|
|
|
undo and redo
Friday, February 4 2011
Gretchen has had trouble lately with a muscle in her left leg near or about the vastus intermedius quadriceps. She pulled it the other day perhaps by walking in deep snow and has had trouble making the pain go away. None of the ordinary or even extraordinary medications she has at her disposal have been any use. Yesterday she'd driven the Subaru (which requires clutching) and this morning she'd made the mistake of walking the dog, and those had added up to debilitating agony. Fortunately she managed to get a visit to her favorite musculoskeletal therapist this afternoon (this required someone else to cancel) and that managed to help, but she was mostly restricted to the living room couch for much of the day. Jenny came over at 5:00pm and the two worked on the book they are co-writing together for a couple hours, with Gretchen using a laptop instead of her usual desktop.
Meanwhile this evening I put a lot of effort into completing and expanding some features I'd begun adding to my DHTML database mapping tool back in late November. At that time, I'd added contextual menu allowing me to click on a blank spot in the map and add an existing (though absent) table from a menu. That system, which is an incredibly complex web of AJAX interaction, still had a few rough edges that needed to be cleaned up. Today I added a feature allowing me to create a new table on the fly in a blank space in the map. It's getting to the point where an entire database can be administered from a graphical map of it. That's powerful. You can try out these new features on my sample read-only database.
As I worked, the complexity of the code was such that my short term memory wasn't sufficient for juggling all that it needed to. I found myself making frequent use of a technique I've used for many years: using undo and redo in quick succession to remind myself of my last action. A useful feature I find myself wanting in such work is a multi-part cut and paste. Sometimes (though not today) I open a scrap document to paste important scraps into to copy and reuse as necessary.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110204 feedback
previous | next |
