Library Blogging and Laszlo Coding

Yikes, I've been using blogger since march and his is the first time I have blogged anything from Internet Explorer.

Normally I wouldn't use this browser, but in this case I am blogging from the Half Moon Bay Public Library.

So to the point. I'm here because the 5yr old has finished his soccer game and the 9 yr old is in the midst of one as we speak. Cunha Intermediate School has no play equipment for younger kids so to keep the 5yr old occupied for the nex 60 to 90 minutes I'm here on a donated Dell attempting to blog.

I considered trying to work on adapting Oliver's Booklist Application for use on my site, but I have discovered a couple of roadblocks to my accomplishing anything more productive than rambling amilessly in one long sentance that sseems like it should have been broken by a period long ago, but for some reason continues wouthout ever really breaking any of the english rules of grammar, yet coming close on may occasions.

Where was I? Oh yes, roadblocks. I understand that the library doesn't want me misusing the facilities or the equipment. I can forgive the fact that I can't install the distributed.net client for example, but for some unknown reason, this system has had certain functions of the [Ctrl] key disabled and the right mouse button is knocked out. I can use [Ctrl] in congunction with the arrow keys to navigate, but not for editing or find. One would assume that this is to keep me from rebooting the system via the three finger salute but the fact that the key is not disabled just leads me to believe that this is merely designed to be an annoyance.

Since I can't do any development with this time, I thought I'd ramble about what could be done to make this hour useful in this environment.

Blogger has this wonderful ability to create an easy link by selecting text and clicking the link button. One thing that is missing here is the ability to set the target parameter in this dialog. Blogrolling's service has this built into the "Blogroll This" javasrcipt link. This would make life move more quickly for those of us who target eveything to "_blank" or a named frame. This dialog should also have the ability to paste, but this only bothers me today bacause of my current keyboard limitations.

Now to do some Laszlorific development I would need a more sophisticated set of tools. LzExplorer is a wonderful tool to twiddle and learn LZX but there is no persistance of the code you develop there. The HTML textarea tag is not the most functional text editor in the world but it will do in a pinch. What I really want is WebDAV turned on for myLaszlo and my directory opened up for me. Build something like LzExplorer into there, with some light file browsing, an editor and LZX preview and wholyshit we have something.

A solution to the problem of a blogger stuck on a crippled machine for two hours. I'm sure Marc Canter would find many other exciting ways to use such a thing, but I'm feeling myopic.