Saturday, 11 May, 2002
Another beautiful Saturday spent working on the house! Rebuild four window screens for the porch, cleaned, mowed the lawn, swapped out the storms for screens on the rest of the house. Glorious!
A busy day of work. Closed up the books on my sugar daddy client for the first four months. Time to get back to scratching for work.
Spent the evening at Home Depot, buying DIY supplies for the weekend. What a wild bunch – the fun never stops!
— TWikiGuest – 10 May 2002
Tuesday, and more stuff going on.
http://80211b.weblogger.com/2002/05/06 is an interesting site with news on wireless networking. A good use of blogging, too, I think.
The Project Manager built into FoxPro? solves about 99% of the needs o f most developers, but the remainder can be frustratingly hard to reach. This project is designed to create several layers of programmable, extensible interfaces that will allow developers to create and share the add-ons that they need for their projects.
The challenge with the design is that we cannot be sure what needs the next developer will have, so we want to make a set of interfaces most easy to access, difficult to break, and good at cooperatively having multiple extensions share access.
The project manager itself needs to be instantiated as an invisible object, visible only through the PMX programming interfaces. This will prevent inadvertant interference.
One of the key features will be support for multiple user interfaces. A “Classic” user interface can duplicate much of the functionality of the original Project Manager. An “Explorer” interface can present a treeview and file list interface. A “Favorites” tab can be added. Perhaps the ability to dynamically define organizational schemes is needed by some. A toolbar interface to add additional tools might be needed. The design key here is that the user inteface need not dictate the underlying inteface of the PMX. Separation of UI from business logic.
Toni Feltman has a great design in ProjectHookX? that allows chaining of multiple well-behaved project hooks. This needs to be supported.
Had a great break in the middle of the day – took the dogs on a mile-long hike through the Hopkinton State Fair Grounds.
Other than that, worked on IIS 5.0, securing the new Windows server. Links of interest:
One of those graphs, worthy of Edward Tufte, can me found in the latest issue of American Scientist, here.