I’ve been tinkering with CSS and Drupal today, trying to get a better understanding of the theme system.

As a result, I’ve got a new theme as the default on the site. It’s called Heatwave (if you live in London, you’ll understand why I chose that name…) and it’s basically a cleaned up and pared down version of the Croxted theme that I was using before.

I’ve been trying to simplify the design as much as possible, removing duplication in the css and trying to make the whole thing a bit lighter. I’ve also tried to reduce the impact of the tabs (which you generally only see when editing pages).

There are probably still some things wrong or missing, so let me know what you think, especially if you see anything particularly hideous. The old Croxted theme is still available, so if you log in you can switch back to it if you prefer.

During a random session searching for Python html generating tools, I came across an interesting article about language syntax.

I wonder if he’s looked at Dylan?

Koders is a bit handy. It’s a search engine specifically for open source code.

Recently I’ve been working on some odds and ends that I wanted to Open Source, so I had to ponder which license to release them under.

This is a surprisingly gnarly question, and I’m not sure if I’ve got the final answer but right now I’ve gone for the GPL, although I did have some concerns about it.

Richard Buckle has posted some useful notes on Apple’s newly published Universal Binary Guidelines.

I’d add a couple of things:

Move On Up

Migrating to XCode/Mach-o is all very well, but my gut feeling is that the higher level language you are using, the less pain you are likely to suffer, so I would change the emphasis slightly.

If you are still using Carbon plus C/C++, consider moving to Cocoa plus Objective-C, Java or Python. This is only repeating what Apple have been saying for a while.

Let Someone Else Store Your Data

I concur completely that byte swapping will be the big deal. All of my decade of (often painful) experience working on cross platform projects and porting games tells me that most of the hard work comes in this area (alignment and other things may affect performance, but byte swapping will introduce most of the bugs).

The best way to minimize the pain is to move to some sort of structure storage library. I suspect that people using Core Data, or one of the object persistence APIs in java or python will win big here - always assuming that the maintainers of whatever they are using do a good job!

Short of that, write your own simple API for file operations, add an endian tag to your file formats, and make sure that you stream data in and out of your API in primitive sized chunks (ie pack/unpack structures rather than writing them directly), so that they can be auto-magically swapped later.