Older blog entries for jimw (starting at number 10)

i just have to wonder if it hurts to be involved in a heated database. it actually sounds rather refreshing, although perhaps not this time of year. maybe a couple of months ago, when it was a little colder.

i find it very disappointing that the gnu file utilities can't handle urls (speaking webdav under the hood, perhaps), and that gnu tar doesn't just automatically detect the compression type instead of making people remember whether bzip2 is 'y' or 'I' or 'j' or whatever this week.

sure, you can fill in the gaps with things like curl and wget and cadaver and remembering the magic bzip2 flag, but it just seems like someone isn't pushing the command-line interface forward when cp still doesn't understand urls.

bratsche, it could just be that people that are fanatical to a type of music (or a specific band) are fun to tweak. (and in my experience, exposure to music breeds appreciation, and exposure to fanatics breeds contempt.)

there's also a lot to be said about the effect of peer groups on musical tastes, of course. (in both directions. there's a herd of people who are fanatical about britney spears music, and the corresponding anti-britney herd. it's barely about the music in both herds, and they're both annoying.)

(what's this got to do with open-source? s/music(al)?/software/; s/band/vendor or license/; s/britney( spears)?/microsoft/.)

dwiner seems surprised that apache hasn't matched frontier feature-for-feature. looks to me like more people want apache's features than frontier's.

i wonder how many more people would use frontier if there were a mod_frontier for apache.

deekayen, you can get oracle for linux for free from oracle for personal/development use. (or something to that effect. i've misplaced my technet login.)
BenFrantzDale, it is a very small world. good to see that the money tree wasn't hurt. (i was at mudd when it was planted -- which wasn't that long ago and i'm not that old, dammit. wibstr.)

its too bad that recentlog.html doesn't send a Last-modified header.

a small project that i think would be fun: build a phone/answering-machine that had an ethernet connection, and used dhcp to obtain an address for itself, an ldap server for its phone number list, and an smtp server and address to which to send mp3/wav/whatever phone messages.

that's an internet appliance i could actually imagine using. (an obvious future extension would be supporting voice-over-ip.).

the only hard part of this seems like it would be putting together the hardware, which i know next-to-nothing about.

i hacked together a primordial dav-capable file browser using perl/gtk. it is almost to the point where i could actually use it. i was able to successfully browse around on a dav-capable server and edit a textfile.

the ui is based on that of sfm (and in fact mine was called sfm.pl until i decided to put it up and point to it from here), but mine is vastly less functional right now (except for the dav support). all you can do is select a single file and hit return to pass it off to run-mailcap, basically. if the file came via dav, and it changes, it will get re-uploaded when the handling program exits.

it relies on run-mailcap, file, and magic2mime to decide what programs to use for handling files. (available in the 'mime-support' and 'file' packages in debian, at least.)

the code is pretty gross. it grew rather organically. the http::dav package for perl is pretty primitive (had to delve into its internals to pull out directory listings).

it was an interesting way to learn more about perl/gtk and dav, at least.

i posted a link to this in a response to slashdot's linking to the gopher manifesto. it got me to reading a bunch of other stuff i wrote around that time in college. two things i noticed: i wrote strange things in allegedly academic papers (i should put my paper on appletalk online), and i knew all this shit was coming, but didn't take advantage of that knowledge. oh, and i was reminded again that i should have saved everything i've ever written.

1 older entry...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!