16:50, Friday July 4th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments
So Hixie blunders on the list and announces that the WG is looking at the centering problems we've all been fighting about for the last few days!
Obviously this is good news, but I can't help getting the feeling that they just aren't really thinking about the outside world too much. If they were then the argument would have been cancelled with a single line email: "In progress after CSS 2.1".
Mental note: The W3C is an elephant. It's not going to do anything quickly, stop expecting daily feedback.
18:47, Thursday July 3rd, 2003 • feeling resigned • no comments
I had another tiff on www-style today. Somebody asked about block-level centering (both vertical and horizontal). I think this is the fourth or fifth time somebody has out of the blue come on to the list and asked about block centering, there is a need for it, but nothing is being done. The people who represent the working group can't even be bothered to come on to the list and talk about it. I can kind of understand this, it's an old issue. By why is nothing being done? Why is there no process for resolving these kind of suggestions formally? Is the W3C at all interactive? At the moment it seems to be asleep. The people who argue with me on the lists are just other people following the mantra of "The Right Way". Where's the plan of action? I don't want to still be having these arguments in a year's time. I want to move forward and I hope they do too.
3:32, Wednesday July 2nd, 2003 • feeling amazed • no comments
Finally they turn on the GPRS support for my new phone! I needed a SIM update to use it, but Orange's SIM updating system has been out of action since the weekend. When it came on today, I had a brief surf, posted to Hype in glorious Technicolor of course and then decided to have a pop at making a MIDlet.
A MIDlet is a Java application designed to run on mobile devices, phones, palmtops, etc. MIDP defines the execution environment and a shoal of other standards define the APIs and everything else. A lot can be acheived. The MIDlet can gain access to almost all of the phone's faculties and apps can provide lovely graphics or interact with a host of network services over HTTP, SMS or potentially other carriers. There is even an API for multimedia, however, the T610's implementation of this doesn't extend as far as controlling the camera :-(
Being a relatively experienced Java programmer, knocking up the source for the Hello world MIDlet was a doddle. The next bit was however annoyingly hard. Once the code was finished I compiled it into a class file. Nothing new there. However, there remains several steps. The class needs to be blessed to run on the KVM device virtual machine. The blessing tools are only available for Linux, Solaris and Windows. So I duly downloaded the J2SE SDK and the Wireless Development Toolkit from Sun on to Louise's machine. This built the required files and blessed everything.
I shipped the files up to Gradwell and add the MIME types required for the JAR file and it's descriptor to this site's root .htaccess file. Everything looked good. I had even tested the app on an emulator that came with the WTK. I managed to download the file to my phone fine as well. However, it didn't run. Perhaps it needed to be signed, or blessed some other way?
No props to Sun on the tools for this one. Usually they are very good for this kind of thing. I absolutely can't believe that they've shipped a binary blessing tool, preverify, that isn't written in Java! How's that for shooting yourself in the foot? The dev tools are crappy as well, providing little more than a button to push and giving me corrupted screen nonsense at the same time. Why not ship this as a batch of Ant tasks? That way I could do it all on my Mac without any extra effort from them. In addition it would fit into the development cycles of a lot more developers than releasing some shonky app to do it. Dave Dribin has provided a set of tasks to work with the WTK, but these do not get round the problem of not having a compatible version of the binary tool to hand.
22:34, Monday June 30th, 2003 • feeling reflective • no comments
Today I gave a pretty large sum of cash to charity, divided roughly between adopting some Chilean jungle, a regular donation to the WWF, an annual pledge to the EFF and one-off donations to Amnesty, FOE and Oxfam. A nice balance of the trees, the animals and the people I think. The animals lost out a bit because the WWF doesn't accept one-off payments, but hopefully the FOE will help them a bit and other people will give more because animals are fluffy.
To be honest I feel shell shocked. The money is a tenth of what I got from the sale of my Dad's company, but the effect on me is very different. Grabbing money was easy, it was instantly acceptable and soon it was like it was nothing special. Giving it away however was hard. Louise made me feel sad because she will earn less than the amount I've given away today in weeks of marking papers. The fact that the money will maybe prevent some other people from having to work so hard is small consolation when somebody so close to me is sad because her hard work seems in vain. If there's one cause I should give money to, it's her.
In addition to positive spending I've recently been indulging the shameless materialist in me, though I don't feel very proud to say that right now. I've spent a lot of money on things like a new mobile phone and insurance in the last few days, as well as levelling debts. I paid Louise back a very large amount that I owed her credit card as well as settling up with Rob for previous work and Mum for the loan she gave me at the end of last year. I also had to pay off the Inland Revenue, I haven't paid any NI for about a year and a half and they billed (and fined) me for that a couple of weeks ago. I've spent almost as much in the last two weeks as I earned last tax year! My income has also been high due to my stock sales. My poor debit card is practically on fire and I'm feeling almost out of it. I still owe the house bills account some cash so I can't quite cut my card up yet, but believe me, it's on my mind.
