Advogato blog for berend

11 May 2008

Sun, 11 May 2008 22:17:00 GMT

Edwards attributes that to a lucky twist: The computer was running an ancient operating system, DOS, which does not scatter data all over drives as other approaches do.

1 Mar 2008

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 07:36:20 GMT

Two fairly busy days. Crash job to set up a website for SalesNet using Drupal 6. Not finished, but company is adding content first. Monday I'll hope to complete the last theming.

My first real project with Drupal 6. I just felt like a somewhat improved version of Drupal 5. Nothing really shocking, nothing large, just minor. Theming is fairly different though. And not a lot of the modules have been ported yet. So probably will be using Drupal 5 for a while.

30 Nov 2007

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:44:40 GMT

And that, my friends, is the best description I've come accross:

JS1 favors closures (behavior with attached state) over objects (state with attached behavior)

23 Nov 2007

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:14:33 GMT

I'm really happy with Emacs 21.1.2. It's extremely stable. Great stuff. Wish FireFox becomes that stable...

Recently also saw the State of AJAX. Although there are good parts, some parts, I think, are really misguided. He thinks JSON is much better for data transfer than XML. Yes. And how do we validate someone has send valid JSON? Not only syntactically, but also semantically. JSON is really a step backward in most cases. It's of course useful in certain others. But after a brief dabble with JSON I'm back to XML. It's the only way I can actually test easily if my server returns valid data.

Crockford complains about the graphics primitives, but SVG is a quite capable solution. CSS is horrible? It's much easier to use than any other alternative available to mankind so far.

Crockford also misses real innovation: innovation on the web is in the libraries these days. jQuery. is an absolutely brilliant new way of looking at the browser.

He believes that browser innovation has halted. That's partly true of course, but mainly because browsers are still catching up and fixing bugs. I think real innovation will come from killer apps: a particular application that will only work on one browser, but that is so compelling that other people will download that browser as well, and through such viral means the market share of that browser becomes dominant enough to take the next step. And such a browser should of course also offer a compelling development platform so those killer application writers will want to use it in the first place.

13 Nov 2007

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:12:18 GMT

Stuart Parmenter explains, unintentionally probably, that you really need a language that has a movable garbage collector, i.e. one that can compact memory. Only one player in town and that is Eiffel: compiles to C, compiles incredibly fast, no overwriting memory, runs on almost any platform.

12 Nov 2007

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 02:20:47 GMT

Lots of changes recently. Upgraded to gnome 2.20.1, which is a fairly smooth process now I understand the build system and can fix build errors.

I'm also trying to upgrade to OpenOffice 2.3 which is much harder. I.e. in the unbuildable category.

Upgraded to TeX live 2007, but in the process lost the ability to use the PDF built-in fonts, which simply look best and create very small PDF files. And no one knows how to get it back, argghh. When TeX even for its most ardent fans becomes to hard to use, it really will move to a very small segment of the market place.

30 Sep 2007

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:16:23 GMT

Had to upgrade my FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE server to FreeBSD 6.2 as the 4.x branch was no longer supported. I looked at the binary option, but that wasn't really supported. Played a bit with the source option, but that didn't look good either. Installed the new kernel, but could not boot it. Tried something to install the new boot loader, but that didn't work well either. So in the end I decided to go for the recommended option: backup user data, wipe out the disk and reinstall. That went reasonably well actually. New system seems to be faster than 4.11-STABLE, pretty good.

But still in the process of updating software, which is a slow process because my server is a Pentium II...

25 Sep 2007

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:51:42 GMT

I might not agree with a lot of Blair's policies, but I think his call to boycott the Beijing 2008 Olympics is a good cause. I fully support it.

17 Aug 2007

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 01:10:55 GMT

Another terrific Ann Coulter column. It is indeed interesting how a particular segment of the population is falling for loonies and hoaxes, be it that G.W. Bush is a greater threat to the USA than Hugo Chaves is to Venezuela or that global warming is caused by humans and can be stopped by not leaving your charger in the outlet. There must be some explanation for it, they are not loonies at first sight, but there's a great deficiency in capacity for rational thought.

15 Aug 2007

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 22:25:59 GMT

Tried to run pecl, got something like:

phpize: shtool: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission
denied

The resolution isn't something I would have found easily.