Apple announced the final bits and bobs that will be in Leopard, the next release of OS X, at the Apple Developers’ Conference yesterday. I thought it would be interesting to note my thoughts on it down, amongst several thousand other people. I’m not sure whether I can re-publish screenshots from Apple’s site — I presume not — so you’ll have to follow the links for pictures and videos.

Before I begin, I can’t resist a slight moan. I was disappointed with the Safari 3 beta version for Windows. It’s simply woefully incomplete for a beta: it doesn’t support proxy servers yet. It also crashed when I tried to browse to our internal TWiki site. Somewhat uninspiring.

In an open letter to AQA a physics teacher bemoans the new Science curriculum in the UK. I read about the plans a few months ago in the Guardian and was appalled by what I read. I thought that things couldn’t possibly turn out as bad as the article made them sound; it was a comment piece. It turns out I was wrong.

The new science curriculum is based upon a plausibly laudable aim. There is a view that scientific understanding in the UK is low. Following from this, it is put forward that we need a change in science education. It appears one of the criticisms of science teaching was it is too, well, science-based. God forbid!

If you ever have the need to make a mini template engine, may I recommend Ruby as the language to make it in? I’ve just spent an hour re-writing the one I wrote a couple of weeks ago in a much nicer way. For those who are curious, here’s an outline of the steps:

1. Make a Templatable mixin with a single method, generate_from_template
2. Mix this into a class, populated with some methods and instance variables
3. In this method, use a regex to parse each # xx var from your template (get the template name from self.class.name, perhaps?)
4. Take the xx and eval(xx) and sub! back into your line. The eval will, of course, have access to all your variables and methods from your newly Templatable class, as we mixed-in. Make a note of the fact that you can put any ruby code in your eval play around.
5. Carry on doing this until you’ve run out of # xx to parse.
6. Write out your fully evaluated template!

Very simple and powerful.

Don’t panic, fair visitors, the programs section will be back once I’ve worked out how to handle static content in The New Ruby Way. I didn’t realise the programs were still used, but I have already received one email asking whether I am going to reinstate them on the site.

In other news, I bought my very first shareware application to help with the site, Panic Software’s Transmit ftp client. They have a synchronise function which will mirror a local directory on the server; in other words, perfect for uploading articles as I can just leave Transmit to synchronise my publish folder, which contains a version of the site ready to publish. It’s even super easy to create an Automator script to do this so it’s just a single click away.

So, you will notice there have been some changes around here. Firstly the site is fairly un-styled right now. The more important change is more hidden. If you glance up at the location bar, you’ll note the extension of the page is now html. That’s correct, old school, non-dynamic hypertext markup language.

You see, I’ve changed how I generate the pages on the site. I now statically generate them on my local computer and upload them. The articles are stored locally in text files which are processed by a ruby script into a publishable set of html files. The script also generates the home page, RSS feed and the archive page (a new feature!). The system isn’t complete or pretty, but I thought I’d get it live sooner rather than later.