Older blog entries for neale (starting at number 30)

This Sklyarov stuff is keeping me pretty busy. I hope they let him go soon, so I can get back to my normal life.

28 Jun 2001 (updated 20 Dec 2001 at 17:30 UTC) »
drc's post about the reworked advogato stuff convinced me to finally learn enough about CSS to make bordered boxes. You can do it, but finding out how isn't easy. The best way appears to be creating an element with table-cell display attributes, like this:

span.cert {
    display: table-cell;
    background-color: inherit;
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
    border: 2px;
}

Of course, Gecko is the only rendering engine that gets this right (although Opera does pretty well). Konqueror draws it correctly but then fills background over the text. IE does some weird word-wrapping. Looks good in w3-mode though.

So you can get advogato-like output using CSS, but it's not well-supported yet.

If you'd like to see the resultant output, check out thunk.

Yesterday, I submitted an ITP for robotfindskitten.

kgb, I like your wife's cards!
1 Jun 2001 (updated 1 Jun 2001 at 16:53 UTC) »

Gar, flub, mispost.

Yesterday I merged my mod_virgule changes in with CrackMonkey's tree. So now there's a mod_virgule tree which has an XML configuration file (for virtual hosting--no more recompiling! at least, not as much) and CrackMonkey's awesome "Last Read" hacks (as seen on Badvogato, among other places). Next stop: GNOME CVS.

I dusted off my modified jhcore last night. Maybe now that I know real (as opposed to net.) people, it will see some use. I debated a little bit about whether I should use a Cold Project core, since I'm much more familiar with the language, and tinnkered with the idea of a Scheme MOO, but decided to go with jhcore simply because it's very robust and I don't get much hack time these days. The first MOO I launched was pretty successful until I axed it and replaced it with a ColdCore. The users tried to use it, but eventually everyone ditched it.

Seems like I'm not content unless I have too much stuff to work on.

14 May 2001 (updated 14 May 2001 at 19:07 UTC) »

Working on mod_virgule now, and raph has perused through my patch archive. This included him seeing a rather flippant comment about a quick hack I inserted to make something work. I hope he didn't take it the wrong way, but I realize now that when you're treading in the tracks of your elders, it's wise to show a little respect.

raph, I think Advogato as it stands is just about ideal for its purpose. It's a community for free software developers, and the projects et cetera are targetted toward that sort of group. Adding additional rooms to this forum would be out of place, IMHO. Do one thing, and do it well.

If, however, you wanted to make Advogato its own room, inside a larger board, I imagine that would be fairly well received. But perhaps your best bet is to virtual host a new site with new users. I would like to end up with something that can continue to run Advogato more or less as it exists today, perhaps with a few extra amenities, but something which is also capable of supporting a larger BBS-like site with multiple topical message boards.

Wouldn't it be cool if the rooms could be distinguished by virtual host name? books.advogato.org, rants.advogato.org, what have you. Then www.advogato.org could be what it is right now.

I got on to say something about how there was more traffic to the mod_virgule archive than I expected, and ask if I should start a mailing list, but then I saw binaryfoo's diary entry and it changed the flavor of my day. It's cloudy out, perfect weather for introspection. Today has ceased being a good day for work.

More on thunk. The spouse factor seems to be an oft-overlooked hacker-related issue, and I don't doubt that folks on Advogato would have quite a bit to say about this. Maybe there's something relevant in the linuxchix mailing list archives.

If you run a mod_virgule, you may be interested in my patch repository.

I just registered thunk.geek using the OpenNIC system. Pretty cool. I'm glad to see that something like this has finally happened, and that there's enough support behind it to make it stick. At least, it looks like it's going to stick. Hooray! The Internet is (mostly) free again.

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New Advogato Features

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