One of the things that Eclipse had, and lost, was ftp file transfer. I don’t really do ftp transfer anymore. I do a lot of ‘svn commit’ then ‘svn update’ on a different machine (or a svn hook script), and on occasion I use sftp.

But I still need to sync over ftp for some projects. And the eclipse plugin was several years old and targeted an ancient version.

Now, from Aptana, the people who took over RadRails, is ftp functionality.

http://www.radrails.org/docs/index.php/Transferring_Files_with_FTP

I am blogging some more serious content — content that will be carefully edited over time. I need version control. WordPress stores pages and posts in the database — making it hard to version content. Sure, you could store old versions, and write a bunch of custom software to diff recordsets. I have a better idea — store content on the filesystem. Then you can use subversion. DB storage is nonstandardized.

I’m going to start learning a RubyOnRails blogging package — whichever one I think is going to be dominant. I’m not sure if it’s Typo or Mephisto, or something else.

I hope that whatever tool I choose, it saves posts in the filesystem.

I know at least one tool that saves posts in the filesystem — blosxom does — this software is being used by a bunch of the pragmatic programmers people. Downside — it’s perl, and probably it doesn’t have the nouveau web services support that WordPress and the emerging ROR platforms have.

I may look into hacking WordPress to save content where I want it to be saved. One person has posted a plugin that stores versions in the database, but it’s old. Another has posted a plugin that allows you to insert a tag in the content pane that links to a text file on disk. Of these, I like the first solution best since it lets me keep editing in WordPress and by using ScribeFire.

A while ago I was having trouble with this — the answer is, don’t install Fedora. Install OpenSuse 10.2. It’s very similar and the support for Oracle is better. And it doesn’t have Anaconda.

Thanks to digg, I have added visitors from Australia and South America to my loyal readers from North America, Europe and Asia. I am still waiting on readers from Africa (preferably Botswana) and Greenland (standing in for Antarctica).

I have posted a tool (and also an ajax version) to use the imagemagick command line in a web browser. This will allow you to edit your pictures and photos and do all sort of interesting transformations.

I’ve been thinking about the classic things to put online — command line programs from long ago such as Eliza and imagemagick. These things were all put online about 10 years ago. You can kind of tell from the websites that they are on.

Now that we have faster forms and ajax, I think that it’s time to do some of these apps again.

Don’t you just hate it when you have code in lots of different files that you want to work with, but you only need one function in each file? Recently I was working on an abstract syntax tree which is constructed from XML, and the lead developer suggested that I put a function in each node type called parseXML. I suggested that it would be better to have an loader with a function for each node type — the same system, but all the loader code is in one place, and the nodes don’t need to know anything about the xml that they come from. This is a pretty standard thing in compiler design, I remember creating lots of AST visitors when I was building a compiler.

But there are a few disadvantages: you need to make public setters for object properties, even when you ‘really’ want the properties to be private. And you can’t see the code of the node while you are working on the loader. There is a way around the first thing (a true visitor implementation and pass by reference) — but the second thing is a consequence of our folder-based way of looking at code.

So I was thinking that Tiddlywiki would be an interesting way to edit code — you could call up exactly the functions that you want, in the order you want.

The big problem is getting the functions back into the correct files, and doing just-in-time parsing. I suppose that prettyprinting could be hacked into tinymce — there’s a css stylesheet / javascript for prettyprinting on google code.

We are looking into a lightweight way to track database changes in ‘raw’ php — actually not quite raw, but a pretty wimpy homegrown framework — and I just discovered that SQLyog has a command history, so I can record the alter table statements.

I have posted an ajax version of the segmentation and false coloring application here.

This application produces an artistic rendering of an image. The options are to have the image rendered in a patchwork of random colors, or to have similar areas of the image colored in the average color of that image. Looks sort of like the image has been smoothed out.

I really like digg. I just started using it on my own best content yesterday, and got 80 new visitors. Which is about 1/3 of the total visitors since the site opened on Februrary 24, 2007. Yay digg. The content is various online animations and toys.

Popular content:

[Physics simulation toy]

[False-coloring images]