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December 30, 2003
Weblogging cycles
An interesting article about the cycles of weblogging - gleaned from decaffeinated.org.
Posted by dave at 03:43 PM.
Comments (0)FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers
As seen on Yahoo!...
This is possibly one of the stupidest alerts in a very long line of stupid terror alerts. What's next? Arresting people for being able to read? For reading the wrong books?
"He was carrying a copy of the Qu'ran, your honour."
"Clearly Guilty. Send him to Guantanamo bay."
Update: There's a great discussion of this over at Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Site. (Have I mentioned how much I like that site?)
Posted by dave at 03:23 PM.
Comments (0)Some CSS goodness
I've been doing some web design for a friend of mine. The previous design she had involved all sorts of bletcherous IE specific stuff and a metric buttload of javascript and cack to get image popups working.
I've recreated that effect with pure CSS on Vicky's pages. It wasn't easy to get IE to play along, but I got it in the end. If you look at the CSS, the key to the image popups is:
DIV.thumbnailbox A:hover { display: inline; }
DIV.thumbnailbox A:hover SPAN { display: block; position: absolute; top: 0em; right: 0em; z-index: 102; }
/*Hack to stop IE being a pain in the butt*/ /* This moves the popups over to the left because IE gets it wrong.*/ *html DIV.thumbnailbox A:hover SPAN { right: 15em; }
This turns off the SPAN, which is itself an image, until you mouseover it, when it appears in a fixed location.
The key to getting it to work in IE involves the A:hover declaration and the hack selector at the bottom. without the first, the images don;t appear at all, and without the second, they get absolutely positioned to the parent element to the actual containing element, for some strange reason and need to be repositioned with the hack.
It works perfectly well in Mozilla without those hacks, but IE is what most people use, so it has to work in that steaming pile of cack.
Posted by dave at 12:38 AM.
Comments (0)December 28, 2003
Closing Entries
I closed off the last entry — it was just ranting on my part about something that almost no-one who reads this would ever find interesting.
Currently trying out Movable Type. Seems a lot slicker than Greymatter.
Posted by dave at 11:12 PM.
Comments (0)Blogging
Having used Grey Matter for a few weeks now, I must day that I really don't like the interface. Typing into a webform just feels very, very wrong to me.
This just feels wrong, dammit!Not being able to break up entries with proper HTML also feels wrong, although it is possible, as the callout shows.
I really got used to being able to edit entries with vi, and having a nice, solid Makefile to regenerate the whole site. By contrast, Greymatter seems to take an age to regenerate the site. It takes five minutes or so, as opposed to the twenty or thirty seconds which my Makefiles did. OK, Greymatter is doing quite a bit more, but it still feels very awkward.
I also stand by my earlier comments about the sheer mind-boggling stupidity of the storage format. Why oh why is the data not stored in XML files? What possible reason could there be for storing the date in eight fields when one would do just as well?
Gaah!
I'm looking at MovableType at the moment. Maybe that'll be closer to what I want and I won;t have to go and develop something from the ground up.
Posted by dave at 02:52 AM.
Comments (0)Site Down
I've been trying to upgrade this webserver to Linux 2.6.0 over the last few days, but I've had very little success. I've had to spend a few hours tonight recovering from a corrupt root partition, and trying to get the server to actually boot again, despite having a good spread of RedHat kernels, home compiled kernels and the new kernel. If you've been trying to access the site tonight (28 December 2003), it's largely been powered down and disassembled
Strangely enough, I had 2.6.0 booting or a bit, and my ancient laptop will boot it with no problems, but I had persistent creeping failures when trying to get Gizmo (the webserver) to boot it.
I guess the lesson is that production machines shouldn't run the bleeding edge stuff. I'm sticking to the stock redhat kernels until Fedora 2.0 comes out, with the 2.6 kernels as stock.
Speaking of the ancient laptop - it has some weird problems with the PCMCIA cards - I have a wireless card for it which is a genuine PCMCIA card, but I keep getting "Bad Vcc" errors due to the weirdness of the PCMCIA interface. Toshiba Tecras are not a good choice for a Linux Laptop - they're just chock full of proprietary hardware which doesn't work with anything except Windows. Not to mentions that the processor is welded to the chassis, and has a heatsink welded on top of it. It's is not possible to upgrade the damn thing! I fondly remember my old Olivetti, with a Socket 7, so that I could keep uprading the processor.
Posted by dave at 02:20 AM.
Comments (0)December 26, 2003
Return of the King
I woke up this morning and blearily shuffled into the computer room to check something. The 11:30 showing of Return of the King in Pacific Place had seats available which were acceptably far back from the front. I saw the first movie from the front row. Man, did those hobbits have big feet!
I arrived at the cinema just in time to get a drink — a small one, it's a loooong movie — and got to my seat. Some slouching Neanderthal was blubbering on his phone next to me, but mercifully didn't use it during the movie. He inexplicably left about an hour and a half before the end too, which seems a bit strange. Maybe it was the way I'd growl whenever he took his phone out...
Hot Damn, that is one fine movie.
The large scale open air shots are truly glorious, as are the battle scenes. Jackson and Weta have truly raised the bar on large scale battles.
Minas Tirith is absolutely stunning - it's just like the image I had in my head. The tree is perfect too, but it should have been explained why it was lifeless before and was flowering after the victory. I guess (and hope) that this will be in the Extended edition, as well as the Houses of Healing and some explanation of just why everyone decides to follow Aragorn.
Vertiginuous angles - my ankles are still twitching. Why are cavalry perched halfway up a mountain? Why do people in middle Earth build without regard for actual flat land?
Arachnophobes - I'm very arachnophobic, but I wasn't grossed out by Shelob at all — I though it was a very convincing giant spider.
Gollum - Andy Serkis is truly amazing.
Some Other reviews:
- http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/rotk.html
- http://www.steelypips.org/principles/2003_12_21_principlearchive.php#107210908553025525
- http://www.livejournal.com/users/kate_nepveu/34669.html#cutid1
- http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004263.html#004263
Posted by dave at 09:49 PM.
Comments (0)December 25, 2003
Happy Christmas!
It's that time of year again - the Earth has tilted on it's orbit and the days are getting longer. The sun has shone into the burial chambers at NewGrange, the ritual music has been played (and played, and played), Google's gone all seasonal, and Americans are trying hard to not offend anyone by their words (by saying "happy holidays" instead of "happy Christmas"), while their government offends the entire world by their actions.
Here's some Christmas Urban Legends to while away the time with.
Posted by dave at 12:06 PM.
Comments (1)December 19, 2003
Just when you think the world may not be that weird after all...
As seen on the ever unlinkable SCuMP this morning:
Michael Jackson became a member of the Nation of Islam shortly before he was formally charged with child molestation yesterday, the New York Post tabloid reported.
Jackson's first scheduled court appearance in January was also delayed by a week. His passport would be returned to allow him to travel to Britain, sources said yesterday. The change in plans to arraign Jackson, 45, on multiple counts of child molestation came as prosecutors were poised to file formal criminal charges against the star in Santa Maria, near his Neverland ranch in California.
The newspaper quoted sources as saying Jackson became a member of the black Muslim organisation led by Louis Farrakhan on Wednesday night.
"The King of Pop is re-styling himself Jacko X," the tabloid said.
Mr Farrakhan's organisation would not comment. Fox News reported that Jackson's brother, Jermaine, brought Mr Farrakhan's chief of staff into Jackson's inner circle as "a bodyguard".
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, just in case you don't know, is military slang for "What the heck is going on here?"
Posted by dave at 09:30 AM.
Comments (1)December 17, 2003
Content Management Software
I've just been poring through the source code for Grey Matter, the software which manages the bloggier aspects of this site and I have to say I'm stunned by some of what I see. 'Music', 'Mood', 'Emoticons'. It makes me want to barf. There's a lot of things, well, not wrong, but which could certainly stand improving.
The primary focus of the software is very clearly managing a personal weblog. There are some pretty powerful things in here, don't get me wrong, but there are an awful lot of hardcoded decisions by the programmer as well. These are things like forcing two 'adjectives' for every post — Music and Mood — rather than letting the blog-author specify a number of additional attributes when setting up the blog. It wouldn't be very hard, for example, to replace the 'Music' or 'Mood' templates with generic templates, so authors could have whatever they wanted as descriptors for each post. A blog about wines could have descriptors relating to vintages, grapes, vineyards, regions, etc, while one about food could have descriptors relating to ingredients, ethnicity, spiciness, carnivorous or vegetarian.
Possibly one of the worst things is the way dates are stored in the database. Not, as you would imagine, as a timestamp, but as a collection of strings with (and this is the stupidest thing) AM or PM specified. sure, this makes it easy for the programmer to patch up a defective entry later, but it means that you now require eight fields to store the posting time when it could be done easily with one. All Unix boxes have a counter of seconds since 1970, which functions as the system datestamp. This one counter specifies the posting time in UTC to the second, and is easily convertable to local time in Adis Adaba or whatever.
The data files are stored in a glob-delimited form ('Glob delimited' means that there's a non printing character which separates the various items of data) and this glob changes &emdash sometimes its the vertical bar character, sometimes it's a newline. The more logical choice of flat file storage would be an XML file, which is how my own Content Management System stores the rest of the site. The concept of splitting the body text with <br /> tags is inherently wrong as well. A paragraph is defined as something between <p>...</p> tags, not one lump of text with breaks scattered through it.
One aspect of the GM software which really annoyed me was that there are some components which are completely hardcoded and not changeable without editing the Perl code. Everything which is output to the HTML file should be definable by the user. My site is valid XHTML - I don't want someone else's stuff in there screwing up the validation.
There are many things which are excellent about GM - the simplicity of setting it up and the way it stores everything in flat files is good. The way it generates flat-files for the html is perfect for a site like mine where the content changes less often that the number of page-visits. If the content is changing more all the time, then of course a database backed site is ideal, but there is a risk of increasing the load times for each page. with my hourly hits going between 50 on average and 500 during the peak SARS traffic time, having the pages regenerated each time would have overloaded my server.
So, while I like GM enough to continue using it, I'm working an adapting it to use XML files for storage, better date storage, completely user-defined output and multiple generic descriptors. In fact, adapting it is the wrong phrase. 'Seeing how it does it, and then sorting out how to do it right ('right' being 'right in my particular context', of course). Just don't expect this to happen quickly, or even completely, or even to result in a product which would be useable by anyone except the author. I'm doing this to scratch a very specific itch.
And did I mention that the preview uses GM's own styles instead of the blog's styles? How chuffing useless is that?
Posted by dave at 01:24 AM.
Comments (0)December 16, 2003
Some New Pictures of Conor and Roxanne
There are some new pictures of Conor over on Conor's Page.
There's also one new picture of Roxanne at this page.
[Updated to fix URLs.]
Posted by dave at 01:10 AM.
Comments (2)December 15, 2003
In a World
Ever wondered about who does those Movie Trailers?
Here's a trailer making fun of trailers. Apparently the guy doing the voice over is one of few guys who do most of them.
Posted by dave at 11:16 PM.
Comments (0)Site Down
Hmmph. My DSL line went down last night just after one, and needed a good kick to get back running, which is why the site was unavailable.
I must really get around to writing that Perl::HTML module to keep an eye on the router...
Posted by dave at 08:03 PM.
Comments (2)December 12, 2003
Oil firm 'overcharged' US in Iraq
Oil firm 'overcharged' US in Iraq. Yet more crony-capitalism.
Join in the Google™bombing meme: unelectable
Posted by dave at 09:47 AM.
Comments (0)December 10, 2003
The Environment
There's an excellent article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr about the environment and the way the Bush administration is rolling back years of progress. Crimes Against Nature: By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Posted by dave at 06:15 PM.
Comments (0)The Language Hat
I just noticed a fascinating site about languages: LanguageHat.com.
Posted by dave at 01:20 PM.
Comments (0)December 05, 2003
Monstrous Regiment
Some time back, I mentioned that I'd picked up a copy of the latest Terry Pratchett book, Monstrous Regiment.
On first reading, I didn't like it very much.
I read it again this week, however, and my opinion's changed somewhat
On the second reading, I found the gradual revelations about the cast of characters to be less contrived than before. The realisation that they all have their little secrets and the constant wondering about who else might be aware of those secrets runs throughout the first two thirds of the book, until the somewhat heavy handed climax blows the whole thing open.
As for the Ankh-Morpork characters who show up, I suppose it's consistent with The Fifth Elephant to have Vimes show up as an ambassador, but I wouldn't have throught Lord Rust would go along with him.
It's not one of the all-time great Discworld books, like Reaper Man, The Fifth Elephant or Night Watch, but it's ok. Enjoyable, well written, and thought-provoking.
Updates: spelling corrections.
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Posted by dave at 02:01 PM.
Comments (0)December 03, 2003
A few changes
You may notice a few changes...
Update 10/12/2003: right now, the styles are a bit of a mess and the layout is a bit busy. I'll try and sort it out soon as I can. I can't get at the guts of the site when I'm not at home.
I've moved the whole shebang to a Grey Matter blog. I chose this because it's the closest to the existing design philosophy of the site.
Comments are enabled on everything, so you can go back and wibble about earlier stuff, if you want.
This is also entry 300, believe it or not...
And also, you won't be able to comment easily if you use IE, because the damn stupid piece of crud won't recognise perfectly valid CSS. I'll probably fix this later - when it isn't quarter to two in the morning!
Update: Some features may come and go while I get everything sorted out.