June 2007 in the Life of Ben (Blog)

Birthday for Fliss (24^th June 2007)

Just got back from seeing Fliss again. We completed Baldur’s Gate; the last battle was really tense.

She really liked the card I got for her. But the present, Worms (Private Pack), wouldn’t run on her laptop.

Hardware being incompatible with software seems a bit 1970’s to me. I thought it was a solved problem. It runs Windows XP fine, was way above the minimum spec and was above the recommended spec. They have a Technical Support number...an 0845 one, naturally. Very dissapointing.

But at least the card worked and we had a fun time together.

Testing CFG Studio 2 (24^th June 2007)

If you want to test the upcoming revisions to CFG Studio 2, ask in the GTAF topic.

Picolini has the new version already. You may get it from him if he knows you. Add a message to the topic saying you are testing it, with any good and bad points you notice.

Return to GTA Modding? (18^th June 2007)

GForce messaged me earlier today about helping out with MISA. He’s taken two months off work partly to do this. Seems like the project wants to be more professional in the way it is run. Like planning district themes and getting the municipal buildings in before anything else.

It’s an attractive prospect. Updating CFG Studio 2 to support commenting would be a useful way to help, as well as a difficult programming challenge to attack.

However, there’s a lot of attractive things in my life. Designing and programming TextStudio’s new features is quite a fun exercise. The Find/Replace Panel is something I’ll find useful every day.

But relaxing away from the PC is becoming more appealing to me. Especially when it’s with Fliss.

Not sure what I’ll do.

Fathers’ Day Family Dinner (17^th June 2007)

Myself, my dad, my mum, my sister and her girlfriend all went out to dinner. Genuinely cheerful reunion.

My sister and her girlfriend are engaged, which is cool. So I’ll be gaining a half-sister-in-law.

My birthday is on June 27^th. Need to figure out presents people could buy for me quickly.

Fuji 1,000km (15^th June 2007)

Using the gorgeous Bentley Speed 8 GTP, I won this race in GT4. My total time was 5 hours, 2 minutes and 27 seconds.

My fastest lap was a 1:14.021 thanks to good slipstreams down the long main straight. I could consistently run in the 1:14 range; pretty good for Super Hard tyres. 58 litres of fuel per pit stop and about 20-25 minutes between pit stops worked out nicely.

IE6 Rendering Issue (14^th June 2007)

Just noticed the search box is in the wrong place and the page has a horizontal scrollbar in IE6. Fixing it was pretty easy. Was some random bug with using float on <form> so I apply it to the <fieldset> now.

Then I noticed the list of footer links was invisible. They were in the correct position and the links affected the pointer as expected...but they were invisible. Turned out to be a hasLayout bug on the parent <div>. Obviously.

Old CFG Studio (14^th June 2007)

After an e-mail conversation with Picolini about CFG Studio and Vista, we eventually found that CFG Studio 2 works in it fine.

The current beta of CFG Studio 2 actually seems more stable (and more functional) than the old version ever was. I’ve removed the old version from the site and I’ll clarify that my work on version 2 stopped when I left GTA modding.

Everything under http://projectcerbera.com/tools/cfgstudio/ now redirects to http://projectcerbera.com/tools/cfgstudio2/, as do the old version’s download URLs.

Gaming with Fliss (11^th June 2007)

Saturday

Fliss called me about noon on Saturday 2007-06-09. She was really bored having spent all week at a course with loads of people and was now back home with nothing to do.

I arrived about 13:30 and went straight upstairs. Fliss had music playing so we relaxed and chatted at length about Fliss’s course, how work was stacking up for me and more general stuff.

Sunday

Watched a bit of the MotoGP. Played outside with Scrappy for a while.

Had fish and chips. We arrived at the shop about 15:00 but they are closed between 14:00 and 16:30. We returned home to get a towel, then went back and chatted on the grassy hill opposite the shop. The time passed quickly.

I bought the food once they opened. The fish was huge and there were loads of chips, even though we shared the portion between us. Very greasy but very tasty!

When we got back we played computer games for a while. Started with Dead or Alive 2, accompanied by much cheering and cursing; then Juiced; then we switched to Baldur’s Gate. We played that for hours, with Fliss cooking lunch for us both while at a save point.

My first experience of playing an RPG. It was really fun playing through it cooperatively. It had enough depth to be immersing with enough action to be entertaining.

Birthdays

Both our birthdays are on June 27^th. I’ve got two present ideas for Fliss. Should order them asap to make sure they’ll arrive in time. Will hopefully be visiting her again next week.

Comments about mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 (11^th June 2007)

Dan Connolly started a please reivew mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 thread on the HTMLWG mailing list on 2007-06-07. For a long time I’ve thought the work being done by the Mobile Web Initiative is nonsense.

There were already some detailed responses about technicalities in the mobileOK work. But the really important thing is that to pass mobileOK you must avoid HTML. So this is what I commented on...accidentally top-posting like a total n00b.

Here’s what I wrote, reformatted in HTML:

On Monday, June 11, 2007 at 12:04 PM, Henri Sivonen wrote:

The draft is premised on a vision about mobile browsing that assumes special mobile content. Instead of implying a separate Mobile Web, I think the W3C should push for one World Wide Web with mobile browsers that can access general Web content.
[...]
The premise of mobileOK seems to be that you take the non-Web-ready thin browser and expect origin servers out there take special steps to accommodate it.

This is a fundamental criticism I have of the mobileOK guidelines. Mobile phone networks here in the UK have been promoting their “access the whole Web on your phone” capabilities for years. They can even do scripting (Raising the bar of mobile browsing).
Because so much web content is text/html, surely it is more useful to work on improving support for that in UAs? Mainstream mobile UAs already have better support for HTML than XHTML, many having no support at all for XHTML (Results of mobile tests). I can browse the text/html Web fine on my mobile phone in the here-and-now.
PDF and Word documents are also more common than XML formats on the web, in my experience. Improving support for them would surely be the next logical priority after HTML?
Advising against W3C technologies such as HTML and PNG seems like a strange move for a W3C Working Group to take. Especially since these technologies are already implemented widely.
Sorry if I have misunderstood the guidelines.
Ben ‘Cerbera’ Millard
------------------
Project Cerbera

Every lump of hard-wrapped, monospaced, plain text on that list’s archive seems like a wonderful irony. It’s the HTML Working Group but we shalln’t use <a href>!

On the plus side, the mobileOK people have been responding. So maybe their MobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 will get a reality check, somewhat like WCAG 2.0 has undergone over the past year.

Find/Replace Panel for TextStudio (5^th June 2007)

TextStudio currently uses one window for Edit > Find and another window for Edit > Replace. They share an Apply To window so you can run them on multiple files.

Firefox’s Find Bar has impressed me ever since I first used it. It is compact without being cluttered. Being a toolbar rather than a window, it does not obscure parts of the viewport:

So on 2007-06-01 I started making a Find/Replace Panel for TextStudio:

It aims to combine the best bits from both approaches. Differences from the Find Bar:

The panel will be vertically resizable:
- The text boxes will resize vertically with it to aid working with big strings.
- The buttons might reflow into more or less columns with the textboxes expanding or contracting to suit.
- If the user is running the program is wide enough, a single-row layout might be possible.
Has both Find and Replace, since TextStudio is an editor.
Apply To button to select multiple files to run through.
Uses .MultiLine text boxes so strings with line breaks can be worked on.
Text boxes resize horizontally to make the most of the available width.

Find as you type (FAYT) would be nice once I’ve done the main functionality. The actual find and replace code will probably be all new because the current code is a mess. Always quite exciting when I give myself a challenging (for me) programming task.

Back from Fliss’s (4^th June 2007)

Texted Fliss on Thursday to see how she was. The bedsit she stays at had been raided by the police; luckily they weren’t interested in her room so it stayed intact. She’s now moving back to her mum’s.

Friday

I called her on Friday at 16:30 to see how she was. After chatting for quite a while, we arranged for me to go over there that evening and stay a day or two.

I arrived at about 19:30, put my stuff away and went upstairs. She was playing Final Fantasy XII. We had chicken pies for dinner and she played more Final Fantasy XII.