ItsAllEasy

Thank you Benjamin for your amazing strength and for the love you brought my friend.

We managed to make some headway last night laying the ceramic tile.  My hands still have a bit of stubborn tile adhesive on them as I type.  The base-boards were pulled as soon as I got home from work.  I’d planned on going to a coffee shop and working on my presentation, but I figured I could do that Sat and Sun.

Once the baseboards were up, it was time to think about where to lay the first tile…and how the others would fall around it.  This took a long time.  Its tough trying to map out the tile layout to get as many full tiles as possible (and keep them straight!).  We finally decided to snap a chalk-line and I started tiling while Aislinn went out to get more stuff for showing the house (vases, borrowed rug, paintings…stuff we just don’t have, but make the house show better :)).

I managed 30 tiles before she got back.  I only had 4 that had to be modified.  2 just needed a corner chopped…and 2 needed a notch.  The notches sucked.  I didn’t want to drag out the wetsaw with the boys sleeping (it was 10 by now).  I managed to chop the corner off of both…and ‘liquid-naile’d them both back on.  It worked out well.

So now I’m here at the coffee shop working on my presentation.  (And blogging a little).

Am I the only one that can’t stand the way the Password Manager doesn’t let you tab to the other buttons? Pisses me off…

I may not have emphasized enough in the previous post how much I really like what Terrence Parr is doing with antlr and StringTemplate. This article (especially the linked article on Enforcing Strict Model View Separation in Template Engines) really made me realize some bad things about the template engine I was starting to write (specifically around the conditionals). So, now the conditionals look something like this:

#user_name .boss:not($user.boss){
display:remove;
}
#user_name .boss{
content:$boss_salutation;
}
#favorite_song:if($user.favoriteSong){
content: $user.favoriteSong;
}
#favorite_song:not($user.favoriteSong){
content: $unknown_song;
}
/* shorthand for the above 2 selectors…if first arg is empty, second is used as default */
#favorite_song{
content: $user.favoriteSong, $unknown_song;
}

And the StringTemplate actually has me wondering whether I should write a new one at all. I think Stitch (note to self…probably should get a name…ctrlTemplate?) still adds some value over what StringTemplate does, by fully separating the markup from the rules about how the data is to be inserted into the document…and then the rules file being in a format that is VERY similar to css, a format most web designers should be very familiar with. Then the markup can change quite drastically so long as the ‘css’ rules still match (mostly ids and class selectors), and the rule file need not change. I do think that if/when the tempates have a server-side ‘compiled’ version, its very possible it will use StringTemplate.

I was thinking that the ctrlTemplate could also potentially operate on tree structures too (not just xml/html/xhtml). Like, for example, an AST tree result from a parser of some sort. Just a thought.