john's blog

Google Chrome

john — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:55:39 +0000

I assume everybody has tried out Google Chrome by now. It's been available for download for nearly an hour already. ;-)

It is of immediate interest to me, because of the AJAX I use in Analyst. Last week, I downloaded and tried out IE 8, beta 2. Now, as far as I'm aware, I'm using pretty old, straightforward standards-compliant javascript in my browser pages (which work fine in Opera and Firefox), but IE still doesn't work.

As you might have guessed, I found that Google Chrome works fine with Analyst. So, I'll support Firefox, Opera, and Chrome, but IE is still out.

Miscellaneous Group

Fascinating cookbook

john — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:17:15 +0000

This site, Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook is fascinating:
pleac.sourceforge.net
especially if you are familiar with the old "Perl Cookbook" book.

What's fascinating is that aside from Perl (which was the basis for the whole thing), Groovy is the only other language that is 100% complete in the project, even though it is a latecomer! I find that amazing, given the other languages that are listed.

Miscellaneous Group

Frames and Fields in the Symbol Tables

john — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:24:31 +0000

A recent client requirement got me into ProRefactor to add some more goodies to the symbol tables. The requirement was to find all database fields that could be updated in the UI for all frames in each compile unit.

It wouldn't have been too much work to write a script to walk through the syntax tree to figure this out, but it really seemed like something that should be easily available from the symbol tables. And, it seemed like something that would be easy to add to the tree parser in ProRefactor.

Codeparse group

Groovy is so darn cool

john — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 20:55:44 +0000

I'm using the syntax tree from Proparse+ProRefactor, and the Groovy language, to generate XML data about procedures in an application. I want to generate XML with entries that look like this:

<tableref table='customer' create='true' write='true' delete='true' />

Miscellaneous Group

The Hive will be upgrading!

john — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:15:01 +0000

Our hosting service (WestHost) is putting us into the beta for a major service upgrade.

It is estimated that oehive.org will be upgraded on Thursday, November 15.

Hive group

Milestones

john — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:41:58 +0000

Has anybody else noticed that the Hive now has over 1000 nodes (pages) of content?

As far as milestones go, I think this one is pretty nifty.

Hive group

wait(,) of current-window.

john — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:58:10 +0000

Bugs reported in Proparse sometimes lead me to come up with some pretty funny looking but legal code. The following script displays a couple of strings and then waits for keypress of '(' or ')'.

function wait returns character:
  display "in wait()".
  return "".
end function.

display "hi".
wait().
wait(,) of current-window.

What fun. :)

Codeparse group

Desktop search, code analysis

john — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 05:32:29 +0000

I've been contracted to do some analysis of the client's code. Naturally, the first thing I did was load up all their source into Callgraph, and generate HTML of all their source. :) Now I have something that is preprocessed, formatted, easy to read, and with hyperlinks between calls and procedures. The best part is, plain text searches of this output HTML are more useful and reliable than unprocessed code would be.

That leads me to my topic. I wrote a little find/grep script with generates a nice HTML list with links to files which contain my search string. It works great, but it takes about 10-20 minutes per search. The need for a desktop index/search application is something that I've avoided until right now.

Codeparse group

Almost there

john — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:30:10 +0000

It's been several long weeks of struggling with site hosting configuration, web servers, mail servers, Subversion servers, a few different CMS options, and of course, mostly with Drupal and a number of optional modules. But we're getting there!

Subversion is functional, the groups and mailing lists are functional, and the projects are functional. The site look needs work. The site navigation is contentious! We have a temporary logo, a temporary theme, temporary project categories, tentative navigation categories, and a tentative layout for site navigation in general! I'm confident that, in spite of all that's in flux, the important bits are working: Subversion, project issue tracking, and backups.

Miscellaneous Group