A few more happy shiny links from OSCON 2005:

• http://www.whytheluckystiff.net
• http://redhanded.hobix.com
• http://www.onestepback.org
• http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog
• http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/
• http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/oscon2005/

I’m here at OSCON 2005 and I just saw DHH give one of the keynote addresses. Walked the exhibit hall, but not much to see. All the sessions are starting soon, so I have a day full of Ruby and Rails goodness to look forward to. Oh, I am breaking out of the Ruby sessions for one PHP session about Unicode support in PHP 5.0.

One thing that has stuck me so far: Well more than 50% of the thousands of laptops here are Macs.

Update: My unofficial and highly subjective survey says that roughly 70% of the laptops were Macs.

I decided that I’m going to attend OSCON on Thursday, August the 4th. I’m just doing the one day pass thing for $525 because I don’t want to spend $1k to spend all week there.

My primary reason for going is to see David Heinemeier Hansson give his Extracting Rails From Basecamp session. I’ll also be attending most of the Ruby sessions. Anybody wanna go with me?

I may go to the Apple Developer’s Connection Reception that night too, unless there’s some sort of Ruby or Rails related event happening.

The new template still follows the basic pattern of the old template, but is has been updated with better use of fonts and colors. The CSS and markup has also been greatly simplified. The only complicated bit is the new tabbed navigation. I used the CSS Sliding Doors technique from A List Apart and some of the elements from the CSS Sliding Doors 2 article. I chose to leave out the rollovers and I haven’t corrected for the anchor width problem in IE. In any other browser besides IE, the entire tab is clickable. In Internet Exploder you’re stuck with just the text being clickable. The fix for IE requires far too much structural markup for my taste, so I’m leaving it out. After getting all the tabs working, I found that the template started randomly inducing the the IE Peekaboo bug. Thankfully I found that the Peekaboo bug is now easily fixed with the Holly Hack.

What else is new or changed so far?

• The left sidebar menu has been replaced with a horizontal menu bar under the header banner. The links have been styled as buttons and I’ve taken great care to ensure that the language drop-down is vertically centered in every browser that I can get my hands on. Guess which one was the most difficult to get centered? This frees up a lot of real estate for the rest of the content.
• A gender icon is now shown after each person’s name in surname lists and search results windows.
• The surname list is displayed in 5 columns instead of 4.
• Fixed slash escaped characters showing up in the comments.
• The pedigree chart has been completely overhauled. The lines and boxes are made up of simple graphic elements positioned with CSS. I think it looks much better than the square lines and boxes of the old template.
• The tabbed navigation has been replaced with graphical elements. No more ugly square tabs.

That’s all I can think of for now. Stay tuned for part 2 as the work progresses.

You can more information about Retrospect-GDS on the official Retrospect-GDS project page.

Released a new version of Retrospect-GDS earlier today. What’s new you ask?

• Polish language translation by Michal Rudolf
  The addition of the Polish language translation required me to rewrite parts of the language handling functions because they weren’t working well with the UTF-8 or 8859-2 character sets needed for Polish. I also uncovered a problem with gettext when its compiled against certain versions of libiconv. This has caused me some headaches on my development box. Oh yeah, and PHP’s built in htmlentities function doesn’t like some of the 8859-2 or UTF-8 character codes, so I had to stop using it. This means that some pages may not validate as strict XHTML 1.0, but there is no easy workaround for this.
• More CSS cleanup
  
The CSS has been simplified a little bit more. This is an area that is undergoing constant tweaking as I get time.
• Added error handling for unwritable directories
  
There are several directories that need to be writable for Retrospect-GDS to work correctly. Two of them are critical, so if they are not writable you will get a blank page when trying to run the program. I’ve added some code to make sure these directories are writable. If they aren’t, then Retrospect-GDS will die with an error message instead of just choking and giving no output.