Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

to catalana!! Have a good one!

Back to the bit mines

I've spent the last three days getting back into work after a delightful and musical Baycon. It's a slightly rough transition, but as I told my boss mr_kurt (also a fan) it's something of a vacation by comparison.

In any case, I spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and this morning preparing a slide presentation for the Patent Review Committee -- that's the group that meets every couple of months to decide which of our hare-brained ideas are worth throwing a large pile of lawyers and money at. I still don't know if this particular idea passed the test, but I'm feeling pretty good about it.

The other interesting feature of this presentation is that I did it in HTML instead of OpenOffice, using the HTML slidy package from the W3C's collection of slide show tools. It was distinctly rough around the edges; fortunately I'm a quick study. I may try S5 for the next one, but I definitely like being able to develop a presentation entirely in a text editor. On the flip side, Firefox seriously sucks as a presentation tool on the Mac -- there's no full-screen mode, so you can't cover up the menu bar and the dock. Luckily it didn't seem to matter.

I'm starting to give serious thought to using Javascript on the website, especially for highly-interactive stuff like setlist and playlist management. My current setlist-maker is a Perl script that works well enough, but only on a fast network inside the firewall.