Month: May 2009

Fixed Aptana RadRails GEM_LIB issue on m…

Fixed Aptana RadRails GEM_LIB issue on mac by linking ‘/Users/{user}/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems’ to ‘/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems’. I can’t blame Aptana for this since it was me who chose to use a tool built by a company that spread itself too thin. I doubt they have more than a couple of engineers working on RadRails which is not enough to provide the necessary quality across the range of environments Aptana is unfortuantely being asked to support.

HTML5 Microdata Fantasy

I haven’t been tracking HTML5 design efforts lately but what’s being proposed for microdata (see posts by Sam Ruby and Shelly Powers) yucked me sufficiently to revisit an old fantasy of mine about HTML (man, what a boring life I have). My fantasy was to add general element/structure definition facility to HTML. It should easily extended to support microdata as well.

The way I envisioned it being used is like this:

<address>
<street>123 ABC St.</street>
<city>Foobar</city>
<state>CA</state><zip>94065</zip>
</address>

which sure is preferable to:

<div item>
<span itemtype="street">123 ABC St.</span>
<span itemtype="city">Foobar</span>
<span itemtype="state">CA</span>
<span itemtype="zip">94065</span>
</div>

As to how a semantic structures and syntactic sugars can be defined, one very arbitrary way could be:

<head>
<def name="address" package="http://test.com/1/mapking"
    params="{{street city state zip}}">
  <div>
    <span>{{street}}</span>
    <span>{{city}}</span>
    <span>{{zip}}</span>
    <span>{{zip}}</span>
  </div>
</def>
</head>

I don’t have any illusions that this fantasy has even a tiny chance of coming true though. Besides, it’s like a beggar asking for caviar when any kind of microdata support will satiate our hunger.

Boss! Boss! The Plane. The Plane!

update:

Here is a more elaborate version of the def element for the bored:

<def name="name" package="http://ting.ly/name"
  attrs="$$first last$$">
  <span>$$first$$ $$middle$$ $$last$$</span>
</def>

which could be used like this:

<name first="Don" last="Park"/>

There are lots of wholes in this sketch which is why it’s a fantasy.

Smiley Profile Image Set

I wish I could use a set of profile images instead of just one and have appropriate one displayed based on text content so that if I put a smiley like 🙂 or 😉 in the text, photo of me smiling or winking will show.

It doesn’t have to be a face, it could be topic/category images. And I don’t see why tweet-specific images couldn’t be displayed since Twitter already sends out image URL with each tweet (inside ‘user’).