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Sara Cammeresi

Administrivia —

Due to a semi-lack of things to do tonight, I decided to add a preview button to the comment form. I also massively unstupified the HTML being output from the comment page code. It's now standards compliant, and the form is also now accessible to people with disabilities! I'm not sure why the spacing between the labels and the text fields is so large though.

And after a bit more tweaking, everything should now be XHTML 1.1 compliant, except for some of the older content, of course.

posted by Sid at 00.27 / 310     [ Comments: 3 ]

My brain hurts —

My officemate and I got pulled into another project at work temporarily in order to help build some database stuff, but we've ended up making some pretty massive changes to the schema so that it can handle all of the little business rules we keep uncovering. The basic idea is that we have students who are in sections of courses, and the sections have books which have assignments, and the students (who are blind or so forth) want those assignments converted into a format they can use by some date. Not too bad, but then throw in a few business rules.

• students need to be able to drop classes
• if a student drops a class, we want to finish converting that book anyway
• students don't want some books converted at all
• students have a preferred format, but they might want some assignments in a different format

Now, the proposition of figuring out what we need to convert into what formats and by what date (basically the central report of the system) becomes really hard to generate. Really, really, really hard. So hard, in fact, that it took my officemate and I thinking as hard as we could for most of the day today to figure out how to do it, but eventually, we figured out how. Ow. In case you're wondering what the deal is with _all_of_the_underscores_, that's because the tables were generated from an XML file by way of a separate system I wrote.

It occurs to me that the completed check could be moved up earlier in the process to reduce the size of some of the intermediate result sets. Also, the dual except thing bothers me, but I think that's clearer in intent than doing set subtraction manually with full joins.

posted by Sid at 17.36 / 025     [ Comments: 1 ]

Masthead rotation —

Time to rotate the masthead. Today, we replace Elvish with Japanese （日本語）. If you see boxes, you don't have the correct font installed, so just click to see a graphic instead (or install the fonts; they're on your Windows CD). It will also help if you're using a superior web browser like Opera instead of an inferior one like IE, which doesn't support the <abbr> tag.

posted by Sid at 09.14 / 676     [ Comments: 1 ]