Older blog entries for Waldo (starting at number 11)

I've gotten pretty good with RegEx, I'm happy to say. I'm a little fuzzy on the Perl-style RegEx (which is obviously much more powerful than egrep or PHP's ereg), but I've got to start somewhere. I just sort of puttered along with it for a bit, never really using RegEx for what it's worth. It's nice to be getting some real mileage out of it.

I've also been moving along well on XML. Someday I'll step back and learn SGML, but I figure if I wait, I'll appreciate it all the more.

BTW, Tobias Ratschiller's Web Application Development With PHP is pretty good. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, so I'm not prepared to give a full review, but I'm definitely totally happy with it so far. It's nice to see that the way that I do things (at least 2 chapters in :) in PHP is pretty much the right way to do it. Not that I haven't learned anything; I've learned a lot. But a lot of it is just re-enforcing what I've taught myself.

I've been totally redoing nancies.org, a site that I and a few friends made a couple of years ago. It's structurally unchanged from its condition when it was first made, which makes aspects of it embarassing to me. I'm completely rewriting it in PHP and MySQL, and I'm *really* loving the work. I've written all of the systems that one would generally just grab from elsewhere -- intelligent content management, XML-based content syndication, polling, advertising management, some impressive text parsing and auto-linking of keywords, and (working on this) message boards. I was thinking about integrating Phorum, as I've done before, but that requires a new table for each discussion topic, which isn't cool. Too many tables for too few posts. If we get 50 posts after each story, I'd be happy. With a new story about once a day, that's just too many tables. So I've started on my own system. Nothing terribly fancy -- your basic threaded discussion board. If it's any good, I guess I'll GPL it. You know, since the world needs yet another threaded discussion board. ;)

I got the O'Reilly Firewall book in the mail from Fatbrain this week. It's about as big as the bat book, which is a little frightening. My experience with ipchains is limited, but I really need to get a firewall running at the office before we add some of the new systems that we'd like to get in there. I guess I'll get an emachine and hook up a couple of terminals to it and start testing. Maybe I'll have the energy in a few weeks.

On Saturday, I'm off to Emerald Isle, NC for a week at the beach with my girlfriend. We went there 2 years ago, too, at the same house. I'm not bringing a laptop or nothing. But the PCS and a stack of O'Reilly books are a must. After all, am I not a geek? <grin>

I just saw in jschauma' s 00.08.05 journal that he just started reading Fahrenheit 451. Funny -- I (re-)read that book on 00.08.06. I guess it's all of the recent events (DeCSS, Napster, CPHack, etc.) that have us thinking about this.

I've been trying to set up Publius since late last night. I get nasty Perl errors when running it, things like:

Bareword "RC_BAD_REQUEST" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/publius_server.pl line 87.

I don't know what to do with that. Anyhow, Publius sure seems especially compelling after reading Fahrenheit 451. I guess we're all just tuned to that.

I've ceased to get karma on Slashdot. My posts get moderated up, but I'm stuck at 122. (I should have 128.) I'm not sure what to make of this. As the FAQ says, "[Karma] doesn't determine your IQ or your value as a human being. It's simply not a big deal." This is true, and I keep telling myself that. I guess I'll have to wade into the Slash code, but that seems like a lot of work for a few lousy karma points. I mean, if I wanted to to add a new feature (karma graphs!) that would be one thing... Anyhow, I don't know what to do about this, if anything. I've had worse problems in life, that's for sure.

Sweet Jesus. It's 3:40am and I'm still at work. I stopped for dinner for an hour back around 6pm. Short of that, it's been a 15.5 hour work day so far. I don't imagine that I'll be leaving for another hour or so.

I hate deadlines. And I really hate false deadlines.

I know that I'm having a bad day when I get e-mail from both CmdrTaco and Ras mus. Both were just replying after I broke something and whined for help. Ain't no other reason that they'd ever e-mail little old me. :)

Why is it that \n == " " on Advogato? I have to rephrase my sentences in all kinds of weird ways to get things to work. See how "Rasmus" is broken up? That means that I decided to stop caring. It's good for me.

Well, that worked. Though that really wasn't a plea for ceritification, I'm glad that I was certified by jmelesky and macricht , because it looks like that put me over the top. Yesterday's queries stand, though.

We just met with our attorney about our client contract, and one tough point was copyright and ownership of code. If we make a US$30K system for content management for a client, we give them an exclusive license. As part of that, they can't change that system at all. Even though it's in PHP and Perl, neither of which are compiled. That really bothers me, with my OS roots. But the point remains that they could make a change, screw it up, and we're obliged to fix it. (Or they could make a really minor change, claim that it's their own version now, and sell it.) So I understand and recognize that we need to retain copyright and contractually prevent them from altering their own website. But it upsets the OS (but not the FS :) geek in me. I guess I should write an article about this; I assume this duality is a problem for a lot of my fellow hackers. I don't know if I can provide any answers, but I can raise a lot of questions. I'm good like that. :)

I thought I understood the whole certification system, but I guess not. 8 people have certified me: 1 Observer, 3 Apprentices, 3 Journeyers and 1 Master. Now, I've read about the trust metric, and I guess it's just too much about process and not enough about specifics. But I'd like think that, if it just takes a single Master to certify somebody as a Master, I'd at least be certified as an Apprentice now on that basis alone.

This isn't some whine for people to certify me -- I've hardly certified anybody. First the obvious ones, and I'm trying to learn about other site users and their FS involvement before I certify others. But I guess I'm just saying that I don't really get the system -- is it broken, or have I just not hit the threshold yet?

I only suggest that it's broken because I also can't log in. God help me if I erase my cookies for "www.advogato.org." If I skip the "www.," thusly rendering my cookies useless, and try to log in, I get:

Account is missing auth field
Account waldo is missing its auth field. This is a problem with the server.

So I don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility that something's broken. What's really curious is that I could, for about a day, post articles. (Not that I did. But I could.) After more people certified me as an Apprentice, I lost that ability. Very weird.

I scratched an itch! Granted, it's a stupid little shell script, but it's all mine. :) Generally, I undertake projects in PHP and MySQL that span months, creating immense content-management systems with extensive administrative and logging functions, entirely web-managed, that are deeply entrenched within the server. This time, I wrote a little Bash script that proved a point. And it got modded up to a +5, too. I'm so proud. :)

I'm learning Perl. I kinda knew it, once, but pretty much forgot it. My head works like that, sadly. I've been such a PHP whore for so long (well, a year and a half) that Perl looks uglier than ever. ;) PHP can be run from the command line, if you compile PHP as a stand-alone executable, but that seems...I don't know...wrong. It's just not what it's for. Like using a nice paring knife to carve pebbles out of the treads of your shoe. Perl is like using a Leatherman to spread peanut butter on a bagel, tear open an Outpost shipment, or pry open an old drive bay. You can use it for pretty much anything. It may not be the best solution, but it's probably pretty damned good. And I'm no more going to continue to ignore Perl any more than I'm going to leave my Leatherman on my nightstand.

I'm starting with the scratching-the-itch functions. Yes, I know that most of my itches have been scratched many times before in far more Rube Goldburgesque fashions than I'm likely to come up with, but it's the best way for me to start.

This evening, I installed an Aqua theme on Sawfish on my YDL iMac at home. Just for kicks, I read over the theme.jl file. Sawfish, if you don't know, is a Lisp-based WM. I'd never really paid much attention to Lisp, pretty much disregarding it as something for old-school hackers with bushy beards and sandals. It's nice-looking. Very non-threatening. I don't think that I'll be learning it anytime soon, but it's nice to have a language so easily demystified.

Maybe there will be a time when Perl will look nice to me. Or maybe not. :)

I figured out the solution to my problem: Don't show images on their own in the browser, but call them from within body tags. Avoids the whole thing.

Gosh, if I worked in a big corporate place, I'd probably get some award for "thinking outside the box."

Munk & Phyber, Inc.: We think *around* the box!" :)

Oh, and today's my birthday. I'm 22. I can't bring myself to be excited.