It's a good day for backups.

You've got the day off, you're sitting around having a mellow afternoon, and you're about to launch a new year's worth of work. Now is a great time to make some backups. If you don't have a formal backup program, and you're within the sound of my voice, I beg you: make today the day.
If you've got a mac, join .mac, and use their Backup 3 software along with their iDisk, with monthly burns to cd or dvd. This costs $99 for a year, plus an hour a month feeding blank disks to your machine. Your mac will tell you when it's time to back up.
If you've got a PC, I don't know what the industry standard is; probably something from Symantec? Pay money for the software (should be about $100 I think) and then use it at least once a month to back up to hard media.
Then go one step more: bring a complete backup set to a different location. If you've got a safety deposit box, great; a drawer in your desk at work is also fine. Or ask a friend who lives in a different zip code to tuck your backups into their files. Why? Floods, hurricanes, fires, burglary, psycho roommate: many things that destroy your computer can also destroy a set of backup cd's stored in the same location. Life will be hard enough if the levees break; at least your data can be safe if you do some regular preventive backups.

triumph!

Who says I'm just a client-side kid? Check out what I just learned about compiling OpenLaszlo on our brand new 64-bit linux server:
jikes 1.22 was already installed in /usr/bin/jikes, so I just had to change build-tools/build-opt.xml to have build.compile.path to /usr/bin/jikes.

i just cut my own hair!

I just cut my own hair! It was so incredibly easy! I'd snipped at little bits with scissors before, or cleaned up around my ears, but this time I got out the clippers and really did it. #2 all around the sides and back, then I cleaned up the top and front with scissors. Wow! I can't believe I have ever paid $80 for a haircut, ever. This may not be as perfect as the cuts I get for $35-50, but it's certainly as good as a $12-30 cut. Of course, I can't quite see the back... If you see me in person, you have my express permission to tell me if the back looks bad.

how to bring a powerbook g4 to its knees

My powerbook has finally gotten so incredibly slow that I'm resorting to using my linux box as a client. Here's the trick: I'm burning a purchased ten-hour unabridged audible book to audio cd, for personal use. I think the audible DRM policy must only allow this because it's such a fucking pain. I'm on disc 4 of what will probably be 10 or 12, and my mac has been unusable for most of the last hour. I can type into my text editor, but it's like closing my eyes, because the text doesn't appear for at least 30 seconds after I type it. Oh, well, they're only comments.

I'm really enjoying having a few non-stress days to explore and code in Open Laszlo. It's a fast, fun platform for prototyping, and I love that I can just post my work and almost anyone anywhere can see it, pow, with nothing more than Flash 7. It's the total opposite of working with C++ and OpenGL on a custom virtual reality hardware installation. "Sure, I'd love to show you my work, just come to Providence, Rhode Island." Heh. Nope, much easier now.

The question still remains: do I spend some time this week getting up on the learning curve with Objective-C/Cocoa/XCode, or do I leave all my eggs in the OpenLaszlo basket? All things come to an end, eventually, and when my association with Laszlo ends, I don't want to have to go back to C# and .NET, or (heavens no!) middleware.

roundrectbutton, and the purpose of styles

I've been sort of disliking OpenLaszlo styles since I started using CSS. The <style> tag says "Be greenish!" which is a cool effect, but not much use when I'm trying to match a particular customer's brand, or artist comps. CSS lets me specify exact colors; the <style> tag lets me suggest approximate colors.

But something changed my mind. Yesterday, Oliver Steele contributed a roundrect class to OpenLaszlo. Until then, without a designer and art assets, we had to prototype with plain old rectangular views. The roundrect class inspired a button based on it, roundrectbutton, which I've just checked in to the dev branch, in the incubator. I was trying to make it a well-behavd basecomponent subclass, so I made it handle _applyStyle, so now it's tintable. This makes me happy in a silly sunday morning wannabe designer kind of way.

In the example below, the roundrect buttons are mine; the other widgets are built-in OpenLaszlo components.