This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

The discussion on the proposed software patents law before the European Parliament has been withdrawn. According to the Parliament Office in Ireland, "this happens when a directive is very controversial or when too many amendments are proposed". I wonder if the controversy has anything to do with the public outcry over the proposed law organised by the FFII? I hope so; this is another example of how we can make a difference if we mobilise a little.

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If you dropped by here yesterday, and you went to the front page (rather than reading all this in an RSS reader or something) you might have noticed that the front page was different; an exhortation to do something about the impending European Commission attempt to legalise software patents. If you didn't see it, you might want to read why you should oppose software patents and what you can do about it.

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Please, all of you out there with Windows, stop clicking on attachments you get sent. I can't believe that this message hasn't filtered through yet! I've had loads and loads of mails containing PIF files, which are the w32.SoBig.F@mm.html virus, because people out there who've visited this site or have me in their address books are clicking the attachment. Don't run attachments! Just, don't.

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Trendy Furrow is a dead good weblog. Sean is a VBScript/ASP guy, which will get him nothing but brickbats rather than bouquets from a pretty reasonable proportion of the tech weblogger community (and me on bad or hypocritical days), but I do ASP stuff all day (Python stuff all night). Not only can I sympathise with his struggles with MSXML and the like, he certainly has the hacker nature (he's ported Textile to VBScript, which I was just abot to do myself for a project here at work, for a start: this is not the act of some MS-obsessed droid), his writing creases me up in places ("I fucking hate XML schemas. That was a waste of a few hours I could have spent punching myself in the face"), he's Irish, and I think he lives pretty close to me (I'm really close to the border with Warwickshire). Added to blogroll and RSS subscriptions. It's always nice to discover new people.

The BBC are going to make their whole archive of programmes and media downloadable by the public.

Wow.

I can't actually describe this any better than Danny has and Alan Connor has, except to say: wow. This is bloody superb. Not only is this what the BBC is all about, but it shows that they know that and really appreciate their mission (to "inform, educate, and entertain", as Lord Reith put it and Danny O'Brien reminds us). Bloody well done Auntie Beeb! This is great. Plus, I get all the free programmes I like. Wow!

A couple of minor caveats: Stuart Houghton notes that we need to ensure that it's in an accessible format: I can cope with RealMedia if I have to, but it could be DivX compressed AVIs or something. Not just Windows Media Player. And at the moment Radio 4's Listen Again programme doesn't cover everything, and until recently didn't cover comedy at all; I'm not sure how much of the Beeb's archive is actually owned by the Beeb.

One of the best things about this is that BBC7, the digital station, plays lots of reruns of old comedy radio shows like I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. Anyone doing this with a commercial eye would think that a free archive would endanger BBC7 and reduce listening figures, but that doesn't apply to the Beeb because they're there to give us great entertainment for free; BBC7 will stop being the only way we can get at old programmes, and start becoming the way we know what the best programmes in the old archive are. Superb.

And I tell you what: this ought to shut up those whingers who complain about the licence fee.

Yay the Beeb! Did I say this? Yay!

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In Mozilla (or Firebird) you can hit "/" and then start typing, and it finds what you're typing in in the page! Did everyone else know this apart from me? I knew you could just start typing and find text in a link, but I didn't know about the "/" to find any text in a page at all. That's really, really useful.

The European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) calls itself "the international PC skills standard", helping you to understand computers and get an "industry-recognised qualification". Reading through the syllabus, you notice that it's very carefully, at least in form, operating-system- and application-program-agnostic, teaching you "[how to] open (and close) a word processing application", "[how to] shut down the computer using an appropriate routine", that sort of thing. Well and good, until you look a bit closer. Section 2.3.5.3: "Empty the recycle bin/wastebasket". Now, that's funny. I haven't got one of those anywhere, here on my Debian Linux machine. 2.3.6.1: "Use the Find tool to locate a file, directory/folder". Again, a Find tool? Haven't got one of those. I wonder how many marks I'd get if I said that shutting down my computer "using an appropriate routine" meant typing sudo shutdown -h now into an xterm? If I said that 2.3.3.5, "understand the importance of maintaining correct file extensions when renaming files", was completely irrelevant on a Mac? European Microsoft Windows Driving Licence is what it is. Now, it appears that, in Germany at least, you can do the ECDL on Linux, using KDE and StarOffice, but we need special arrangements for that. Hardly a "computer" driving licence, is it?

Federico Pellegrin writes in Linux Journal how he ran a 26-hour course based on the ECDL, but on Linux machines, so it's entirely possible to use the syllabus' theoretically neutral prose in a genuinely company-agnostic way, which is reassuring.

Ironically enough, both the UK ECDL site and the ECDL Foundation site are both running on Linux boxes. I hope their site admins don't need the ECDL...

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There's a lot of controversy over the idea of web proxies that block sites, for use in the office, on kids' computers, or in schools. A lot of the controversy centres around the censorware companies' blocking of sites based around their political ideals (the Peacefire people conducted an interesting experiment showing up the hypocrisy of some of the companies). Most of the companies don't publish their block lists, but those lists are normally at least partially generated by keyword searches for "objectionable" words. I wonder if a Bayesian filtering sort of system might be more reasonable? It's been pretty successful at detecting spam, and identifying sites you might not want your kids or employees to browse (assuming you buy into the concept of censorware at all) is the same sort of textual analysis problem. It would be easy to have the list of "sites I hit that were blocked" stored somewhere for review, so that incorrectly blocked sites could be reclassified as acceptable, and that reclassification process improves the accuracy of the blocking algorithm. (This doesn't solve the problem of false positives; not blocking sites that should be blocked, but OK.) Wouldn't be too difficult to do, I wouldn't think.

OK, no-one at all liked it, and I wasn't happy with it either, so by popular request you can all have the Ice design back :-)

New design: I'm not really all that happy with it, but it embodies the principles I wanted (scroll right rather than down to get to articles on the front page, dates displayed vertically) and frankly I am bored with poncing around with it. I'd like more images, too, but I have more important stuff and it's become a black hole for time. I'll leave this up until it annoys me enough to do better again.

The Disability Rights Commission has put together a demonstration of an inaccessible website (requires Flash for an interactive demo, but has non-interactive screenshots) (via Gary). This is neat. It could be a little better laid out, their site (the demo's a bit small and dwarfed by the main site's navigation elements) but it's nonetheless an excellent demonstration. I especially liked the screen reader. And done by a government agency, too! Whatever next?

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Hacked Vellum a bit to be a bit faster, not that anyone will notice. Whole thing needs a boot in the arse to shape up, but it might stop the problem with pages timing out when people submit comments.

I've also changed the comments plugin so that it parses people's comments with Mark's PyTextile, which should suppress the problems with comments not having any formatting or carriage returns. Oh, and we then strip all tags except A, STRONG, EM, CODE, and PRE from comments, and only allow HREF attributes, using Itamar Shtull-Trauring's StrippingParser.

And just for the hell of it, since I had a JavaScript implementation of Textile lying around anyway for something else that I wrote, I threw in a "Preview" button for comments that doesn't submit back to the server but does do the Textile parsing. Minor hacks all round.

Next, I need to boot Vellum's DB up the arse, and stop it being a DB at all. (My idea is: a blogging system relies on a big DB listing all the entries, and that's what an RSS feed is, so why not just have all your entries stored in one big RSS file? XML parsers are fast, you can pick out one entry easily, you can store all the stuff that your blogging system cares about specially by inventing your own elements in the RSS with a specific Vellum (or whatever) namespace. In the dim future you should also be able to XSLT the database file directly into output with no code processing on the way, which would be Damned Cool.)

I also ned to redesign this place again, although that might just be Zen Garden envy...

I'm allergic to work.

This may not surprise you. Moreover, you may think that I'm not the only one. But I have symptoms.

This morning, I walked into work after my holiday, and within five minutes I was covered -- covered -- with a horrible rash. Looked like I'd been stung by a whole field of stinging nettles, repeatedly. So, I had a chat with the first-aider at work who packed me off to casualty (our facilities manager gave me a lift to the nearest hospital, for which I am very grateful). This rash was the itchiest thing I have ever known. The first-aider thought I was shivering from cold, but I wasn't; I was trying to not touch the inside of my clothes. Horrible feeling, your skin being that sensitive. Horrible.

So, as I say, they sent me off to casualty. I was a bit worried by this point; I mean, I was having this fairly pronounced reaction to something, and it came on very fast; five minutes or so. I was half feeling that it was just something random and so all this lift-to-hospital stuff was overkill, and half worried I was about to fall into anaphylactic shock and die right there. Not all that happy, in other words.

By the time I actually got seen by a medical professional in the hospital, a good 90 minutes after I arrived, the rash had faded remarkably and there was no itching. It was still showing in some places (it was all over me, remember?), and they diagnosed it as urticaria. After further research I have not been persuaded away from my initial conclusions that this essentially is a medical code-word for "some kind of allergic reaction that brings your skin out, and we don't know what caused it".

So, the doctor, after the long wait, prescribed Piriton, which is a general allergy treatment. Although I went to the hospital pharmacy, I didn't get the tablets there, because they're cheaper to buy over the counter than they are to get on prescription (despite having a welfare state, getting a prescription carries a minimum charge of £6.30 in the UK). So, eventually got home, after this big wait in hospital and so on, at about 5.00pm. Had something to eat, and took a Piriton tablet.

And then I fell asleep.

It says on the packet, may cause drowsiness. It's not kidding. I slept from 6pm until 11pm, and then woke up because my back hurt (which happens every night, this isn't anything to do with the tablets) and now here I am.

My firm swear blind that they haven't just changed the air freshener or has the building fumigated or something. The doctors all said that they rarely find the cause of this sort of thing. My big worry now is, what if it's still there tomorrow? I mean, I've taken another one of the tablets, and I'll take another tomorrow morning (after I've driven to work but before I get there, so I don't fall asleep at the wheel and die), but what if it's not enough? I imagine a lot of people would be doing somersaults at the idea of being allergic to something at work, but I have loads to do. Ah well. Maybe I can take my laptop up to a meeting room where they didn't vacuum with Stuart-Death-Shake-n-Vac or whatever.

Back from my holiday, which was absolutely bloody excellent. Expect field notes on the 2003 tour of the "Men With Big Stones" (I wanted so, so much to get a T-shirt with that on) at some point when I transfer them from my Zaurus and then finish them off.

Every Opera user in the world mailed me to say that I'd missed a comment closing tag in my image replacement article, so that's now fixed, and thanks all. Seems to have got a certain amount of attention while I was away, even if I was clearly unwittingly picking up Seamus Leahy's brainwave out of the ether.

Of course, kryogenix decided to go tits up repeatedly while I was away, and fixing it from inside a crop circle isn't all that trivial. Should be OK now, although it wouldn't have happened had I worked out how to fix damned Vellum so that it worked properly. Sigh. More work to do.

It is way, way too hot. People not from England probably think that we're all pathetic for not coping with 36C temperatures, but it's still too damned hot. If I wanted to live on the sun then I'd move.

Anyway, I'm back. Time to go get another drink and avoid writing code...

So, me and Andy are going on holiday tomorrow. To Wiltshire, to be exact, to look at stone circles and other examples of weirdness. Probably drink a couple of beers too.

Anyway, the canonical reference on ancient sites and folklore across the UK is Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian, which has a very useful associated website. In particular, the section on Avebury and the Marlborough Downs is just the guide we need. Now, sadly, I don't own a copy of TMA, but the website is all the reference guide we need. But we'll be in a caravan, in a field. No net connection (well, I can get to the net if I dial up on my mobile, but, yeek, it's horribly slow). So I wanted to take the relevant bits of the site with me, because it's so useful.

First we grab a local copy of the Avebury page and all the sites it points to:

wget --recursive --level=1 --no-host-directories --html-extension --convert-links --accept *browse.php* http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/browse.php?site_id=422

Then we convert that local copy into something browseable on my Zaurus. Since I have Opie-Reader, I can read Plucker-format documents. So, we build a Plucker document from our downloaded copy:

plucker-build --doc-file=tma-avebury --doc=name='Avebury and the Downs: The Modern Antiquarian' --home-url=file:browse.php\?site_id\=422.html --maxdepth=2 --noimages --pluckerdir=$HOME --stayonhost

And then transfer the file to my Zaurus (I used my ipkgput, but do it however you normally do). With my Zaurus and Andy's OS map we have all we need to find our way around prehistoric Wiltshire. Reports may be coming in a couple of weeks, assuming that we're not both sacrificed by druids or something.

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Still marvelling at the beauty of designs in the CSS Zen Garden. I'd love to be able to design like that, but I just can't. The best I could hope for is something like the "minimal" designs in the Garden; not that they're not nice, but they're, well, minimal.

Oh, and does anyone else, when reading the first line of the Garden's text ("Littering a dark and dreary road lay the past relics of browser�specific tags, incompatible DOMs, and broken CSS support") hear the voice of Holly from Red Dwarf saying "Three million years from earth, the mining ship Red Dwarf"?