A Day Lost to Nerdiness

Posted on 2006/05/28 03:40:05 (May 2006).

[Saturday 27th May]
Today was a fairly uneventful day. Chie needed to go into work to make up her hours. This gave me the opportunity for a giant festival of nerdiness, a whole day on the computer with no threat of having to be dragged out to go shopping, etc.

When Chie returned home in the evening, we decided to make okonomiyaki using our denki guriru nabe (hot plate thingy), set up on the table in the lounge (it is nice to cook somewhere other than the kitchen for a change!).

So to return to the daytime nerdiness extravaganza... Apologies in advance, this is going to be a very boring entry - non computery types may want to stop reading here!

I worked on my travel pages a fair bit, although the changes now are more like refinements so it is hard to see the "delta" really. In order to make these pages I've been developing an ASP/XSLT based system for building them. Perhaps one day I might consider releasing it to the world, but unfortunately that sort of thing always requires a lot of extra work to improve usability (a polite way to say idiot proofing!) which isn't particularly gratifying development effort. Still though, I can see a few other interesting applications of this sort of map/location based thingy - perhaps a map showing where all the 'Maison users are, or a pub/bar/restaurant guide for somewhere like Tokyo or London. Realistically though, these sorts of projects (particularly the latter) are really time consuming, and will probably remain on a vague "to do" list somewhere, without anything ever really getting done.

Oh and I spent a bit of time trying to sort out the backup of my pictures archive. Over the years I've had a digital camera, I've stored the pictures on a number of different hard drives in a number of different PCs and laptops. I now have a single external hard drive with all the pictures on, but I've achieved this by basically dumping the entire contents of all the other hard drives into one place. So there's loads of overlap and duplication and it is a bit of a mess. There are lots of instances where I've got two or more copies of the same set of images, and one set might be the full size originals, one set might be scaled down versions, and yet another one might have comments added. I wanted to make a single "master" directory tree today, but it was somewhat daunting as always so it ended up a bit of a half-hearted job.

The other thing I attempted to do was write a simple program that could monitor and back up a web site (i.e. the 'Maison) using FTP - the idea being you'd run it once a day, it would go and check for changes, and just download any new or updated files. Sort of a version control system for the web. I got some way with this, and for the sake of my education attempted to write it in C#. For the time being though it is very much a work in progress. I'm not sure I really liked the way the .Net FTP client worked, and so maybe I might beed to start again at some point with good old C++.

As usual I am impressed by the way you make it sound all so easy... Well, it is your job after all, but still. Good idea about the backup program, it ight be hard to get it started with the first backup (it will take ages) but after that it should be painless to have it running... Nice stuff!

Posted by Lox at 2006/05/28 07:30:25.

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