bspace notes

Greetings. I'm Birkin James Diana, and this is my personal website: a kind of experimental technology room.

I'm a programmer & web-developer for the Brown University Library, a cool institution doing very cool work. I code primarily in the languages python, java, and php, and increasingly (and happily) in Django. My interests include extreme programming, test-driven development, instant-runoff-voting, weighted-randomization, solar power -- the list is long.

One reason for this site is to have a venue to focus and disseminate a sliver of the numerous ideas I have about how to make the world a better place, mostly in a geeky web-programmer realm. Another reason is to deepen my knowledge of Django, an impressive, terrific web-framework. There's a tension here between using a pre-existing solid service like wordpress.com to easily communicate ideas, and 'rolling my own' site to deepen learning. Example: I haven't yet fully implemented comments.

General email address, birkin.diana@gmail.com; work-specfic email address, birkin_diana@brown.edu.

[IE6 note: I've realized that IE6 does not display horizontal scrollbars properly on this site, so on some pages, the right-navigation appears at the bottom of the page. IE7, Firefox, and Safari are fine. My understanding is that IE6 does not respect the 'maxwidth' css setting, and that dokuwiki, from where I got my solution, handles this via a section of javascript within a large block of javascript. I don't want to embed all the unnecessary javascript for this specific issue, so until I implement an alternate solution, my apologies to those of you using IE6.]