Older blog entries for dorward (starting at number 33)

Netscape 8

So Netscape 8 is out.

"The browser is like a hybrid car that combines the usability of Internet Explorer with the security of Firefox," Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for America Online/Netscape, told Reuters.

The usability of IE? I've always found Firefox more usable. It sounds more like a hybrid car that combines the security and usability of Firefox with a Big Red Lever which turns that security off.

Biometric DVD Protection

Over at Wired there is an article about Biometric DVD protection. Obvious problems not mentioned in that article include:

• Buying a DVD as a gift
• Letting other people in the same household watch the DVD
• Buying a DVD by mail order

This must be the most insanely stupid DRM scheme yet.

Replicators

They are coming.

Still setting up

Got lots of packages installed today (note that for x in package other-package etc etc etc; do emerge -u --deep $x; done doesn't work too well when you decide to add another package at the last minute and replace "$x" with it instead of adding it to the list.

x2vnc is handy. With it running, if I move my mouse far enough to the right it drops off my display and appears on my Windows "for testing CSS in IE" 98SE machine. No longer to I have to deal with the keyboard with too short a lead.

E17 is very nice. I love Xinerama with seperate virtual desktops on each screen. Now to decide if I poke around and see if I can work out how to customise the menus, or just switch to something more mature.

Gaming

Mongoose Open Day in a few weeks. Claudia Christian will be in attendance. This time I shall flee if I see Ian Barstow pointing a camera in my direction. Various people from around the country will probably be crashing at my place for the weekend

Higher Order Perl

Got a nice email from MJD - there isn't a hardback edition, but he hopes I enjoy it. Got a nice email from Amazon - they're sorry and would I like 20% off? Goes to show that complaining can be rewarding.

Reading

Currently I'm working my way through Interference: Book Two again, its always a good read. Oh no it isn't! and Mean Streets arrived this week. I also need to track down a copy of Dirk Gently so I can read the copy of Teatime that has been sitting on my to read pile for the past six months without feeling I'm missing out on something.

Gentoo

I finally found time to wipe Fedora from my harddisk and reinstall Gentoo. On the downside, I'm still watching stuff compile in the background. On the other hand, I managed to get X to use both video cards at the same time, something which always managed to crash Fedora for some reason (its amazing how used you can get to a 3000 pixel wide desktop - and how horrible it is to lose it). I also bothered to set up my mouse properly, so my scroll wheel and navigation buttons work once more. Things seem a lot nippier too - although that's probably due more to running Openbox instead of Gnome and a pile of servers.

CMS

Work progresses, slowly, on the CMS. It still isn't ported to Class::DBI (it didn't want to compile on Fedora and, like so many other things, didn't get investigated becuase I was planning to switch back to Gentoo (since Christmas)). Lastest bit is a hacked version of Justin Koivisto's "Defining An Image Crop Area With Javascript" script which will see patches submitted to the author once I get it doing everything I want. (I did send in one patch, only to find out that he had implemented the same feature the day before but hadn't published yet - ho hum, that's life).

Amazon

I'm unhappy with Amazon at present.

• A SCART lead arrived 3 hours before they posted it (if I believe their email).
• A DVD player posted before the SCART lead still hasn't arrived ... and was due today at the latest.
• Higher Order Perl arrived nice and quickly, but in paperback - the website claims Amazon only sell a hardback edition.

Its been a bad week for online shopping.

Perl

Looks like the Apps team at work is off to Braga this year. Yippie. I must arrange to take some of my holiday time off while I'm out there (shockingly I failed to use all my holiday last year, so I'm landed with six weeks to use up before next April - its a hard life).

The Dark Side

I've been drooling over X-boxes lately. Now I have a decent sized screen in my living room it would be nice to get a computer plugged in to it. Scarily, it looks like an X-box (with a mod chip) is the most cost effective way to go. Plus it has the added bonus of being able to play Fable and Jade Empire.

New Article: Ampersands, PHP Sessions and Valid HTML

26 April 2005: A new technical article on the topic of Ampersands, PHP Sessions and Valid HTML was published by the QAIG, courtesy of David Dorward. The QA Interest Group welcomes such contribution of material, see our Contribution Guidelines for details. (News archive)

- W3C QA News

I'm so proud.

How cute: Google Maps UK. Shame they aren't using up to date sources of information though. My road doesn't appear on their map.

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.