Our 2003 presentations for IALLT and WorldCALL had some cool SVG stuff in them, which at the time was only working in special builds of Mozilla. Now, many browsers (Firefox, Safari, Webkit, Midori, and Opera) have support for SVG, but some of the code has broken in the interim as user agent implementations shook down, so I fixed bugs, added one new feature (redraw the tree optimally in the browser window when it's resized), and updated links, references and explanations. These materials are now working, and even more interesting because the SVG functionality is now broadly available.
February 18, 2009
Worked through examples of compiling dictionaries based on the del.icio.us API and building recommendation functions from them. So far so good...
MF reports a large number of unwanted submissions to the survey form on the home page of the CanMys site. I looked in the db and discovered a large number of records which had obviously been submitted automatically. I did a number of queries which isolated various categories of those unwanted records and deleted them.
To minimize future similar spam, I added some pretty conventional lines to the form and to the code processing the form which should catch the majority of that junk and prevent it from being sent. Nothing elaborate.
One of the options for the second treatment field is "multiple". So far 23 records contain that value. I modified the report generating code so that if "multiple" appears as the value in the condition_2 field, then the word "multiple" in the search results table for the condition field for that record becomes a link which expands the details line for that record (just as the [+] button at the start of the record and the [+] link in the conditions field for those records that have text in the "more conditions" field in the db).
JP sent me an email summarizing the Web Services office's review of the Social Justice site.
I made the changes I could:
- configure search box to search only the site
- couple of invalid html instances
- made submenus on all pages consistent
I responded on issues that I didn't change:
- "lack of content" : up to client, required elements are there
- "not tested on IE6" : W3C validator is our only standard
- "home page photo not specific to site" : up to client to provide image if they don't want to use the stock image
- "image of ferns in left column missing" : don't see the point of that element, so haven't included it
- "case of submenus not compliant with style guide" : contact client to determine which words are proper nouns
February 17, 2009
Got snarled in a gnarly Delphi problem and didn't want to quit until I'd wrestled it into submission.
This was a bit tricky, because of the use of AnsiString types and PChars in the original Pascal header conversions. I have it working, but I don't have much confidence it will work reliably with (say) filenames in Japanese. That will need some testing.
Ported a progress bar dialog box which is required for the batch file window in Transformer to Delphi 2009.
Ported and simplified my DocLauncher console app, which is used to launch help documentation for IMT and Transformer, to Delphi 2009. In the process, I removed dependencies on old libraries (FileFunctions and SHBrowseU) by substituting actual ShellExecute calls for calls to my own wrapper functions.
A long and tedious task, now done, although many more chairs are still to be confirmed.