as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Darxabre have released Hooligans: Storm Over Europe, a strategy game in which your goal is to “become the most notorious group of hooligans in Europe!”

Maybe I’m losing my sense of humour about these things, but…

Is the hooligan problem not, like, severe enough? In a world where fans can be fatally stabbed before matches and England’s fantastic 5-1 victory over Germany is marred by hooligans travelling abroad with makeshift weapons and 40 arrests, is this a subject to make light of?

OK, so you’re supposed to have a sense of humour about these things. There should be no subject that’s invulnerable to a laugh. It’s not designed to encourage violence, of course. It’s just any old strategy game set against the background of hooliganism in Europe. Think of it as another Command and Conquer, if you like. I”m just getting old and out-of-touch.

But what’s next? Stalin: The Game? Perhaps we”ll see Gutshot: Medical Emergency on our shelves soon. Or Theme Auschwitz. See how many undesirables you can shepherd into the gas chambers.

What? You’ve got to have a sense of humour about these things.

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The word of the weekend is: diarrhoetic. I hate everything.

I hate being ill. Really.

Especially since most of the time I feel alright. I have a ton of work to do and I can”t go to work, because, to be frank, my desk is too far from the toilet.

Did I mention how much I dislike being ill?

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I”ve been waiting for digest authentication for webservers for ages. It turns out that, surprise, IIS is incompatible with Apache and the RFC.

According to eWeek, IIS and IE work with one another for digest authentication but neither will operate with non-MS servers/clients.
MS’’s response to people’’s complaints about them once again breaking a standard by implementing it incompatibly was to say, “the nature of this particular issue does not put customer data at risk or pose a known security threat, so the fix will be prioritized accordingly”. Which looks to me like not-so-secret code for ah-ha-ha-ha, suckers, that’’s one more idea we didn”t invent that no-one will now ever be able to use. Conspiracy theorist? Me? I mean, come on, does it look to you like it was an accident on their part? Are they leaping to fix it and be standards-compliant? Are they hell. So IE and IIS work together as a pair, and Apache and Mozilla implement the RFC (meaning that any other browser, like, say, Konqueror, or Opera, that implements the digest RFC will work with Apache, but not with IIS). Great. Microsoft on one side of the wall and everyone else on the other. Again.

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I don’t like Flash. And I don’t like Mozilla telling me to download it. So I fixed it.

Sick of Mozilla popping up its “Default Plugin” box when you hit a page with Flash? Well, if you”re on Linux, then a solution is at hand.

nullFlashPlugin is, well, a null Flash plugin. It’’s a plugin attached to Flash that doesn”t do anything, so it suppresses the warning without displaying the monstrous corruption to the purpose of the web that is Macromedia Flash. All hail Netscape making their plugin SDK available, I say.

Finally someone achieves the Holy Grail of video gaming. A perfect score on Pac-Man.

I would not have believed that no-one had ever managed this. But apparently it is so. Billy Mitchell, a 33-year-old from Fort Lauderdale, scored a perfect 3,333,360 points playing Pac-Man, according to Twin Galaxies. That is real obsession. I cannot help but applaud this true devotion to duty. It took him two days.

The Alertbox catches a spelling error in its URL and fixes it for you. This is a good trend.

Try looking at http://www.useit.com/alterbox/. It takes you straight to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. This is rather neat. I like this sort of thing. How common this error is can be seen by the fact that I’ve typed the above URL into this post three times and spelled it “alTERbox” two of those three. But the key thing is that it just happened. If I hadn’t noticed my misspelling in between hitting ENTER and the browser displaying the page (and changing the URL), I wouldn’t have even noticed. This kind of clever touch does wonders for a site’s usability. Google does it too: try http://ww.google.com/.

Now, the examples I’ve got there are no great surprise — the Google team have done wonders on the usability of their site (to the point of leading trends rather than following them), and it partially explains why they’re the leading search engine. And if Our Lord of Web Usability Jakob is not using usability finesses, what hope the rest of us? But I’d liek to see more of this sort of thing.

This site already makes some overtures in this direction. At one point, all the pages on here were suffixed .html, then they became .shtml, and then .cas, as the content of the pages became more sophisticated. However, the site does redirect accesses to foo.html and foo.shtml to foo.cas, so as not to break old links. Now, the filenames in the URL don’t need to be accessed with the suffix at all — if you want index.cas, you can simply call it “index”. This is made possible by Apache’s snazzy content negotiation feature, a secret code word for “if I’m asked for a file and no extension is specified, get the file with that basename and an extension.” As I understand it, if you’ve got foo.html and foo.jpg, and you ask for foo, then Apache does some weird negotiation thing to work out what to get — I don’t trust this sort of guesswork trick, so all my files have unique names. Besides, the W3C wants us to do this, and I think it’s a good idea.

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Adventures in machine translation

Remember all those old jokes about using computers to translate text into one language and then back into the original? So that you started with “The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak”, and translated it into and back out of Russian again to be left with “The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten”?

Now you can do it too.

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kryogenix.org gets reinvented

Lots of changes. I’d like to do a writeup about how all this works, under the covers. Changes to Castalian, complete rewriting of the header and footer stuff, this weblog code… the list goes on. It’s a lot easier to maintain, now, though :-)

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Someone wrote a little bit of code that makes the Python interpreter work loads better; more like the shell, in fact

I love all this. The concept of being able to adapt, in a language, how the language works. Bally ingenious, I say. Anyway, interaktiv.py adds tab completion for everything (module names, method names, the lot), gives you OS file calls (mv, rm, c.), and so on. It’s great.

Only if you like Python, mind, but if you’ve not got into it and you’re a coder, what are you waiting for?

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Mozilla have done a 1.0 release candidate.

A Mozilla v1.0 release candidate!. It’s good to see this. The Mozilla project have an excellent browser, the one I use. It’ll be good to be using a “stable” version.

Even if it has taken four years!

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