The Coppit Family Daily News

Well, we found out the cause of Christopher’s deafness today. It seems that he has the so-called “Connexin 26″ cause. Actually, he inherited two recessive mutations from us.

Click the “more” link for the full report. On the one hand this news is comforting in that we now know the cause, and it wasn’t because we anything we did. It also means that our future kids are more likely to be deaf as well, although I don’t know how much more likely. So, if you’re related to either me or Dorothy, answer “yes” to the question about a family history of deafness.

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Anthem of Virginia has denied our request to have Christopher’s operation done 3 weeks shy of his first birthday. I suppose it’s because the FDA recommends cochlear implant surgery as 12 months of age.

Oh well… The surgeon’s assistant said they would try to work us in the day after his 1 year birthday.

The last few weeks I’m been spending all my non-teaching time implementing the next version of Spotlight. Spotlight is a plugin for Eclipse that implements the notion of software plans.

Software has been traditionally implemented in one view, compared to the multi-view representations used to represent designs in other disciplines. Source code is a lot like cubist art–every perspective in one representation. My research has tried to provide multiple views of code, thereby more naturally representing concerns of interest separate from irrelevant concerns.

The new implementation is coming along nicely, and hopefully will be ready for public consumption soon.

I’ve released a new version of the Category Order Wordpress 2 plugin. This plugin allows the blog administrator to set an explicit ordering, spacing, and indentation of categories in the category list that appears in the sidebar. The administrator specifies the ordering in the new “Category Order” management page. There is also an option for placing the category post count inside the link.

New changes:

• If categories are filtered out in wp_list_cats, empty list elements will now not be created.
• Instructions now make it clear that the plugin directory must be “category-order”.
• Added a message when the category list HTML cannot be parsed.
• Fixed the error some users have reported about the management page being included twice.
• Fixed a bug that would cause the buttons on the management page not to work.
• Fixed a problem where images would not show up if the blog was hosted on a non-standard port like http://myblog.example.com:85/

Many thanks to David Lucash for his help on this release.
A screenshot shows the management page. Download it on my code page.

I’ve released a new version of the Category Access Wordpress 2 plugin. This plugin allows the blog maintainer to restrict access to posts belonging to particular categories on a user-by-user basis.

New changes:

• People with the category management capability (typically Editors and Administrators) now have access to all categories regardless of visibility settings.
• New option to show a post if the user can view any of the categories, rather than all of them.
• A post will now be hidden if its category, OR ANY PARENT CATEGORY is protected.
• Fixed a major bug where multiple categories could not be excluded–just one.
• If a person selects categories that they do not have access to when editing or writing a post, these categories are removed. If no categories remain, the post is put into the uncategorized category and not published.
• Added check all and uncheck all buttons to the categories checkboxes on the options page.

Many thanks to Paul Magnowski, Pierre Lauvergnier, and David Katz for their work and input on this release.

Download it on my code page.