Thursday, November 18, 2004

Documentation
Today has been spent reading yet more OWL documentation, and looking again at some Kowari docs. There are still a couple of OWL predicates for which there are no iTQL implementations, and I need to either provide them, or explain the current shortcomings of iTQL.

TJ has also set me a series of tasks, starting with solving a problem of a server knowing not to make a remote connection to itself when using a Remote Resolver. If a model is to be found on a particular server, then the name provided could be any one of several qualified or unqualified names, or even "localhost", not to mention numerous IPs. When this happens, the server has to know when to handle a query itself, and when to pass it on.

The only thing I can think of that would work reliably, is for each server to generate a GUID on startup, and to set up a protocol to negotiate this with all connecting clients. That way if a server wants to pass it on, and the connection it makes happens to be to itself (via a name or IP that it didn't recognise) then it can drop the connection and handle the query locally. That way there can be no IPs or names that escape the server's attention (eg. dropping and restarting a network connection could allocate a previously unknown IP to a server).

So I'll be spending my next few days working on this, plus the documentation mentioned above.

Other than that (and filing my tax return) it has been a very quiet day.

Firefox and Virtual Desktops
I've been trialing CodeTek Virtual Desktop, and overall I've been really happy with it. It's a little expensive (given that I only have Australian dollars to play with), but I think I'm using it enough to justify the expense when my free trial runs out. The only thing that makes me wonder if I should get it, is that Apple might try providing virtual desktops as a built in part of Tiger.

One problem with the CodeTek software has been that it doesn't play well with Firefox. I normally use Safari as it has a full Aqua GUI and is well integrated, but Firefox is the browser I use for Blogger so I get all the cute features in the editor. (Camino would seem to offer the best of both camps, but it does not properly render all pages, eg. The Blogger editing page).

When I click on a link to create a new post in Blogger, or I change to another application and back, then I cannot get Firefox to accept any kind of keyboard input. Initially I was thinking that it was a Firefox problem, until I discovered that I can get the focus onto Firefox when I change virtual screens and back. Firefox is the only application I've found with this problem, so it seems to be an interaction bug. I suspect that it is because Firefox uses Carbon, while almost everything else I use is based on Cocoa (maybe I should check out IE?). Firefox is about to start moving over to Cocoa for OS X, so this problem might eventually go away even without any intervention from CodeTek.

1 comment:

Dylan Beadle said...

May I suggest Desktop Manager?

I don't use virtual desktops, but it is considered pretty good and comparable to CodeTek Virtual Desktop.

Another productivity app I cannot live without is Quicksilver.