Well well, It's been a bit since I've updated this. Oh well. Anyway, more programming. Getting back into the swing of things, finally. That stuff in the account view I talked about earlier hasn't happened yet. Haven't been able to gather Adam and Evan together without them fretting about our DO and Thread code. Oh well (Too bad, it looks like Adium's not gonna be ready for the ADA on the 17th...)
I'm going to rant a bit about Cold Fusion. I hate it. I absolutely detest it. I can't understand why someone would want to use such a proprietary language. Apparently, my employer adores it, and refuses to install PHP on their server for a "toy program" I wrote for them. So, I get to rewrite it in CF. Fat chance of that ever happening. I really don't know what to tell them, though. It's not exactly missions critical, but I really don't want to say to them "Um, sorry, your development tools suck." It doesn't help that I found out that they're all a bunch of undercutting scabs, which really irks me, coming from a union family ("scabs" probably isn't the right word, but they charge dirt and undercut everyone else, so, eh, close enough). I'm pretty much just spinning my wheels waiting for the internship to end. Then, of course, I need to find an actual job. Joy...
Speaking of jobs, I'm doing some (unpaid) work for my school (see a pattern? I'm too nice for my own good). It's a pretty straightforward project; currently, the Summer School teachers have to write out all their comments by hand. Me and one of my former CS teachers are working on moving this over to a web-based system. If only the slate was totally clean, this would be a breeze. Unfortunately, it's not. All of the student data is stored in a Paradox server that's totally separate form the web server. So, when grading time comes, we have to do an export from Paradox to a csv file, which is imported into the MySQL database. Thankfully, we don't have to export back to the Paradox server; all the reports are generated from the PHP-driven website. I'd work on my Python-fu, but PHP is easier for someone from a C/Java background to read (they need to be able to change it after I leave). I've got this mostly planned and sketched out, but I haven't started on the code side. I have about half of the layout finished, and it's working in [Win|Mac]IE 5 and Safari 1.2. I'll see how Netscape handles it later on.
Now, in some forward looking news, I've got an idea for an article to post. It's a problem that's been bothering me for a while, and now that I've been doing some web design again, I've noticed it even more. I'm talking about fonts. Currently, a page designer has half a dozen choices of fonts to use on their website. What if there a way to allow you to upload a file to the server, and have a stylesheet load and use the serverside font (yes, there's been something like this before. But that was a plugin, and nobody felt like downloading it). I'm going to propose a clean solution. Stay tuned, folks (Surprisingly, this has been one of my longest entries, well, ever, in any blog, ever. Cool.)