looking into making a template?
• Hmm, for some reason the logo isn't in the upper-left
• Gave it an absolutely positioned div class. Dunno why it wasn't working
• God dammit. MM2 reordered my buttons without me telling it to
• 21:00 Out

22/mar/04

• 14:00 Looking at using WS_FTP to upload site. It has a scripting utility that should work fairly easily
• It works, but not exactly as I'd like. I have to hard-code the directories into the script. And, it isn't smart enough to upload only changed files.
• I guess they have a "synchronization" tool that I'll try
• Downloaded CuteFTP. They have a VB scripting language. Might go with that. Seems to work well

20/mar/04

• 13:00 Changing the colors of the buttons to dark blue. For now, the whole page is dark blue. I'm not sure I like that. I think I want dark blue on the left and light blue for the main content section. I'll play with that later, when I put some content in.
• Changed menu and flyout fonts to Goudy Old Style per request
• Whenever I upload my changes to the site, Dreamweaver uploads the hidden .svn directory used by Subversion. I don't want that. But, the hidden directory doesn't show up on the Site panel, so I can't cloak it. Posted a question to the P7 newsgroup to see if anyone is using version control, and what they do about hidden directories
• Geez, I need to note the time when I upload the site next. I think it's been over 30 mins so far
• 15:47 Uploading
• - 16:03 Done. Sheesh
• 19:30 Out

18/mar/04

• 13:00 Even with MMII there's a lot of drudgery to creating these menus. At least in Dreamweaver it's easy to make these simple changes in the code view, instead of having to go through the GUI for each and every one in 20 different files (so far)
• Dreamweaver takes *forever* to upload the site. It's only a coupla meg. But it's a few hundred files. At least I can watch the ftp log scroll by. I can't back up and check stuff on the fly, though. Modal dialog in the way
• Got a prototype up on my site. But it's using the "over" image instead of the "down" image for the default button.
  Found the answer to that in the newsgroup. In the onload handler of the body I had changed from "Over and Down" to "Over" during the tutorial.
• Also stumbled across a possible fix for not being able to view source code in IE on dad's machine.
  Under Tools > Internet Options > Temporary Internet Files > Delete Files

17/mar/04

• Finishing the tutorial. Starting on a JCI version
• Discussing duplicate menu items. Quotations and FAQ are both in the Public section and the Customer section. That's a UI no-no. It's an Unnatural Law of the Universe that the user will go to the wrong one more than 50% of the time :-)

Met my cousin Gary. I was worried about that, but he turned out to be pretty cool. I think he's in his mid- to
late-twenties. He is in town taking a class to become an Orkin salesman.

16/mar/04

• 12:00 Finally halfway through the tutorial
• MM2 rocks

15/mar/04

• 12:30
• Started on MMII, but didn't get much done

12/mar/04

• Very late start. I just couldn't sleep last night. I think I fell asleep after 05:00. 15:00 start
• Still no response to my question from yesterday. Gonna repost it
• Finally got a response, asking for more info
• I noticed in the release notes for v1.0.1 that there was a problem with a URL that had a space in it. Tested that by renaming "Simple menus" to Simplemenus. That works. Gonna live with v1.0.0 for a day or two and upgrade after I have an MM2 menu up and running.
• Working through that tutorial
• Out at 23:00
• Helped a chat buddy with some Javascript (was pulling a number out of some text and went from 1,6 instead of 0,5)
  Gave advice on how to protect from that kind of error in the future
• Sent an email to a woman who's linking to one of my fireworks pics asking her to give me attribution

11/mar/04

• Late start, and distracted while I was paying some bills. 14:00
• Posted question on why I'm getting "svn: Invalid editor anchoring; at least one of the input paths is not a directory and there was no source entry" when trying to "switch" to a branch I just created.
• Coupla suggestions came from the primer question:
  Software CM Patterns (www.scmpatterns.com) Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration by Brad Appleton
  acme.bradapp.net
  www.cmcrossroads.com
• Took a few hours off to watch a hockey game on TV. Stars pulled out a tie. Got distracted with chatting for awhile.
• Gonna set up to work on MM II first thing in the morning
• Out 01:00

10/mar/04

• In at 12:30
• Sent email to svn list asking for pointer to a primer.
• Sent email to TSVN list asking about how TSVN was able to perform functions against the repos, even though I had forgotten to fire up svnserve
• Gonna ignore version control for the moment and learn how to build a menu in Menu Magic II
• Ahhh, the light bulb begins to flicker. I was checking out from too high in the repository tree. So I was polluting my working copy with the trunk and branch directories. Also, I was pointed to the "switch" command. This is how you jump around between versions.
• Got it working in one test, but it isn't working here at the end of the day. For one thing, I forgot to create a branch at the beginning of this test. Will look at it more closely tomorrow.Got onMouseOver to work on text. But it's not auto-hiding itself. Turns out, I'm going to need to create a table or something under my main menu entries to handle that behavior. I might try that, or I might abandon Simple Menus and move on to Menu Magic II.
• Out 21:00

09/mar/04

• Yikes, in at 2:00
• Started trying to import a P7 tutorial. But I'm totally confused, now. The paradigm is very different from SourceSafe. I can't figure out how this is supposed to work in daily life when using an IDE. My vague impression at this point is that in order to work on a branch I need to change directories. I don't see how Dreamweaver's IDE can handle that gracefully.
• Looking up "CVS for Sourcesafe users" and "best practices for CVS." No luck after over an hour.
• Off at 19:00

08/mar/04

• 11:30 Email and newsgroups
• Planning repository layout
• Trying it with P7 tutorials, to see how it'll work in real life
• Out at 8:00

05/mar/04

• 11:00 Email and newsgroups
• Just came across a really neat development model
  Make a branch off the last milestone for each change request
  Go through the entire development and testing cycle for that branch
  Then merge it back in
• Later: Saw discussion of problems if a feature takes awhile to implement and you try to "reseed" from the trunk
• Asking for advice on best practices setting up under XP

04/mar/04

• 13:30 Forgot to set my alarm
• Email and newsgroups
• Some manual reading.
• Didn't feel very productive. Cut out at 18:30

03/mar/04

• 11:00 Installed UPS and trackball
• A virus snuck through Spamcop last night. It came as an attachement that I didn't open. A copy of the virus was in Popfile, and PC-Cillin kept quarantining the file. I finally figured out I could delete the message from Popfile and not have to worry about any indices or directories being out of synch because of the missing .msg file.
• Email
• Paid a coupla bills
• Ran tests for the JCI template in Word 2003
  One .doc had the template embedded and the other didn't. Turning the standalone copy on globally caused it to run twice (Two copies of the toolbars.) In the embedded version, somehow the function calls had a "char" designation appended to them.
  In the other .doc file everything looked okay until I tried letting the scripts change the bolding and italics.
  If either or both were chosen then it crashed Word.
• Reading, reading, reading
• Thinking about what I want backed up on all my machines
• Thinking about putting blog software on my site to act as my .plan file

02/mar/04

• 10:45 Email
• Turns out I only have one CPU, even though Windows thinks I have two. I'm guessing "hyperthreading technology" means essentally putting two CPUs into one package. That sounds like something Intels marketing would do. Need to look that up someday
• Changed to subversion users mailing list digest
• Transposed digits in the ICQ number
• Printing out Subversion docs. Turns out it's 221 pages(!)
• Reading, reading, reading
• 19:00 Out for soccer practice

01/mar/04

• 11:30 Still setting up new machine
• Installed Dreamweaver
• Set up work email
• Powweb was having POP3 account creation probs
• Using Mozilla email client
• Installed ePrompter
• Subscribed to P7 newsgroups with Mozilla
• Installed Trillian
• Pointed Musicmatch at my jukebox
• Whoa. I just noticed this machine has two CPUs. Cool! :-)
• Installing Netscapes. v7.1 and 4.8
• Looking at Subversion
• Installed. Time to read the docs
• Looking at wireless keyboard/mouse
• Gonna write Logitech and see if I can have two wireless mice. An MX700 and a Trackman
• 21:30 out

27/jan/04

• 15:00 Getting more into the tutorials
• Starting to look at www.projectseven.com

26/jan/04

• 15:00 Browsing cascading menu Google hits
• This one behaves really well and I like how it degrades of Javascript is turned off http://www.cross-browser.com/x/menus/xmenu4.html
• 16:30 Back to reading Templates book
• Changed my mind. Gonna try to set up a schedule for myself
• Eh, waffled back and downloaded software components for the book

15/jan/04

• Package from NE showed up. Dreamweaver and books
• Installed Dreamweaver.
• Tried to make a Flash movie showing my accident. Couldn't figure it out without docs.
• Imported MightySETIInfo docs to play with

14/jan/04

• Check out Windows Media Encoder 9 for capturing onscreen sessions as tutorials
  http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/01/09/02OPstrategic_1.html
• Gotta job. Gonna do web development for my dad

Current .plan
.plan Archive 2004 - Start of JCI
.plan Archive 2003 - MightySETIInfo
.plan Archive 2002 - MightySETIInfo
.plan Archive 2001 - Inertia/RC Sim, MightySETIInfo
.plan Archive 2000 - Inertia/RC Sim
.plan Archive 1998-1999 - Digital Chicken, Parsoft/SDOE, beginning of Inertia/RC Sim

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