On issues, ideas and happenings interesting to Brian

24 October 2006: Yet again I am reduced to writing -- "Sorry about the blog, I've been really busy". It's true but not very satisfying. Since the last blog entry I've started and and finished three projects. The biggest claimed my last 6 weekends as well as all of the days inbetween. So now I have a bit of time to catch my breath and get back to Associate. I'm still working on one external project and going to a meeting today about another, but life should be more balanced in the future and allow me to spend more time on Associate.

My next two tasks with Associate are:

1. Review the specifications of Associate and make sure that they are still relevant and exciting. It's a good opportunity to look at Associate with fresh eyes (Ideas or comments, as always, are appreciated).
2. I've rescheduled the meeting at the beta site to next week so that I can record actual work flows and tweak the prototype accordingly.

16 June 2006: Well Associate is going forward, but slowly. I am going to talk to a beta site (actually the owner) next week to keep the pressure on. Why so slow? Well an exciting contract (I mentioned the proposal phase in the last entry) has eventuated. It means working with someone I have known and respected for almost 15 years and working with robots. Who hasn't wanted a robot?

Most of this last month has been used up in writing a detailed 'token' specification and playing with wxWidgets (used to be wxWindows), and wxPython. By working full time on these aspects I now know the abilities of the platform (which prompted my switch from GTK to wxWidgets -- both are good, both have complete python layers, but I felt that the books for wxWidgets and wxPython were more up to date and that the Mac support was better). As for the specification -- well it exposed questions, helped with their answers and now gives Bill and I a common target.

16 May 2006: How time flies when your busy! I have been receiving requests to update the website -- fair enough as almost two months have passed. My life has been very busy with contracts, contract proposals, and even a marriage proposal (Anna said yes)!

As I mentioned in the News on the home page, the Associate prototype hasn't yet been tested externally. What is heartening though, is that when I asked the owner of a potential test site to check out Associate, his response was very positive saying "it looks great and very intriguing. I want to know more!!"

While documenting system requirements for a contract proposal, I decided to try a variant of restructured text. I wanted to concentrate on the requirements and not the formatting, but I still needed the output to be acceptable for presentation to the client. I tried restructured text as embodied in the python written DocUtils. For my first effort, I found it a little rough but easy tables, a free table of contents, output in html and latex, and easy to read sources mean that I will persist with it.

Lastly I am trying an experiment to improve this website. Some solutions exist to help users find new (for them) pages on a website, but I've never found them very successful. I'm trying embedding a tooltip with the last modification date in the html for the navigation buttons. If you hover your mouse over the button it will tell you when it was last modified. As the html is automatically generated it doesn't require any more work from me, yet it should help visitors, while being unobtrusive for people who know what they want. The idea came to me today when I was updating the site so I would love any feedback on it.