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Blogging Gallery Tool
Oof! It’s been a while, hasn’t it. Not sure why I expected my side-project work to continue while I’m here in Canberra. Feels like a waste of a trip to go somewhere — well, not “unique”, I’ve been here before; but different — and expect to spend all your time indoors writing code. Maybe a choice I would’ve made when I was younger, but now? Hmm, better to spend my time outdoors, “touching grass”. Continue reading →
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Bulk Image Selection
Some light housekeeping first: this is the 15th post on this blog so I thought it was time for a proper domain name. Not that buying a domain automatically means I’ll keep at it, but it does feel like I’ve got some momentum writing here now, so I’ll take the $24.00 USD risk. I’d also like to organise a proper site favicon too. I’ve got some ideas but I’ve yet to crack open Affinity Design just yet. Continue reading →
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The Site Page Model
I opened up Photo Bucket this morning and found a bunch of commits involving pages. I had no idea why I added them, until I launched it and started poking around the admin section. I tried a toggle on the Design page which controlled whether the landing page showed a list of photos or galleries, and after finding that it wasn’t connected to anything, it all came flooding back to me. Continue reading →
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Indexing In UCL
I’ve been thinking a little about how to support indexing in UCL, as in getting elements from a list or keyed values from a map. There already exists an index builtin that does this, but I’m wondering if this can be, or even should be, supported in the language itself. I’ve reserved . for this, and it’ll be relatively easy to make use of it to get map fields. But I do have some concerns with supporting list element dereferencing using square brackets. Continue reading →
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Tape Playback Site
Thought I’d take a little break from UCL today. Mum found a collection of old cassette tapes of us when we were kids, making and recording songs and radio shows. I’ve been digitising them over the last few weeks, and today the first recorded cassette was ready to share with the family. I suppose I could’ve just given them raw MP3 files, but I wanted to record each cassette as two large files — one per side — so as to not loose much of the various crackles and clatters made when the tape recorder was stopped and started. Continue reading →
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UCL: Brief Integration Update and Modules
A brief update of where I am with UCL and integrating it into Dynamo-browse. I did managed to get it integrated, and it’s now serving as the interpreter of commands entered in during a session. It works… okay. I decided to avoid all the complexities I mentioned in the last post — all that about continuations, etc. — and simply kept the commands returning tea.Msg values. The original idea was to have the commands return usable values if they were invoked in a non-interactive manner. Continue reading →
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UCL: Breaking And Continuation
I’ve started trying to integrate UCL into a second tool: Dynamo Browse. And so far it’s proving to be a little difficult. The problem is that this will be replacing a dumb string splitter, with command handlers that are currently returning a tea.Msg type that change the UI in some way. UCL builtin handlers return a interface{} result, or an error result, so there’s no reason why this wouldn’t work. But tea. Continue reading →
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UCL: The Simplifications Paid Off
The UCL simplifications have been implemented, and they seem to be largely successful. Ripped out all the streaming types, and changed pipes to simply pass the result of the left command as first argument of the right. "Hello" | echo ", world" --> "Hello, world" This has dramatically improved the use of pipes. Previously, pipes could only be used to connect streams. But now, with pretty much anything flowing through a pipe, that list of commands has extended to pretty much every builtins and user-defined procs. Continue reading →
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Simplifying UCL
I’ve been using UCL for several days now in that work tool I mentioned, and I’m wondering if the technical challenge that comes of making a featureful language is crowding out what I set out to do: making a useful command language that is easy to embed. So I’m thinking of making some simplifications. The first is to expand the possible use of pipes. To date, the only thing that can travel through pipes are streams. Continue reading →
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Imports And The New Model
Well, I dragged Photo Bucket out today to work on it a bit. It’s fallen by the wayside a little, and I’ve been wondering if it’s worth continuing work on it. So many things about it that need to be looked at: the public site looks ugly, as does the admin section; working with more than a single image is a pain; backup and restore needs to be added; etc. Continue reading →
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UCL: Procs and Higher-Order Functions
More on UCL yesterday evening. Biggest change is the introduction of user functions, called “procs” (same name used in TCL): proc greet { echo "Hello, world" } greet --> Hello, world Naturally, like most languages, these can accept arguments, which use the same block variable binding as the foreach loop: proc greet { |what| echo "Hello, " $what } greet "moon" --> Hello, moon The name is also optional, and if omitted, will actually make the function anonymous. Continue reading →
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UCL: First Embed, and Optional Arguments
Came up with a name: Universal Control Language: UCL. See, you have TCL; but what if instead of being used for tools, it can be more universal? Sounds so much more… universal, am I right? 😀 Yeah, okay. It’s not a great name. But it’ll do for now. Anyway, I’ve started integrating this language with the admin tool I’m using at work. This tool I use is the impetus for this whole endeavour. Continue reading →
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Tool Command Language: Lists, Hashs, and Loops
A bit more on TCL (yes, yes, I’ve gotta change the name) last night. Added both lists and hashes to the language. These can be created using a literal syntax, which looks pretty much looks how I described it a few days ago: set list ["a" "b" "c"] set hash ["a":"1" "b":"2" "c":"3"] I had a bit of trouble working out the grammar for this, I first went with something that looked a little like the following, where the key of an element is optional but the value is mandatory: Continue reading →
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Backlog Proc: A Better JQL
Backlog Proc is a simple item backlog tracker I built for work. I’d like to link them to Jira tickets, so that I know whether a particular backlog item actually has tasks written for them, and what the status of each of those tasks are. I guess these are meant to be tracked by epics, but Jira’s UI for handling such things is a mess, and I’d like to make notes that are only for my own eyes. Continue reading →
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Tool Command Language: Macros And Blocks
More work on the tool command language (of which I need to come up with a name: I can’t use the abbreviation TCL), this time working on getting multi-line statement blocks working. As in: echo "Here" echo "There" I got a little wrapped up about how I can configure the parser to recognise new-lines as statement separators. I tried this in the past with a hand rolled lexer and ended up peppering NL tokens all around the grammar. Continue reading →
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Tool Command Language
I have this idea for a tool command language. Something similar to TCL, in that it’s chiefly designed to be used as an embedded scripting language and chiefly in an interactive context. It’s been an idea I’ve been having in my mind for a while, but I’ve got the perfect use case for it. I’ve got a tool at work I use to do occasional admin tasks. At the moment it’s implemented as a CLI tool, and it works. Continue reading →
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Photo Bucket Update: Exporting To Zip
Worked a little more on Photo Bucket this week. Added the ability to export the contents of an instance to a Zip file. This consist of both images and metadata. I’ve went with lines of JSON file for the image metadata. I considered a CSV file briefly, but for optional fields like captions and custom properties, I didn’t like the idea of a lot of empty columns. Better to go with a format that’s a little more flexible, even if it does mean more text per line. Continue reading →
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Photo Bucket Update: More On Galleries
Spent a bit more time working on Photo Bucket this last week1, particularly around galleries. They’re progressing quite well. I’m made some strides in getting two big parts of the UI working now: adding and removing images to galleries, and re-ordering gallery items via drag and drop. I’ll talk about re-ordering first. This was when I had to bite the bullet and start coding up some JavaScript. Usually I’d turn to Stimulus for this but I wanted to give HTML web components a try. Continue reading →
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Photo Bucket Galleries and Using the HTML Popover API
Spent a bit more on Photo Bucket this evening. Tonight I started working on galleries, which’ll work more or less like albums. At the moment you can create a gallery and add a photo to it. Most of the work so far has been backend so the UI is pretty rough. Eventually you’ll be able to do things like rearrange photos within galleries, but for the moment they’ll just be added to the end. Continue reading →
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Spent some time this evening working on my image hosting tool. It’s slowly coming along, but wow do I suck at UI design (the “Edit Photo” screen needs some rebalancing).
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Working on one of the admin sections of the project I was alluding to yesterday. Here’s a screencast of how it’s looking so far.
The styling and layout is not quite final. I’m focusing more on functionality, and getting layout and whitespace looking good always takes time. But compared to how it looked before I started working on it this morning, I think it’s a good start.
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In the end it took significantly more time to write about it then to actually do it, but the dot product approach seems to work.
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Making some progress in learning Elm for building frontends. Started working on a Connections clone, which I’m calling “Clonections”. This is what I’ve got so far:
It’s been fun using Elm to build this. So far I’m liking the language. Of course, now I’ll have to come up with puzzles for this. 😐
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Spent a little more time working on my idea for Dynamo-Browse this week. Managed to get it somewhat feature complete this weekend:
I probably should say a few words on what it actually is. The idea is to make it quick and easy to run pre-canned queries based on the currently selected item and table.
Let’s say you’ve got a table with customer information, and another table with subscription information, and they’re linked with some form of customer ID. If you wanted to see the subscriptions of a customer, up until now, you’d have to copy the customer ID to the paste-board, change the currently viewed table, then run a query to select the subscription with that customer ID. It’s not difficult but it’s extremely tedious.
This change is meant to streamline this. Now, in a script function, you can define a “related item” provider which, if matched against the currently displayed table, will be given the currently selected item, and will return a list of queries that will display items related to the current item (depending on whatever definition of “related” will be). This will be presented to the user as a list. When the user chooses the item, the query will run and the results will be displayed.
Here’s an example of the script used for the screencasts:
ext.related_items("business-addresses", func(item) { return [ {"label": "Customer", "query": `city=$city`, "args": {"city": "Austin"}}, {"label": "Payment", "query": `address^="3"`}, {"label": "Thing", "table": "inventory", "query": `pk=$pk`, "args": {"pk": "01fca33a-5817-4c27-8a8f-82380584e69c"}}, ] }) ext.related_items("inventory", func(item) { sk := string(item.attr("sk")) return [ {"label": "SK: " + sk, "table": "business-addresses", "query": `pk^=$sk`, "args": {"sk": sk}}, ] })Notice how the last
business-addressesitem specifies the “inventory” table, and that the “inventory” provider actually uses an attribute of the item. Here’s a screencast of that working:This feature has been on the idea board for a while. I was trying to work out how best to handle the pre-canned queries, especially considering that they will likely be different for each item and table. Some ideas I had were adding additional UI elements that the user could use to configure these queries. These would go into the workspace file, a sort of an embedded database which is created for each session. This was pretty crappy, especially when you consider that workspaces usually only last until the user exists. It was only a few weeks ago when I considered using the scripting facilities to implement this (which, honestly, shows how much it remains under-utilised).
Anyway, I’ve only just finished development of it. I’d still like to try it for the various related items I tend to use during my day-to-day. We’ll see how well it works out.
