Stochastic Geometry

I guess there’s irony in this, but less than a fortnight after submitting some code to mantisBT, I’m now trying to update a perl migration script (m2bz, by Julian Mehnle) to handle a migration from Mantis 1.0.3 to Bugzilla 3.0 (currently it works from Mantis 0.17.5 to Bugzilla 2.16.3).

I know, it’s no great hunk of coding, but I thought it was worth a grin.

(I should point out, by the way, that this isn’t because Mantis is bad software, it’s just that the time tracking chunk of Bugzilla is better than that of Mantis right now, and that’s something that’s required at the moment. There are other features in Bugzilla that are nice bits of icing as well, but the time tracking’s the main thing.)… Read the rest

Hmmm. One of the fun things when a client specifies W3C html compliance as a requirement is that you can spend a surprising amount of time picking just what W3C standard they want you to comply with in the first place. And now it seems that there’ll be another one to choose from. HTML 5 has just been revived as a standard in development, as a reaction to CSS and XHTML. Which means that at some point in the future, you’re going to have CSS 3, XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5 out there.

Daniel has a good summary of the whys and what’s involved. Some of the new features look downright spiffy – DOM support improved (right about the time that PHP is pushing away from DOM to get to SimpleXML – doh…), improved support for Forms (native data validation and better native input controls look like good timesavers to me), and more content tags (article, dialog, video, canvas and progress were listed).… Read the rest