Week ahead: Ruby/Rails conference and next paper?

It should be a stimulating week ahead as the clocks spring forward (why not two weeks ago?) and I check the schedule for Scotland on Rails and plan the sessions to attend. Now with a new Eee PC I should also have something to write on and connectivity.

Yesterday jQuery in Action arrived. I've started to read it and am finding already that the two CSS books that were until recently just sitting on the shelf are helping me to grasp what jQuery is about. One of those titles - Keith or Cederholm - highlighted that learning CSS helps you to understand and learn other languages and this really does seem to be the case. jQuery in Action will definitely be travelling to Edinburgh. Even though I'm only at chapter 2 it's a good read. There's a Selector Lab a web page to enter jQuery selector strings and see how the code relates to the DOM (document object model).

Over the past week I've been investigating Ruby graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits - specifically Tk (must check version 8.5). Just as with Drupal and settling on a theme, eventually - it seems? - I will have to choose a GUI. For now it's a case of seeing what they offer and how to run them within Eclipse (and without). The jQuery book will help push me with Drupal and enliven what will be essentially be static (archive) content:

• Archive - Brian's original notes; my introduction
• Biographies - Brian, myself - and who knows other contributors
• Chronology
• - still thinking about other content
• old - e.g. the informatics pages
• and new - a h2cm collaborative book.

There is no word as yet about the socio-technical chapter submitted in the new year, which may be good news? Although there's enough going on above, I like to have a paper on slow cook. So, we will see what arises on mapping, concept organisation ... in health care, communication and education. As a starter (c/o free access to SAGE journals) there are several papers on intervention mapping within public health and health promotion that will be essential reading. Another ingredient to (potentially) add to the mix - I've long wondered about case formulation within psychological therapies and Hodges' model. Time to make a start, but real slow like...