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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Thursday 8 April 2004 (Day View)

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08.04.2004 – Thursday 8 April – Starsky, Hutch & XSLT Powered Image Viewing

• I was supposed to go to university today, but woke up half an hour after the train went. I did some more work on my XOR encrypting and decrypting “Systems Interface Programming” assignment, getting a few menus and stuff working, and then got sick of it. It would be so much easier if I knew C – obviously. Every little thing takes ages because I don’t know how to do it.

Evening

• Having got sick of both my assignment and sitting in front of my computer, I decided to head into town, get some dinner, and see a movie. I had a rice curry thing from a shop in Indooroopilly, went and bought some chocolate, browsed through a stereo and television shop, and saw “Starsky & Hutch”. The price has gone up fifty cents – it now costs $6.50 for University of Queensland students, and we don’t even get that on Saturday evenings. I guess I can’t complain – that’s still considerably cheaper than what everyone else has to pay. The movie was fun, and quite full. There was a big queue waiting to see it, and it was shown in one of the larger cinemas.

2:11am

• I guess I should go to bed. I’ve been working on making an XSLT powered image viewer for use on photo CDs. It seems to work. Currently it reads information from an XML file (which I generate using ACDSee) including descriptions, filenames and various other bits of information about the images, and creates an HTML page showing thumbnails of the images and a listing of the description of each image. JavaScript is then used to show an auto-sized pop-up window with the full-size image and various bits of information about it. It all works fine with my version of Internet Explorer, although it uses a phenomenal amount of memory, mainly because the thumbnails aren’t actually thumbnails – they’re just full-size images sized in the HTML to a thumbnail size.
  Mozilla and its kin seem unable to use JavaScript from a client-side XSLT page generated from XML – which doesn’t surprise me but is annoying. This means the pop-up full-size image viewer doesn’t work, but it degrades gracefully, just showing the image in the browser instead. Mozilla doesn’t handle the thumbnails as well as Internet Explorer either – they work but it’s slow to load them, and they change slightly the first time the mouse is hovered over them, but other than that, it seems to work fine in both major browsers so should work on virtually any PC. I might try to test it out on Tonya’s computer tomorrow and see if it works on that. She’s running Windows 98, with a lot less RAM than me. Another interesting test would be the Solaris machines at uni – I might try it on them before I declare it complete and make some CDs. Hmm, come to think, I probably can’t because they don’t have CD drives. Maybe I can use it via the Windows machines somehow; I’ll have to think about it. Anyway, I’d better get to bed or I’ll wake up tomorrow evening and waste all the morning sleeping again.

Comment by keight – Saturday 10 April 2004, 4:24 PM

  Did you go to the 8:40 session of Starsky and Hutch, perchance?

Comment by Ned – Sunday 11 April 2004, 2:54 PM

  I don’t recall – but it was probably a bit earlier than that.

Comment by Ned – Sunday 11 April 2004, 10:22 PM

  Correction: It was the 8:40 PM viewing.

Comment by kathryn – Sunday 2 January 2005, 4:37 PM

  random note this is my birthday and i remember seeing Starsky and Hutch and being dissapointed with the 80's humour.

Comment by Ned – Monday 3 January 2005, 2:26 AM

  Happy Birthday!