Geocities site cleanup

Haven't been able to get browsers other than IE, Gecko (Mozilla, Galeon, and recent Netscape), and NN4.5 to work with object tags for Java applets. In particular, Konqueror resisted, and presumably that means Safari would too. So I've added some more Javascript fu to put in an applet tag as a fallback. Netscape/Gecko users will get their page first, all the rest will have to wait for the whole script loading and execution, I'm, afraid.

Geocities site cleanup

With a little bit of JavaScript tinkering, I've managed to get applets to work for NN7 and 4.5 as well as IE6. Intermediate NN versions and some earlier IE versions may work; the two families require completely different sets of attributes on an <object> tag - what works on IE drops through to the included text on NN, and what works on NN leaves an applet sized blank in the IE rendering.

I've also adjusted the other bits of script in an attempt to get closer to XHTML1.0 strict validation - but since the redirection service for pointing ravnaandtines.com at the GeoCities URL uses frames, I'm stuck with the non-compliant target=_top" attribute on links. That being the case, I'm not going to roll out the last little tweaks until I've got more content to upload - just on an as-updated basis. The Yahoo-supplied script addenda, with their preceding set of "close everything" tags will still make a page invalid according to the validator at validator.w3.org, so there's another limit to how much I can achieve.

Oh, and while I was at it, I nuked all the gifs, apart from the one animated logo on this page, in favour of pngs.

(No) Progress

No progress on any s/ware projects since last update. The CTClib-C++ port is not going well - there's not enough internal encapsulation around keyrings and packets, so it's turning into a rewrite rather than a refactor. So I paused to commission a new PC, and haven't picked up again, and now the little spring-time window as the longer days perk up my energies, but before the weather is warm enough to attract me outside, is closing.

Geocities site cleanup : Spring cleaning and mega redesign

This site went black many years ago as part of a one-day protest event (which might have been something to do with the American CDA), and stayed that way out of inertia. Now I felt it was a suitable season for a redesign, and have done one with an eye to handling small format devices (for mobile internet) for which a 150-200 pixel navigation bar at the left becomes a screen-wide thing, often rendered above the page body; in any case the real above-the-fold content is hidden offscreen to the right or below of the first screenful. To combat this all navigation is moved into a narrow band, with links top and bottom to a site map; and in the more functional browsers, the whole thing is a clickable link.

The new look is a brushed-metal version of the original Mosaic/Netscape black text on grey ground.

Putting style information into a separate CSS has had the advantage of letting old browsers like NN4.5 pick some of them up, which the in-line ones weren't being, so the site should be looking better there too.
Downside - as I'm going for XHTML 1.0 strict, I'm using <object> rather than <applet>, which currently means I've only got applets working on IE6 - but I'm working on it.

Passive FTP 1.2

New version (1.2) of PassiveFTP. It loses the Java Metal skinning and gains HTTP proxy support.

From the Windows page.

Pegwit/Java withdrawn

I have withdrawn the deprecated Pegwit/Java and redirected my key hyperlink to (moribund) Yahoo group.

Tines' Dice 1.1 + IconPatch

One negative of Plua for the PalmOS platform is that it leaves you with a default Plua-powered large icon and the PalmOS default list icon. And there aren't any obvious (to Google) freeware icon patching utilities out there. So I wrote one. It assumes you use PilRC (or TealPoint Software's BMP2AIB) program to compile the tAIB03e8.bin and tAIB03e9.bin files (names aren't important, but you must supply both of them), and it patches the .prc file. Note that BMP2AIB does require you get the colour palette right whereas PilRC uses a best-match approach. The archive contains an example that shows how I patched Tines' Dice 1.1 to have a more obviously dice-oriented logo (2d6), with PilRC .rcp file, all the .BMP files and the resulting .prc file.

Second download from the RPG page.