I added a regular expression to highlight search terms in matching entries, in the style of Google’s cache. This is a nice thing, if a bit poncey. It has a known issue that it will match text in a tag.

E.g. a search for hypothetical will replace all instances of hypothetical with <span style="background-color:#9f0;">hypothetical</span>. If there is a link to hype it will go from:

<a href="http://hypothetical.co.uk/">hype!</a>

to

<a href="http://<span style="background-color:#9f0;">hypothetical</span>.co.uk/">hype!</a>

Which isn’t valid HTML and will snap browsers like a twig. Well, nearly.

I have thrashed the journal code into a state I’ve decided to refer to as finished. I have added searching and a whole new navigation system. Searching was pretty easy with MySQL’s fulltext indexing, you can search in a specific mood as well. The new nav pulls the links out of the stream of text making them a bit more noticeable and it looks nice over there on the right.

Thanks to Mat for testing and feedback, I’ve now polished off the rough edges he noticed. On the off chance that anybody notices any more “unexpected features” please drop me an email. All addresses on this domain forward to me so pick any address you like at aftnn.org. Thanks!

I made a page about helicopters instead. Now my battery is dead again.

I’ve made some additions to this site. I’ve built a menu page for the content section and added two basic content items: redworld and swatches. Redworld is a PSD I did a while back. I quite like it. Swatches is just an exercise in the use of loops. It merely displays all the colours of the web palette and a random strapline I made up. It’s visually quite nice though, and at least nods in the direction of generative art. I cunningly used some absolutely placed headings of different colours to create a neat drop shadow effect. All hail me!

Adding content really highlights the usefulness of the bread crumb trail bit. It’s a sweet navigational tool and the fact that it can be found in the same place in every page on the site except the home and error pages should make it invaluable.

Now I’m going to make some more stuff. Maybe I’ll kill the last few things on the journal to-do list, maybe I’ll make a homepage. Who knows…

I’ve been tweaking and working on the Journal a lot over the last few days. Tonight I fought back the still present RSI and built, amongst other things, a lovely new form for myself to type into.

Hopefully it will work. Here goes nothing…

Hooray!!

Internet Explorer 5.2 just got released. It has Quartz text-rendering, meaning anti-aliasing. It’s pretty nice. I’ve got other browsers that do it and they seem a bit over the top really, but IE is OK. Plus it doesn’t anti-alias at small point sizes.

Thanks Tantek!

Don’t click here! NPR won’t like me! Yes this link is top-rated on Blogdex right now. NPR: You are wrong! Official.

Well, this site has moved to aftnn.org! I bought the domain a while ago. In intend to make heavy use of Smarty and mod_rewrite to meta-ise everything. Only problem is that mod_rewrite goes into an infinite loop if you rewrite all addresses in a per-directory config! Nuts!

Basically, if your .htaccess has something like

RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php

Just make sure you add a RewriteCond to make sure this isn’t applied to the clever script that’s going to do all the work, index.php in the example. I use the one below, which basically negates the rewrite rule for all files that actually exist (handy for css and images too).

RewriteCond /path/to/webroot%{REQUEST_URI} !-f

Doh!

Anyway, a new look for my weblog and lots more content to come, including the massive backlog of dreams I’ve had since my last post!

I cut me another stencil, it took me hours. I made a grid-based pixel font design in Illustrator and then transferred it by hand to card. The cutting gave me really bad RSI. I super-masked it when spraying, I thought I’d put too much paint down and it would drip but it was OK. I chose a particuarly audacious spot on the toilet wall. Right where the men look!

It says “COME ON MY SELECTAH!” I’ll post a picture when I find the software for my camera.

I’m scratching. It’s my decks and Mat’s mixer, as per reality. I’m scratching with something quite ambient, it reminds me of Tortoise’s mix of Beats and Pieces 2, but not quite. The other deck has some beats of some kind on it. I’m scratching really well, making a nice rythm. However, when I look from one deck to the other the needle is moving around a lot. Maybe this is just time passing, or maybe my turntables are conspiring to scratch with me. Either way, it all still sounds pretty good.

The dream began with Louise and I in New York, but moved quickly to China — specifically Kowloon Bay or Gulong Bay or something similar. We were on a boat. I wanted to get food but we had no money, but we sailed around the harbour looking at the waterfront food places which were all selling noodles. In hindsight the scene is taken from buying food at Glastonbury a couple of years ago.

We went to get money and I think we went to a Girobank, or some other type of professional money organisation which you would not expect to find in China. The guy there, a big bearded man, said that I could buy cash with my card as long as I could show that I wasn’t going to buy drugs. He gave me a form to complete. The form was great, including questions such as “What was the first joke you heard?” and, showing a figure of packages of tea, “These teas all contain [some substance] which is derived from [coke or something]. What would you do with them?” In the dream I knew to put something along the lines of “Not buy them.” In the end I bought £10 worth of Yen (yes, I know it’s Juan in China). and we walked back out into the fray.

I have been reading Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold. LaBerge is apparently the head honcho of lucid dreamers and the book is quite interesting. The first few chapters have instructed me to log my dreams in order to find patterns. Recognising these patterns whilst dreaming, combined with a few other exercises, whill hopefully induce lucidity.

It’s obviously not effective to only post my dreams to this log. By the time my machine boots I will have forgotten. However, I intend to note them and then post them later for posterity.

So here goes… BTW feel free to post comments on my dreams or your own dreams, could be interesting.