random twidlebits

peyton came home from school with a bead necklace today. i asked where he got it, and he said he got it from this girl. i asked if she was his teacher, and he said no she was a little girl in his class and that she loved him a lot. i asked him if he loved her, and he said he wasn't sure but that he liked the necklace. nice.

i decided to get in on the brilliant button craze and did up a few KDE-related brilliant buttons and stole^Hborrowed some more from other KDE people's pages. i didn't want to litter my home page with a whole row of the little buggers, as that always strikes me as somewhat tacky. so i decided i'd put just one in the top navigation bar. but which one? so i decided i'd add in a little image rotator thingy to the framework i use to run my site.

the framework is a home-brewed content manager, document manager, shopping cart, FAQ, blah blah dynamic, modular PHP app that a friend and i have hacked on here and there over the last couple of years as we needed such things for clients and our own work. at the time we started there weren't any really nice open source CMS's out there, and even now most of them tend to be a bit "big" for our needs. we wrote something that was simple, highly componentized, has exactly what we need yet easily extensible.

adding the image rotator meant adding an extension to the document management library. 21 lines of code (not counting whitespace) of error-checking code in the lib, and 6 lines of code in my website template and voila ... rotating brilliant buttons with URL links. adding or removing buttons is a simple matter of adding or removing files from the Brilliants folder via the admin web interface. less than 15 minutes of work, and worked first go. it's nice when things Just Work(tm).

kicker, on the other hand ..... ;) Stefan added support for dragging applets between panels, but it's still a bit buggy. we discussed some options and have decided that left mouse button dragging will work like middle mouse button dragging unless you leave the panel at which point it becomes a regular DnD maneuver. throw the mouse back into the panel and voila, old-skool move. Stefan's whipped up a proof of concept. i think it'll be good. but please ignore the semi-rough state of applet dragging in HEAD for a few days.

there are also a few annoyances left in the taskbar which i'll get to this weekend.

i have an outer ear infection in the left ear which is pissing me off. it doesn't hurt per say, it's just like i have a perma-clogged ear. bizarrely, mahlah has the same thing in the same ear. cue twilight zone music

oh, and I Heart Huckabees. wow. damn. "i'm still geeking out over it." (kudos if you get the movie reference)