Yesterday, instead of my usual two train commute to work I ended up catching four. One to Central, then another to North Strathfield, then all stations to Eastwood and finally a single hop to Epping. Why? Because a bus had run driverless off the road and down the embankment just beyond Epping station. See the mobile phone photo on the right.

A messy start to an otherwise good day that saw me gain satisfaction from programming and cooking Japanese food. It's a cuisine that feels healthy to eat and tastes good too.

I see Drupal are holding an Asia Pacific Conference in conjunction with CeBIT. Not certain if I'll go or not. We have a big stand at CeBIT, but I'm seriously thinking of dropping Drupal for my own CMS. Not sure if the latest versions are supported on this webhost, though I haven't bothered looking yet.

Can't wait for the Easter break. Exhausted for no good reason this week.

Sometimes you may want to allow a user to add extra fields to a form on the fly. For example, an online résume form will have space for previous employment. A jobseeker fresh out of school may only have had one other job whereas a more experienced may have worked for eleven different organisations. Do you provide a form with eleven previous employment fields? Then what happens when the next applicant has had twelve jobs?

The more blank fields you put on your form the more cluttered it becomes. What you want is a way to add blank fields to the form as required.

You could use a server-side script which would generate the fields for you. However, each time you require an extra field the entire form must be submitted. An alternative is to use client-side Javascript to modify the DOM. The jQuery Javascript library makes this even easier. An example of using jQuery is demonstrated below.

I submitted a report today on building an online community on my workplace intranet. After weeks of mulling it over, the four factors in building a successful online community suddenly came to me last night. I label them CANS.

• Contributing - what type of content and tools (blogs, wikis, galleries, discussion etc) should be part of an online community and how can users contribute and collaborate?
• Awareness - how can you ensure that users are kept aware of the latest news and relevant changes? RSS feeds, email digests, personalised home pages and lists of new or changed pages are some of the methods that can be used.
• Navigation - how should the community be structured so that users can easily locate relevant content? What are the differences between handling "static content" such as procedures and policy in contrast to dynamic content like news, events and discussion?
• Systems - what are the best tools for building an online community?

I'm impressed by some of Google's offerings as tools for building an online community and, appropriately enough, wrote my report using Google's online wordprocessor. Staying up until 4am writing the report also gave me the opportunity to view changes in the iGoogle theme that I usually don't see!

I wrote in an earlier post that I have been playing around with Google Gadgets. One place you can use these gadgets is on personalised iGoogle pages. I shall not delve into the privacy and security pros and cons of iGoogle and personalisation now, because I'm feeling strangely inspired by iGoogle's Teahouse theme. This Japanese inspired theme features the daily routine of a fox character outside his teahouse and orchard by a pond.

The Teahouse theme's gentle simplicity is seductively relaxing. I have always loved cartoons like that, especially lantern lit night scenes which hint at life after sundown. Places where the night air is pleasant and mosquitos never annoy you. I would love to be that fox staring into the night sky with his telescope, though mine is red and the skies are obscured by the city lights. It is winter now, not the endless summer of the teahouse. Time for snuggling under the doona, for hot fires and warm drinks.

Roland Harvey is another who's cartoon world I wished to experience. I treasured his Australiana Christmas card scenes, regretted posting the cards away. I miss them now that they are no longer sold.

Memories are stirred by the teahouse. I recall our two week trip to Japan last year. Walking through the lantern lit Kenroku-en gardens in Kanazawa during the cherry blossom festival. Sipping green tea on a tatami mat and gazing across a gorgeous garden and pond in the Samurai district of that same city. Hot baths at the end of the day at the ryokan, then laying down on the unrolled futon, surprisingly comfortable, breathing in the scent of the straw floor.

I've been playing around with some of Google's APIs lately, especially their Gadgets. These are mini web applications that can plug into iGoogle and other pages and are written in XML and JavaScript (although they may reference more sophisticatedprograms written in other languages). So far I have written one that shows the CSIRO media release RSS feed and another that lists CSIRO Podcasts. They aren't finished, so I won't link to them yet.

Google make it pretty easy and I am looking forward to making some other gadgets. Last weekend I also borrowed a book called Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth by Martin C Brown. It's a little old now, but I feel inspired to try writing some code to interact with those applications. Something useful for travel.

Last night's Air Crash Investigations program about the Kegworth Boeing 737-400 crash contained a number of lessons which could be applied more broadly across many areas of work. The causes of the crash can be summarised as:

1. An engine with a design flaw that cause the fan blades to shatter above a certain altitude. The engine has not been flight tested during development.
2. A lack of pilot training on the aircraft. The 737-400 had a number of changes over previous models.
3. Instrumentation that was difficult to read.
4. Crew and passengers trusted the pilots abilities to the extend that they did not attempt to convey observations thatmay have assisted the pilots in making the correct decision.
5. Distraction caused by an interruptions at a critical moment.

The lessons, as I see them, are:

Yesterday I had to dust-off my frameset and Javascript knowledge for a project we are undertaking at work. We are putting together a DVD where the navigation system is in HTML while the contents may be HTML pages, PDF's, Flash animations or movies. Now, most of my coding is server-side scripts, primarily in PHP, but there is no such luxury for this DVD.

It was decided that framesets would be used to provide a navigation banner at the top of the page while the contents load into a frame below. I thought frames had gone out with HTML 4, but apparently there is a DTD:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">

The design brief was to provide a link to the home page and one to the current "section" page in the top navigatin frame. Each section of the DVD exists in a directory one level down from root, simplifying things greatly. The navigation frame would look like:

HOME » Section  

Originally it was proposed that a separate navigation frame file be created for each section. I thought it would be more elegant (and easier to update) if we used a single navigation file and used Javascript to automatically generate the navigation links based upon the current section directory that the main content is loaded from. What I wrote looked like:

I got tired of the very plain home page for allrite.net and decided to give it a refresh on Sunday. I wanted to improve the visual appearance and provide links to more content within the site.

After trying, without luck, to get code using the PEAR::XML_RSS package to extract RSS feeds (must be missing some PHP libraries in my host's installation), I went with a direct database extraction of this blog, cached to reduce the load. 

The banner image on the home page is of sunrise over Sydney Airport.