Older blog entries for dorward (starting at number 23)

Hardware

Kudos to Amazon. I ordered a new graphics card (I still suspect my current card as the source of all my recent system lock ups) from them on Wednesday afternoon, picking the free (but slow) postage option. It was due sometime between next Wednesday and Friday, but showed up this morning.

Now I just have to wait until I can go home and install it - with luck I'll have a stable system again, and just in time for the weekend too.

CMS

The CMS is running nicely now. My next job is to write a decent frontend to it along with a "new article" detection script (which will look at the filesystem for articles that aren't registered in the database, add them with some guesswork about what it should be doing with them, and then let me approve or correct its choices). Then, of course, there is the rest of the TODO list which currently occupies the front page.

Yes Vodafone, I do want to renew my contract for another year, and yes I would like to have half price line rental for the next six months, and yes I would like an included-in-the-line-rental very shiny new toy.

Getting my contacts to my new phone was a breeze with Multisync. I just performed a backup, moved my SIM card to the new hardware, changed the Bluetooth address on Multisync and performed a restore. Easy.

The K700i has a lot more memory then the T610, so I went hunting for some things to put in it. Almost everything I've installed came from NG Phone's J2ME Open Source page. There is some nice stuff there. MathMe (via Russel) also looks good, but isn't available to the public yet.

So, better screen, better camera, more memory, more responsive OS - I'm happy. The only down side is that the keypad isn't as nice. I really liked the strongly seperated buttons on the T610. Still, you can't have everything.

Pushed the new site, such as it is, live at the usual address (comments welcome via the contact page). I've set up a redirect from the test site. I don't expect it will be too difficult to implement the remaining items on the TODO list.

For implementing the blog section, I'm thinking about writing some threading code so that links can be generated automatically from older to newer entries that follow on from them.

Finally made some progress on the CMS. It turns out that firing up LWP and automating the building of most of the database from the existing site does a good job of removing scary barriers.

The new site (I've restructured and changed the design while maintaining the same URLs (Good URLs don't change)) is up for testing at http://stone.thecoreworlds.net/ (for the time being).

Internet Explorer has bugs (oh big surprise there) which I'll try to hammer out before pushing it onto my main site. I've also got to rewrite a good chunk of the About section (since some of it is out of date, reflects opinions I no longer hold, or simply isn't written well) and add blurb to each category index page. That last bit will be easier once I add a front end to the edit page for Category objects.

Distros

I'm getting an itch to go through all my systems and slap Ubuntu on the lot of them, with the exception of my current Windows box which gets to duel boot Debian and be a database and http server for development.

... on second thoughts it would be rather difficult to test webpages in MSIE if the Windows machine duel boots the webserver. I wonder if the machine at the back of the cupboard works?

Gmail

I am not a fan of Gmail, its got too many things wrong with it. Most of which I've mentioned in the "suggest a feature" page, and all of which have been ignored (at least to all appearances).

• No real threading
• The spam filter has too many false positives
• The spam filter has too many false negatives
• The user filters can't filter on arbitrary mail headers. This means that mailing lists have to be sorted on subject (so you can't put responses to list messages sent directly to you elsewhere) or To address (oh dear, BCC)
• When you tell Gmail that a message is not spam, it puts it back in the inbox - even if you have a filter which tells it to bypass the inbox.
• When looking at the spam folder there is a "This is not spam" button. If you click on a message to see if it is spam or not, that button moves to the right and is replaced by "Delete forever!". I've lost mail I wanted to keep thanks to that.
• Sometimes it gets confused and shows you all the messages in one folder as if you were looking in another folder. So you look in A, it thinks you are looking in B, and shows you all the messages in A with explicit "Also in A" labels, and the colour scheme of B (OK, this one hasn't been ignored. They asked me for a screenshot. I haven't heard anything since I sent it though).

The future of the World Wide Web

Spent sometime this morning watching the archived webcast of Tim Berners-Lee's 2003 Royal Society talk. It was reasonably gripping viewing, and I think I finally "get" the Semantic Web. Its worth a view if you can stand to install the non-Free RealPlayer.

Subversion

Started playing around with Subversion, its the first time I've set up my own revision management repository. I'm rather impressed with the hook scripts facility, I've hacked together some Perl to generate HTML documents from committed text files via Markdown.

Next job is to improve its efficiency (e.g. not regenerating every page on the site with each commit) and get it to read as much as possible from the environment rather then hard coded constants posing as variables.

A little behind

UKIF is concened that IDN will let scammers create fake sites more easily.

Gosh, it didn't take them long to catch up did it?</sarcasm>

Google Toolbar

There is more fuss and bother over the Google Toolbar and its ability to change (on user request) various things into links. Some people suspect it might be infringing on copyright by editing the document. I haven't examined it closely (mainly because that would involve plugging a monitor into my Windows PC and booting it up for the first time this year), but I was under the impression that the toolbar edited the document on the end user's PC. Wouldn't this be akin to the VCR issue? Google doesn't alter the document, they just provide a tool which allows the user to. (IANAL)

Work

Very late night last night, and final testing this morning, but the new Sophos Website is now live and rather shiny. This is the biggest change we've done to the website and we managed to bring the change over time down from eleven hours (for the last big launch) to two and a quarter minutes. Woo.

DG834

My home Internet connection is provided through a Netgear DG834 and, since I got the connection I have not been able to send mail (not a major problem since I generally work from an SSH account anyway). Over the weekend I finally managed to track down the problem. The DNS server on the router is providing timeouts when I make an MX request. Now I'm just waiting to see what technical support have to say for themselves. Worst comes to the worst I could hack the source or just tell my mail server to use my ISPs DNS servers directly (they work fine for MX requests). Hula doesn't look at /etc/resolv.conf anyway, so it would be little pain to start using it instead of Postfix and point it directly at Demon's DNS servers.

Printing

My printer was kindly donated by a friend - I got a printer, he got 2ft of shelf space back, but the cable that it came with was a little flakey (by which I mean it was held together with electrical tape and kept falling out of the parallel port). Then I moved to my new flat and the cable vanished.

Weekend past I decided to do something about it. I went to PC World and gibbered in fear after arriving at the cables aisle and spotting the price of printer cables. So I went next door to Maplin and picked one up for less then half the price. CUPS was trivial to configure and I can now print without scping postscript files into the office for the first time since Christmas. Happy days.

ITSafe

I emailed queries about some of their design choices to ITsafe yesterday. No response yet, but that is probably due to them being overloaded on the first day of being live. I'm sure the coverage on the BBC drove traffic at them with the odd inquisitive person among the hordes.

pid seems to share my views. As pid is obviously a smart chap (everyone judges intelligence based on how much other people agree with themselves), I've added him to my rawdog config.

Meanwhile, back at ITsafe, a little poking at their style sheet also reveals that they use pt units on screen. Oh dear.

Projects

Well my SP writing project has been pushed onto the back burner thanks to Tina resurrecting a failed project from two years ago. Still, I need to get the SP sorted by Easter, so I will probably get cracking on it this weekend.

The CMS is still stagnating. I'm being tempted to throw the code out and start again (again). Oh why did I have to forget that my database was stored on my root partition when I thought "Fedora will probably make it really easy to get my graphics card working" and replaced my distro? I suppose I could write an LWP script to parse the current site and extract the meta data from it. That would be more fun then reentering everything by hand.

Silent Trackback

Idea: A script that searches Google for links to pages on a specified website, discards links from that website and links it has seen before, then informs the user of the remaining links. Like trackback, but slower and without the need for both authors to support Trackback.

Elsewhere

• An ideal world
• Bunny
• Microsoft to Disable Online Windows Activation - it isn't as bad as Slashdot makes out, but I'm glad I'm not a Windows user.
• I got round to implementing the better touchpad driver for my laptop; it works a treat.

ITSafe

Our wonderful little government has launched a new service - ITsafe which is wrong on so many levels. I signed up for it for the amusement value, I don't expect it will provide me with any useful information I don't get elsewhere sooner.

• You cannot sign up for the SMS service without providing an email address.
• You have to enter an ITsafe word which is included in all e-mails they send to you. It isn't included in the welcome message. (False sense of security anyway - its so easy to sniff)
• The sign up system is not double opt-in. I could sign up random strangers to the service and they wouldn't get the "If you really want to join this mailing list then follow this link" that we've come to expect from reputable sources.
• Its name is two words mashed together (for maximum trouble for screen reader software).
• The website claims to be XHTML 1.0 Strict - it isn't. It abuses tables for layout. It has a recommended resolution. In short - it is not web standards friendly.