as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Vattekkat Babu has been playing with DocIndexer, the search engine built on Lupy. We needed a search engine for our extranet at work. So, I grabbed DocIndexer, installed the COM objects, wrote a quick script to dump the documents nightly from the DB and index them with DocIndexer, and, lo, a search engine. It took me about half an hour. I was in awe of its excellence. Can’t believe I forgot to mention this! Consider it to have the full Castle Langridge endorsement.

Oh, and: Merry Christmas, all. Some of you I’ll see in the New Year, some of you I may never see at all, but Merry Christmas nonetheless. Hope you all get what you want. I’m out of town for the next few days, with very little access to computers (tragedy! misery!) but I’m sure you’ll cope; those of you who may not I will try and ring with Christmas wishes, I think. :-)

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Anyone got any Python bindings for the Turbovision text UI library lying around?
Update, 2004-06-30: there are now bindings on SourceForge

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The short ‘n’ curlies linklog (top of the front page) now has an RSS feed for those of you who want to follow it. Cheers to Aquarion for annoying me into doing it :-)

After Mark’s thoughts on Hilbert’s Hotel and similar ways of thinking about infinities, I should have reeled off my favourite definition, from Jonathan Swift.

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Hilbert’s Hotel is a better introduction to the idea of working with infinities, and the notion of the countably and uncountably infinite, but Swift’s just, well, sums up the notion of what an infinity is superbly. Better even than the infinite tower of tortoises on which the world stands, alluded to by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time.

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Windows XP has a System Restore function which I am reliably informed is a deeply useful thing; it allows you to roll your system back to any of a number of old states. Install something and it cocks up the world? Just roll the system back. Delete a program and wish you hadn’t? Just roll the system back an hour or a day or a fortnight. Very neat. Over on the Linux side, Joey Hess, one of the Debian developers, keeps his home directory in CVS. Also neat. So, there’s an obvious commonality here. I reckon you could put something together relatively quickly that stored your whole machine (all the relevant bits, anyway) in Subversion (or your choice of revision control system) which gave you the system restore functionality. It would have to work without the user even knowing, but there should be an easy configuration for it (it would come with a default set of directories which are included, and you can add to or remove from that list with a clickable dialog or something). I’d like to see this in RoxOS, so I’m going to have a think about how best to write it.

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New bit of code; the Bloglines Monitor for the ROX Desktop. It’s a ROX panel applet which tells you whether you have any unread Bloglines feeds. I may be the only person in the world using both Bloglines and the ROX Desktop, though. Available from the code page.

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Fixed ‘em. That’s good.

Just one quick idea: the “remember this password” dialog should not come up when you click submit on a form. Instead, it should come up on the next page, and say “remember the password you used to get here?” or something similar. Half my problem with logging into websites is that I can’t remember whether the password I’m putting in is right or not (if I haven’t been there in a while, and don’t have a password saved), so I always tell it not to remember (because having it remember a wrong password is crap). So, if I did remember it right, I then log out of that website, then log in again and this time tell it to remember. If it asked on the next page, once the form had been submitted, it’d be perfect.
This should probably be a wishlist bug in Bugzilla, not a post here.
Update: and now it is a bug in Bugzilla

Bugger. My changes for the linklog broke commenting. I’ll fix it, but try and avoid commenting until then. Sorry for this temporary break in transmission!

I finish work tomorrow lunchtime, and that’s me done until 2004. Aren’t holidays great? Hopefully I will get time to look at some of the outstanding stuff on my list, like:

• Play with Blender and its Python scripting, in pursuit of the Bloke-vs-Bloke project
• Fix comments here, ahaha
• Build a bootable small filesystem using minit and run under user mode linux in pursuit of the RoxOS project
• Think more about Mark Paschal’s ideas about comment spam

I wonder if I need a “projects to think about” mini-weblog to go along with the short ‘n’ curlies? I do think of a lot of little ideas where I think “if I had time I might do something with this“, and then I forget the ideas and when I get a little bit of time I, er, spend it reading the Register. :-)

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Both Simon and I have recently had articles published on SitePoint—Simon’s on Enhancing Structural Markup with JavaScript and mine demonstrating a little unobtrusive DHTML effect to make internal links scroll smoothly to their destination.
Soon I shall be as much a writer as Jono and be able to lounge around the house all day in my pants and play with my PowerBook. :)

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So, I ummed and ahhed about it for a bit, but eventually got around to setting myself up a linklog. It’s called “Short ‘n’ curlies“, arf arf, and is visible from the top of the front page. No RSS feed yet, on account of laziness and I have to swap out a broken CD-ROM drive.
It’s interesting how a reasonable proportion of weblogs were at one point just for serving links up to others, with a little commentary (this one was for a bit when I hadn’t written any code), and now that function is being relegated to a separate weblog embedded in the main one…

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• When you put down a screwdriver it disappears
• When you drop a screw it disappears
• Holding tiny thumb screws between two fingers that are basically too short and fat for the purpose
• Leads that only work when plugged in one way but can be plugged in in two ways
• Cases that don’t fit back together properly
• “Found New Hardware”
• Leads that are too short
• Leads that are too short because you bound them all up neatly with cable ties
• Leads that are too long
• The feeling of satisfaction you get as you finish the job finally find the screwdriver give up on the whole damned thing and have a cigarette instead

I’ve been using Bloglines now for a couple of months, after Sarabian mentioned it and I tried it out. I think it’s great. I’ve never liked desktop RSS aggregators, because I read at both home and work, so a web-based one keeps context. My home-brewed aggregator, Contrary, did OK, but Bloglines does what it could do fine and I don’t have to maintain it (so that me having to edit the subscriptions file to remove feeds now doesn’t have to happen).
I don’t run my blogroll off it, though, because I like it to be in most-recently-updated order, and you can’t tell that from the Bloglines subscription list—it exports in OPML, which doesn’t have a last-updated-date. I’ve mailed the guys to ask if they can add a (possibly namespaced) date to their OPML export, and they’ve said they’ll see what they can do.
I’ve changed the way I work with an aggregator, too. Contrary always showed you the last ten (or however many) post titles for each feed, with the ones you hadn’t read emboldened. Bloglines doesn’t; to see posts that you’ve read you have to explicitly tell it to show you old ones, on a feed-by-feed basis, and this selection isn’t remembered. When I first started using it this annoyed the hell out of me, but I’ve changed the way I work—now I just read the posts that are outstanding, save any that I want to chase up later with the excellent Save feature, and that’s it.
The notifier is also superb; pops up a tiny window with a Bloglines logo in, and refreshes that window every thirty seconds; if you have unread posts the logo changes. So you just pop it up in the corner of your screen, and when the logo lights up you click it to pop up a window on your Bloglines subscriptions. It’s brilliant.
The one serious flaw I’ve found with it is that I can’t really do private feeds; I used to generate RSS from the Open University’s FirstClass online conferencing system and then read the conferences in my aggregator, and now I can’t because the feeds are local to my machine (and hence Bloglines can’t see them to subscribe to them).
In short: Bloglines is recommended highly, especially if you need to read from multiple locations. I mean, maybe other aggregators do commenting or other flash things, but I’ve never needed that anyway. A hearty Good Work, Fella from Castle Langridge!

One of the things that I never got around to doing with Vellum is implementing the Blogger API. Now that I’m using PyBlosxom, I can do that; my last post was from BloGTK on my Linux box, and this one is from w.bloggar on Windows. It’s a rather neat idea, this, I must admit. Since I don’t use categories (yet, although I’ve got some ideas in that regard) or most of the complicated things that the various blog APIs can do I don’t need very much in the way of complexity in a client either. Just type and go. Everyone’s a winner.

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Simon makes a note of the rather interesting-looking LUFS-Python, a tool for writing filesystems in Python. He says:
bq. At first glance, this is a bit of a gimmick – why would you want to write your own filesystem in the first place?
…and then goes on to list pretty much all the ideas I immediately thought of as to why this would be good :) A filesystem that automatically ran Tidy on HTML files, for example. I’ve toyed with the idea of this sort of thing before and been disappointed that there’s no easy way to do it under Linux—the Hurd has stuff that can do this, but Linux doesn’t. It’s also not in userspace—you need the kernel LUFS framework in your kernel to do this—but it’s cool anyway. One to think about in more detail.

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Eric and Kat have a new addition to the family. The urge to make CSS-related jokes is almost overwhelming, but Dunstan got in before me and I’m still laughing. And hopefully Carolyn Maxwell Meyer will (pictures to the contrary) grow up ginger like her dad. I tell you, we’re gonna take over the world, one person at a time.

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Big software release on Monday. I’m a bit worried that we might be doomed, but on the other hand when it’s done it’ll rock the universe. As long as we’re not doomed. Better get back to it :)

So, a new design. This is actually the first one I’ve done in ages that I’m pretty happy with. I’m particularly pleased with the icons down the left and their hover thing, although I am a little worried that they’re Mystery Meat Navigation, but I like ‘em regardless.
The icons do jump a little when you first mouseover them in Firebird. Anyone who wants to give me a clue why this is will be lauded mightily.
I’ve also brought the browser experiments under the new design, rather than them being just plain pages.
I still need to do a writeup on how I got all this to work in PyBlosxom, but the sheer mass of all the complexity that keeps this website running is starting to take its toll, so I’m avoiding it. I was supposed to be doing it yesterday, but I was so damned sick of the damned damned Ice design that I had to do something else. This impulse has impelled me numerous times over the last couple of months, so there are a load of half-finished rubbish-looking designs around in my designs folder. This one I like, though. You might be stuck with this for a bit.
Didn’t have to change any HTML, either. Well, a couple of tiny, tiny bits, but they’re bits that were broken anyway, I think.

Do I need a link log, I wonder? Like those ones that Simon and Mark have? I tend not to bother just doing a “look at this link” sort of post any more, because it takes more time than it’s worth, but with something that was designed to be only that I’d lash up a JavaScript bookmarklet that asked for a title and pithy comment and posted the current URL to the linklog, making it very easy to say “look at this” when I’m looking at it rather than later when I can’t be bothered.

I now have my Fiat Coupe and it’s bleedin’ fabulous. There should be a picture forthcoming (got my dad to take one of me in it :)) but until then you’ll just have to believe me on how cool it looks. And it’s, um, shall we say rather good in terms of acceleration, too. Blimey. I love the bit when the turbo kicks in. Yum.
The seat-belt-not-on warning light is a bit iffy, in that sometimes it lies and says I’ve got it on when I haven’t. Jon at work suggested I should take the battery out!
Oh, and CD players in cars are rubbish compared to my MP3 player, which I have not yet been able to transfer. They don’t tell you what’s playing, and they take ages to switch between CDs. Despite my MP3 player being a pain in the arse in myriad ways all by itself, I didn’t realise how attached I’d got to the damned thing until it was (temporarily) gone.
Being able to out-accelerate pretty much anything on the road is going a long way toward making up for it, though!

Has anyone actually tried out Extreme Programming in all its glory? Is it worth the effort?

KJSEmbed is a
deeply cool thing; a JavaScript interpreter for KDE in
which you can write applications, like the Windows Scripting Host.
Really neat; they’ve got usage examples like “how to create a read-only
browser window” in about fifteen lines of JS. Coolness.

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