Older blog entries for dorward (starting at number 27)

Another day, another person having problems with PHP sessions and amersands in URLs. You'll need to follow through to the HTML part (HTML email is bad enough, but non-multipart with a text alternative? Argh!), but don't follow his solution, its borked.

Where was I? Oh yes, I was prompted to write a detailed explanation of the problem and solutions so I can just pump off links to people in future. Corrections, extra information and general comments (especially nice ones) welcomed.

Allchin stressed that Microsoft has broken new ground in Longhorn. For example, document icons are no longer a hint of the type of file, but rather a small picture of the file itself. The icon for a Word document, for example, is a tiny iteration of the first page of the file. Folders, too, show glimpses of what's inside. Such images can be rather small, but they offer a visual cue that aids in the searching process, Allchin said.

-- CNET

Microsoft? May I introduce you to Konqueror and Nautilus?

I started fiddling around with writing my replacement for mod_autoindex. It is going to be just another module for my CMS, generate the index page offline (which makes handling cache control headers easier), and use valid markup. I should be able to find time to get it finished by the middle of the weekend (busy busy me, already spoken for for most of the rest of the week - I could get so much more done if I didn't have to earn enough to pay the mortgage).

I also managed to get subcategories working, they aren't implemented quite as I would have liked, but I realised I could avoid writing code entirely and support them simply by making the category index page a member of its parent category rather then the "category" category.

The code has, unfortunatly, begun to exhibit signs of the God Object anti-pattern (although everything inherits from it rather then calling it). I'm going to attack it with a big refactoring stick and a copy of Class::DBI before it gets too God-like.

According to TheReg, Via have opensourced their graphics drivers. I did some poking around, but this seems to have happened almost two months ago (or earlier, with an update two months ago). Is The Reg just being slow? Does anyone know if the drivers will be merged into X.org?

Before I click post, lets Google... CVS suggests that there was a merge of drivers two months ago with unichrome. Is unichrome the official Via drivers? Or the open source project?

One thing is clear. This diary entry is really rambling. I think I need to do some serious research tonight (along with replacing Sarge with Ubuntu on my laptop). If anyone wants to let me bypass that research with an infodump (or URL to obvious-webpage-I-haven't-found-yet), it would be gratefully recieved.

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.

5 Apr 2005 (updated 5 Apr 2005 at 22:12 UTC) »

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.

29 Mar 2005 (updated 29 Mar 2005 at 13:56 UTC) »

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.

16 Mar 2005 (updated 16 Mar 2005 at 15:41 UTC) »

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.

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