I’m currently working on a couple of projects, as usual too many at once but one is coming along at a reasonable pace, so atleast that’s something.

I hope to spend more time on the AJAX framework I’ve been developing, well it’s more of a framework + design pattern combined and focuses on web applications completely produced from a single page. Basically you navigate to the site and every navigation within that site from then on is handled using AJAX, there is no loading of a new page. Unless of course the user forces a page reload, in which case the session state defines what the user was seeing before and recreates the page as it was before. This also means that during the current session the user never loses their state. It’s based on PHP for the server side scripting and it’s something I started a couple of years ago and keep chipping away at it now and then.

So far I’ve got login functionality, allowing users to register an account, login/logout and viewing public/private “screens” depending on whether they are logged in or not.

I’ve not got anything online as yet, only running on my private RedHat 9 LAMP server.

I was getting bored with the old website colours, so I went for black. Well I like it.

Just catching up on a whole backlog of GeekBrief.TV episodes, so I’m overdosing on new tech, but after loading more wood on a skip and stripping wallpaper it’s a nice chance to geek-out for a bit. I’ll probably listen to the final podcast from LUGRadio in the morning, it’s a real shame they’re packing it all in just a couple of months after I discovered it.

Hmmm… 3 monitors is very tempting, GuildWars on 2 monitors is great apart from having your character (and view) split in half…

The 8 cu.yd. skip I ordered arrived this morning, and I about filled a third of it when I got home this evening, so hopefully I’ll have it full of rubbish by the end of tomorrow. I’ll try and get some more photos of what I’ve done to the garden on here and hopefully catch up with where I am so far.

But for now, after trawling through Abigail’s latest photos, here’s a pick of my favourites.

Back in May I decided enough was enough and I finally started ripping the garden to shreds. Since installing the NextGEN image gallery plugin in WordPress, I thought this might be a good chance to try it out.

Here’s the reason I’ve not posted in such a long time, I was held hostage by a very short person who had me in a beard-lock. Luckily I managed to escape fairly unscathed. What’s been happening? Lots of stuff… mostly stinky nappies. Abigail was born at 6.54am on 17th October 2007, weighing 6lbs 10oz. Of course she will be 16 weeks old this wednesday or 4 months in a couple of weeks. Time has certainly flown and she’s changing noticably at a fair old rate.

Nevertheless I’ve managed to spend a little time on some other projects, working on AJAX stuff and a hex map editor mostly of late, the latter using the free download of the Visual Studio C++ 2008 Express Edition. It’s not bad for free, and there’s plenty of freedom to do as you please with a finished application, even for commercial use. I’m still not convinced by the C++/Visual Basic dumbed down hybrid that is C#, it’s too Microsoft specific for my liking, even with Mono bringing .Net to Linux. What’s wrong with C/C++? Nothing, that’s what :)

Drupal has been sucking up a good chunk of my time too, as I’ve been tinkering with a gaming resources website idea. Drupal is pretty good, when you finally discover how things are done, but getting it to work just right is a real art form. It’s probably the same with most CMS software, they can’t make it absolutely configurable to satisfy everyone’s needs. But I’m certainly having more fun with it than I was with Joomla, that just seemed to waste my time. I’m not saying it’s no good for anyone, just that I couldn’t get my head round it.

Completed the medium level on Guitar Hero III so far, and 3 songs into the first set on Hard level, them 5 buttons are just nuts.