I have embedded a youtube video of Mother of Perl in the general pages under Videos.

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These pages have been redesigned to rely more on CSS (cascading style sheets) for the page layout. The web pages were all laid out using the HTML tables. CSS, now more mature than when I originally designed these pages eight years ago, is very convenient for building page design. But I'm new to this layout method, and so you will occasionally find pages with text on top of text, a "feature" of CSS.

I found the O'Reilly book, Cascading Style Sheets by Eric Meyer, invaluable. But I was inspired by the book CSS, DHTML & AJAX by Jason Cranford Teague.

I have also revised the Table of Contents (on the left column) so that it better reflects the heirarchy of the pages. In fact, that was a complete rewrite to an object oriented programming style. I will be doing more with the those routines soon. (I want them to generate tooltip popups with the description of the pages.)

The Blog (formally called the Journal) is still the antique Perl based engine Blosxom, but with a few new plugins, including blox and a few to enable using my table of contents module.

Still to be done: the Photos section which entirely generated on the fly by some of my Perl code.

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Thanks to Rachel S. of NOAA/CCOM, I have become more than just a lurker on Facebook. Jon Udell's FriendFeed link to his blog has inspired me to do the same.

Gretchen Forbes has been curious about Facebook and blogs since the public relations folks at the University of New Hampshire are recommending using these new Web services to connect with students and potential students. (Gretchen is my wife and work for the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture.)

So far, (a few days), I have had fun connecting with friends in a different way. The majority of Facebook friends are in their twenties and thirties, but there are some notable exceptions. Jon Udell, is over thirty, I believe, but it is hard to tell.

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I have written and uploaded my discussion of the hydrographic work that I did with Mother of Perl, and the tools that I used to do that work. The source code is part of the page set.

I still need to document my tide work and my data acquisition software.

The URL is http://www.maperl.com/Hydrography

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The pages describing hydrographic work on Mother of Perl are progressing, slowly.

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Here is a little script to facilitate posting my blogs:

#!/bin/bash
file="$1"
pwd=`pwd`
category=`echo $pwd | sed 's/^.*\///'`
destbase="Wroninhouse@copper.mv.com:Journal/"
echo -n "Category? [$category] "
read response
if [ ${#response} -gt 0 ]
	then	command="scp $file $destbase$response"
	else	command="scp $file $destbase$category"
fi
exec $command

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I've had my Nokia N800 Linux handheld computer for about a month now. The thrill of having a Linux handheld doesn't dominate my evaluation (as much as the first week). I had my ups and downs including believing that it had totally bricked. I flashed a newer version of the 2007 distribution, and it came back to life, in fact worked without flaws in performance.

Once the flashing was no longer as scary as I thought, in other words, once I used the Linux version of the flasher rather than the Windows dumbed down version, I decided to see what the 2008 version looked like. After all, I plan to port Xtide and I should do that for the newest OS.

Wow! The 2008 OS is much more usable than the 2007. First the GUI interface is more flexible, the default fonts and application screen layouts are more readable (some apps went overboard in making their interface finger based rather than stylus based). I haven't had a single OS hiccup. Some apps and libraries haven't yet been ported to OS2008, but that is minor.

My only complaint so far is in the lack of quality applications. The PID apps are weak when compared to the Palm Pilot. The OS2008 PID apps are now ports of GPE applications, a great improvement, but not enough to sell the N800 as a PID. There is only the most trivial of calculator apps. I use RPM on the Palm. I carry my Palm just for that.. and Xtide.. and a decent address book, phone dialer.

On the subject of Xtide: I have installed the scratchbox development environment on my laptop. I've the cross compilation toolchain. I've compiled and downloaded the example "hello, world" application. I've download Xtide sources and gave it a first try. Missing some libraries, it seems. So, I'll track those down and compile them. My first goal is to compile the non-GUI version of Xtide (just generates text tide and current tables). Since the Maemo (Nokia) GUI environment is different from the simple X11 environment, I'll need to design and build a GUI more appropriate to the Nokia. I hate GUI programming, so the text based version may be as far as I go.

A few weeks until I'm on Mother of Perl so I'll put this off until I'm swinging on my mooring in Tortola.

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I have included the Blog nickname "SVMOP" (Sailing Vessel Mother of Perl) and the Subtopic name/path in the title of each article so that RSS reader previews can show where the article came from. I only subscribe to three RSS feeds, but until I actually read the article, I don't know where the article is coming from, which by the way, might influence how urgent I might take the posting. Not that I don't love all the stuff I read.. heh, heh!

If anyone finds these article titles obnoxious, let me know.

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I am planning on using this space to log my software development notes as well as anything else I might have use for. This style and use of blogging has been inspired by Kurt Schwehr's blog.

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I don't know if anyone is still doing any Bloxsom development, but I'm using it because it's Perl, a language I'm familiar with. I have had to hack plugins to get it to do what I want. No problem.

It would have been easier for me to be blogging remotely with WordPress, but that system relies on mysql and the server doesn't have it. Too bad.

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