Earlier this week, I’d been thinking about the possibilites that greatly increased bandwidth (a few Gigabytes a second) would provide; specifically, in terms of non-local computing. By utilising remote procedure call formats, it would be more than possible to do all non-trivial processing at other locations.

Today, I came across a link to the online Java compiler, via comp.lang.java.help. Although, I can’t think of any real practical use for it (other than testing if code is small and self-contained), it does show some of the potential in non-local computing.

Imagine a future version where you pass it a tar file with a huge bunch of source code (and possibly a make file), let it do the overnight processing and return a binary. That would be nice.

CVS is a powerful and useful tool. Unfortunately, running it on windows is not easy. Fortunately then, someone has produced an interesting tutorial on the matter entitled, “CVS Version Control on Windows in 10 minutes“.

I haven’t actually tried it (at the moment, I’m running CVS through Cygwin), but it seems fairly comprehensive. Definitely worth a look if you have documents that you want to keep backed-up or have more than one copy of.

Thanks to the recent IE arbitary :hover behaviour (truly a godsend to developers), cross platform CSS tabs are now easy.

The page mixes the Sliding doors technique and the new behaviour nicely. Good job, that man!

It’s time for Solitude’s first obligatory birthday post! Yes, it has been a year since I ditched the increasingly huge workload of VKPS and started this much easier to manage blog.

What has been accomplished in this year at Solitude? 285 posts (one every 1.2 days), some new toys, a deeper undestanding of this web standards mess (XHTML, CSS, RSS, Atom… I love you all), and a whole mess of mindless link propagation.

So, what can you expect from the next year? Although I’m tempted to shift focus to something new just for the hell of it, I know that I’m going to be knee-deep in code for the next few months. Expect a lot more on web standards, information from an as yet undisclosed project being worked on as part of my course work this year, more fiction (there was really very little there, yet I got a very warm response from what there was), more toys (there are at least 2 in my mind just now), and of course more links.

I think you can also expect shorter, but far more frequent posts, amonst the longer posts I’ve tended towards.

Hopefully, you’ll stick around for another year.

If you’ve been having problems commenting over the last week or so, I’ve just fixed the problem (it has also been stopping me posting). Due to a security change by my host, I had to change the single most important script on this site: the incredibly flexible write_file(). Let me know of any further problems.