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Get the Website Right!

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Open Source Software, the web, Coding, Blogs, e-commerce on September 22, 2008 at 9:04 am

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I blogged a while back about the exciting(!) purchase of my new Dyson http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/09/09/hoovering-up-engineering/

I’ve just had an email asking me to write a review. Being an opinionated guy and someone who values user reviews I thought I would just type a quick “yes it works” at http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/406848/DYSON-DC14-ANIMAL. but what do I get?

“Done, but with errors on the page” and no chance of making an entry.

I’m using ie 6.0.2800 - if it don’t work with that what does it work with? More to the point what did the designers check it with?

The email is from a  no reply address and I’ve got better things to do then spend 20 mins trying to get a contact address from the the website so the world will have to live without my opinion. Anyway it may explain why there are so few user reviews on the Comet site!

Stop press on that - I have tried to track down a contact and on their “contact” page I noticed “we recommend using the Firefox web browser ” I’m cool with OSS but things do need to work with MS stuff if you want to maximised your audience!

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Programmers Documentation - the doxygen way

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Open Source Software, QT, Coding on September 16, 2008 at 11:03 am

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I have been producing some programmers documentation. The shrieks of horror (or snores of boredom) that normally accompany such a statement have been mercifully short. I have been using doxygen http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/ (more info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxygen). It took a bit of fiddling to get it set up (and it needs a bit more, I seem to have to hard code the directories rather than go relative from the working dir - any help always appreciated!) but seems OK now.
Things I’d recommend are enabling the pre-processor, disabling all output except HTML (until you have a good set up - you may want some other output at the end). If you’re using QT add moc_*.* to the exclusion list. If you’re using SVN excluding the svn dirs is a good idea (I think I did this but I can’t remember how!), don’t hide undocumented classes / methods, add links to the actual code (source browser) and use the built in class diagram generator. Some of this you can do from the wizard. The excludes & the pre-processor I did from expert mode, I also set the “strip from path”, turned on all the extract all / private/ static / local turned off strip code comments, requested an alphabetical index (you can’t have too much info can you?). A nose around the human readable config file is also a good idea just to give you a better idea of what can be done. Whether you choose plain HTML or frames is up to you, frames look better but my ie is set to disable active content so it is not so good to use.
Anyway, there is a certain satisfaction in generating stuff you can click on and see diagrams in without having to type it all in. The whole process is much more like the program / build / test sequence that developers are used to than the boring old type it & proof read it methods of old.
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Greenbelt - animation software, techies and luvies

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Open Source Software, faith, Blogs on August 29, 2008 at 9:57 am

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Well I’m back from http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/ and a fine time I had. although it is an arts festival I’m always interested in the technology. They have a venue called The Tank where some splendid guys set up a load of PC’s as an internet cafe, you can pay to get your phone charged and they run workshops on presentation skills, web site building, pod casting … I didn’t see a blogging workshop this year (as you can tell from my lack of blogging skills!) but I have attended the presentation stuff in the past and this year I made a stop frame animation film with my son. They are usually keen to push OSS but the stop frame stuff was IBM’s I believe. My son uses Monkey Jam at home which seems to do the job!
I have to say that the efficiency with which The Tank runs implies the techies are more organised than the luvies but as I’m keen not to differentiate between “creatives” and “techies” maybe I hadn’t better push that ;-)

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