Part II in a series of… several.

In Part I I whined on about static type checking in views. Here I moan about composability of page elements.

Composability of Page Elements

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In work, we’ve been using MonoRail for a while. It’s a C#/.NET web application framework, and it’s very much nicer than ASP.NET, which is what I was using before.

Now I’ve had a bit of experience with it, though, there are things I would definitely change: I want the framework to allow me to compose page elements more easily, and to have stronger type-checking.

The easy one first. I’m going to talk about…

Type checking Continue reading →

Or: What I Did on My Holidays.

My previous home networking setup consisted of a routing firewall, a main file server, and a DMZ’d web server machine (which I’d recently replaced)—and a desktop machine.

I’ve spent the last week, for no very good reason, ripping out most of these physical servers and replacing them with virtual servers running under the Xen virtual machine monitor on my main server.

Much of this time was spent pulling my hair out and struggling over various configuration issues, so I’ve made some notes here about the process I went through, and how to avoid making the same mistakes again.

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I did a quick review of a couple of CMSs for a project at work. I limited myself to looking at a shortlist of 3 Free Software, LAMP systems, the aim being to select a system for a medium-sized website, with mostly static content, which can be updated easily by the customer. Continue reading →

Recently I finished (more or less) converting a Perl/CGI/MySQL website application to use UTF-8 throughout.

The CGI module and the DBI module currently have lousy character encoding support, so I created Perl packages to fix them (relatively) transparently.

Here’s how, and here’s my code:

UPDATE: I’ve just updated the code based on others’ feedback, for which, many thanks. See comments below. (Jan 2007)
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