Table of Contents

Reagents required for successful layout design: spare Wacom nib, general lack of artistic skill, too much free time. Reaction is most successfully catalyzed by a mistress who knows a scary amount about CSS. Products should be extracted with DCM, dried and filtered.

The layout is more or less finished with only a few small additions planned in the near future. The same should not be said of the code-base, which Samantha has been pouring herself into most admirably. There is also some content, including a character chart for Lilitic. The grammar has been written and only needs to be translated into a more readable form for publishing on the site. Various other pages have also had content done to them. But I can't stress enough how far the site still remains from being close to rounded out.

See that thing over there? Yes, that. That's the status box. It's unsettlingly like a Twitter feed, but it has that fantastic advantage of being (a) in-house and (b) reused in different data structures. I'm not going to bother with the full details now, since this is the front page news feed, after all, but in short, making that spit out an RSS feed will take four or five lines of code, tops, which is pretty cool.

Badru is coming along steadily. I realise that in its previous incarnation it probably meant very little to passers-by (except for one innovative Brazilian who decided to hijack the mail server), but there's a chance that the future of Badru might be somewhat less useless to casual visitors, and if not, it's a useful programming exercise.

Badru was originally conceived as a wishlist-tracking mechanism, because we felt that most other available offerings were nothing if not overweight. With a little scraping of Amazon's awful HTML, it was fairly easy to populate, too. Of course, this structure was really darn good for regular bookmarks, too, so we threw that on, and of course no one likes staring at a blinding white Google page at seven in the morning, so next came a search frontend, and hey, why not an RSS reader as well? That one worked out particularly well, particularly because most RSS feeds put out their crap in wildly disparate date formats, and it was a total mess. It turns out we picked a pretty good language for dealing with such malformations.

At present, the basic list management functionality is in place, the façade of a search box is in place, and more is on the way. Really.

Also, things are sorted now, but to explain how and why is a lot of technical detail. Some pages sort alphabetically, others by date of creation, and still others by adjustable priority values. The proper order for sticky posts never need be confusing again!

Somehow a certain skunk neglected to announce that her microscopy page was now in session. Since I've just fixed the gallery on it, I figured I'd do the advertising for her. Go look!

They are among us. Previously thought to be mere cultural refuse, these undead hordes, blood sucking ghouls and mindless husks of human remnants wander the halls of your very research institute or university! To test for the undead, please use the following diagnostic criteria.

Does the subject display any of the following symptoms?

(1) An obsession conducting field research in remote locations or at seasonably unfavorable times?
(2) Abject concern over the recent fluctuations in the population of a relatively minor species?
(3) An obsession with generating histograms, chi-squared goodness of fit and T tests on non-research oriented data? A more clear indication is the need to repeat statistical analysis compulsively to the loss of sleep over R values.
(4) They maintain that "ecology" is a valid scientific discipline.

These individuals are more dangerous than I am able to stress. If you notice such an individual, politely excuse yourself, saying that you need to go count the diameter of pine trees in a thirty mile radius. Once out of danger contact the authorities immediately. If unable to free yourself, the last, best defense is to show the undead slave a good mechanism. I have found that either the Ugi reaction or Brown hydroboration work best.

Galleries—check. Now, to get back to some content... that would be a good thing. Error page meddled with—go look at it. Despite what it says in the Hall of Images, all of the things you see there will be explained in painfully meticulous detail as time allows. If we can stop drowning in paperwork. Did I mention this news post form is really satisfying?

I believe I do now have the dubious honour of introducing what passes for Cadre's news posting system, and thus Inkspill's. This probably obviates the obscure chronological ordering of the list below, but we'll get to that. First, we need image galleries, oh yes, image galleries.