Another fun project
last update: 03/21 @ 17:59

I really enjoyed using my hands and some tools to help Taylor build a bed platform in her van. She and Nanette are touring the southwest now; expected back around here in about 10 days. It was great to see something physical take shape in the real world. And Taylor sounds like she’s happy with it — it’s always nice to have positive reinforcement.

My latest project highlights how well my pre-retirement jobs fit my interests. I’m very happy to be retired, and recommend it to almost everyone (I do think there is a lot of learning and growing to be gained by the variety of jobs, bosses and organizations you can experience over a few working decades).

There is a subtle update to this blog as a result of that project. I’ve given thought to adding topic tags here for a while. And there is a Blosxom plugin to do that, but I’ve also been interested in the buzz around Rust lately, and thought it would be fun to learn a new language.

So at the bottom of blog posts now is a little “Topics” section. As part of that, I realized the monthly list had grown pretty long (over 1500 posts over 22 years is a fair amount). So on the left are two HTML details sections: one with the monthly list and one with the new topic list. Finally, I was able to replace a JavaScript library that I was only using for help handling the comments. It was a large file with lots of cool functionality, that I was barely using. JavaScript has progressed to more standardized support; so I think my “fetch” replacement for “AJAX” will serve me well.

That JavaScript file was from the early 2000s, as is Blosxom, the blog engine I use here. As a happily retired person, I appreciate the wisdom and experience which comes with age and don’t want to discount age just because there are newer, younger things out there. But another reason I wanted to use Rust for my tagging project is that Perl is slowly being diminished. When I started working on the integration between Rust and Perl, I realized my workstation didn’t have some of the needed Perl modules and getting them was not going to be super quick and easy. I just pushed along with “development in production” — something I would have had to frown on in my prior, tech managerial jobs.

I am giving a little bit of thought to rewriting Blosxom in Rust so I don’t run into an update to our servers that makes it hard to get the required Perl modules installed. I do have to say that Blosxom is very flexible and does all I need it to do (if I do rewrite it, it won’t be that cool and flexible). And I was really pleased to be able to graft in my updates and still benefit from the core reverse chronological ordering of posts. Also, with a little manipulation of the URL, topic tags restricted to dates work as well (just as they do by default): Alexandria vs. Alexandria in March, 2026. It was cool to me that both those just worked as expected.

I won’t build a full Rust-based web server if I go down that path. I’m happy with the wisdom and experience that comes with GGI, which has been a part of the web since almost it’s very first days. There are more modern ways to build out interactivity, but I know I don’t need that level of sophistication or performance for my little world. I happened upon this post recently about performance of Rust and CGI.

If you’re still reading this, I will also say that I was in no rush and wanted to learn a bit about this new language. So, I chose not to use AI for this at all. I expect AI would have been happy to help me out, would have been much quicker and likely would have produced more solid code. But I would not have learned as much about what makes Rust work and how it differs from other languages. This NYT article about AI assisted programming was an interesting read as I worked on this.

And this fun project has been a throwback, in some ways, to the very first work I did on the web for AARP’s website. In those early days, the AARP IT leadership was all about supported software. Our DEC servers came with a C compiler from DEC so I was told I had to use C for our web interactivity even though Perl was around then (because open source Perl was not commercially supported). Perl, being a higher level language was much safer for public interaction than homegrown C code, and DEC was certainly not going to support my crazy programs. (Eventually, we convinced them that Perl was a better fit.)

As a reward for anyone reading this far: my tagging code.

I expect I’ll slowly go back over some of those 1500+ entries and add some appropriate tags. But for now, back to regular blogging about life rather than reflecting on blogging itself :)

Agile Software Development
last update: 08/09 @ 09:58

Sorry a bit off the normal family topic…

My summation of Agile Software development. I don’t see any results when I search for that on the web so I’m going to claim ownership of it.

And I’ll quote myself again from a short presentation I’m putting together for work:

“It’s always hard to find the sweet spot between over planning yourself into a box and flying by the seat of your pants into a cliff. We try to make sure we know where we’re generally going and what next one or two steps are most likely to get us closer.”

I think it applies more generally than just software development: when remodeling, you don’t need to choose the colors before the drywall is up.

Back to normal family travel and milestones…

New Geek Fun…
last update: 01/26 @ 15:20

I decided I needed to play with AJAX a bit after seeing all the fun other folks are having with that on their web sites. Generally speaking, I’m not a big fan of eye-candy for the sake of eye-candy.

But this seems like a good use of AJAX to me: having the comments and comment form for each entry in this page seems redundant and wasteful of page real estate (and perhaps of bandwidth, though that’s less of an issue as all the regular visitors are now on broadband connections). However, loading a page just to see the comments and form seems less than ideal.

So, now the comments will (should) reveal in-line on this page. I’m not completely sold on this, so let me know if you find it difficult or confusing; it’s easy to change back.

And for anyone interested, it was also pretty easy to set up: I’m using Scriptaculous (and Prototype) as the AJAX libraries. Actually, Scriptaculous is providing the reveal effect, Prototype is the real AJAX library doing the work. So I put those files in place and referenced them from the main blog page template. Then I Wrote a couple javascript functions to use the libraries to get and display my contents. Then I just needed to create a new “flavour” (that’s what Blosxom calls styles of content or sets of templates) to display the comments and form as a snippet of HTML.

The couple of “tricks” I tracked down to make it work reasonably well: set display to none for the container (not the CSS for the container) that holds the AJAX content (the comments in my case) and let Scriptaculous’s effect make it visible. And tell the web server (Apache, of course in my case) to send some no cache headers on the pages and page snippets involved in the AJAX content — otherwise they will be cached and not reflect updates as they should.

Of course, when I hear from folks that this really isn’t working, I’ll try to get it working better and update the tricks here. Perhaps for extra credit I’ll replace the comment submission button with an AJAX post to keep everything in this page…

The only downside I see to this approach is that I don’t expect it plays well for screen readers or for search engines. We’ll see if I have any time to make the comments more accessible for those two specialized types of visitors.

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