New Web Site Plumbing

A significantly revised version of my web site has just been installed, and,
with any luck, you won't notice a thing. The fundamental look and content has
not been changed. Under the hood, however, much is different. Frames are gone,
and that means that bookmarking and printing should work a lot better. Most
pages are now standards-conformant, and the few that are not (typically those
with tables that were tricky to replace with CSS) will be soon (I hope).
Cross-browser compatibility should be better. Fundamentally, all the stuff that
used to work should continue to work, and many things that didn't work before
should work now.

Included among the old things that should continue to work are URLs. It really
makes my blood boil when I bookmark a page at a site and later find that the URL
I saved is broken, because the webmorons maintaining the site couldn't be
bothered to ensure that old URLs remained valid when said morons decided to
reorganize. One of my primary constraints during the work on my web site was
that old URLs should continue to work, and one of the reasons I'm telling you
about the revised plumbing is that I'd like you to tell me if any URLs into my
site that used to work don't any more. If an old URL fails to work, that's a
bug, and we'll do our best to fix it pronto.

If you happen to notice any other implementation aspect of the revised site that
isn't what it should be, please let me know. I welcome comments on content,
too, but my focus right now is on getting the HTML and CSS, etc., working the
way it should be.

Thanks,

Scott

New Podcast interviews available

In March, Addison-Wesley asked Ted Neward to interview me about the forthcoming
electronic versions of my books as well as about my thoughts on C++0x, and that
interview has now been chopped into four pieces and scheduled for publication in
both audio and video podcast form. The first two parts (covering my thoughts on
electronic publication) are now available:

Audio form: http://www.podango.com/podcast/2243/OnSoftware_audio
Video form: http://www.podango.com/podcast/2066/OnSoftware_video

You should be aware that the audio form is simply the audio track of the video
form. Unfortunately, the video form shows the interview topic and names of the
participants only through video, so if you listen to the audio only, it'll be
easiest to understand if you note the topic and names (Ted Neward and me) in
advance.

The remaining two parts of the interview will be published on June 17 and 24,
and there are RSS feeds at the site so you can arrange for automatic
notification, if you like.

Incidentally, the PDF versions of my books are currently undergoing final QA,
and I'm hoping they'll become available later this month. That's a couple of
months later than we'd originally planned, but we've been addressing more
"issues" than we anticipated during their preparation, most arising from
"undocumented features" in several tools we've been using. We've also had to
wrangle with the usual impossible things taking place -- you know, the stuff
that just seems to happen when doing anything software-intensive the first time
around.

I hope you enjoy the podcasts.

Scott