as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

It occurs to me that I very rarely get useful comments on older posts, but I do occasionally (so just turning off comments isn’t the answer). On the other hand, I don’t want to put any road blocks in the way of most commenters. So what I decided to do was add a little bit of extra spam-avoidance to older posts. The Math [s] Comment Spam Protection plugin for Wordpress is ideal for this, but it adds the question (a simple one, like “Add 3 and 4″) to every post. I didn’t want that, so a tiny bit of hacking. After installing the plugin into WP, I edited my comments.php file in my theme and added this below the existing comment entry boxes:

<?php

# For old posts, display math-comment-spam-protection's "add these
# numbers" question.

if (function_exists('math_comment_spam_protection')) {
    $mcsp_info = math_comment_spam_protection();
  if ((date('U') - get_the_time('U')) > 2592000) { # 30 days ?>
<p><input type="text" name="mcspvalue" id="mcspvalue" value=""
size="22">
<label for="mcspvalue"><small>Spam protection for older posts: Add
together
<?php echo $mcsp_info['operand1'].’ and ‘.$mcsp_info['operand2'].” ?>
</small></label> <?php
  } else {
    # it’s not an old comment, so write the answer ourselves!
    $vv = $mcsp_info['operand1']+$mcsp_info['operand2'];
    echo ‘<input type=”hidden” name=”mcspvalue” value=”‘ . $vv . ‘”>’;
  } ?>
<input type=”hidden” name=”mcspinfo”
value=”<?php echo $mcsp_info['result']; ?>” />
</p>
<?php
}
?>

Basically, what this does is work out whether a post is over 30 days old, and then if it is display the maths question. Since the plugin assumes it’s on every post, it checks for the answer being correct on every post. So on posts that *aren’t* more than 30 days old, we calculate the answer ourselves and fill it in!

Seems to work so far. If I’ve got something wrong and it’s stopping you commenting, please let me know through some non-commenty means :)

(08:06:18) mitch21en@[elided].com: Hello
(08:06:26) Stuart Langridge: hello
(08:06:27) mitch21en@[elided].com: This is Mitch
(08:06:34) mitch21en@[elided].com: I want to trade links with you
(08:07:33) Stuart Langridge: I don’t do link trading, I’m afraid.
(08:07:48) mitch21en@[elided].com: What?
(08:07:59) mitch21en@[elided].com: We are site realted
(08:08:01) mitch21en@[elided].com: related
(08:08:10) mitch21en@[elided].com: Here is my site
(08:08:20) mitch21en@[elided].com: <a href=” http:// [elided] “> UK Garmin GPS, armin avionics, bose headsets, aviation GPS, aviation safety equipment
(08:08:29) mitch21en@[elided].com: Your link will be hosted here:
(08:08:38) mitch21en@[elided].com: http://[elided]/
(08:09:09) Stuart Langridge: I have nothing to do with garmins or GPS.
(08:15:01) mitch21en@[elided].com: ok
(08:15:05) mitch21en@[elided].com: Thanks for your tiem

Blimey, Jackfield got linked from OSNews. I need to stress at this point that it’s still very preliminary! If you’re reading this and wondering why it isn’t a drop-in replacement for Dashboard just yet (and when support for Microsoft Gadgets and Yahoo Widgets and Opera Widgets is coming) then, well, I’m working on it, but we’re still at a pretty preliminary stage.

Update: got dugg as well. The server went rather wobbly.

Last weekend the Gentlemen’s Philosophical Society of Elvet travelled to York for the Men With Bigger Romans tour, this year’s installment of the Men With Big (Stones | Thrones | Moans) holiday fact-finding field trip extravaganza series. It was glorious. I have discovered that York Brewery make excellent beer, that Sp. Manlius Fronto (or Tim to his friends) is better at Smuggle (caveat PDF) than I am, even if you steal half his money while he’s in the toilet, and that the Romans left a lot of stuff lying around the lovely city of Eboracum before they ran off to become the Byzantine Empire. Gn. Quinctilius Praetextatus took some pictures of the GPSoE in his official role as secretary of the Society, so good work fella. We’re doing this again next year.

The old GMail Smart Delete button doesn’t work any more. However, I don’t mind, because the thing that’s broken it seems to be the introduction of an actual GMail delete button. Hooray!
There does appear to be a new GMail Smart Delete button which does stuff other than deleting, which was pretty fast, but I don’t think I need it to do anything other than delete mail :)

The latest comment spam technique here seems to be a script which looks at previous comments, grabs a paragraph from one of them, and posts *that* as a comment, with the URL being a spam URL. Anyone got any good ideas for how I can fix that? Since the earlier comments are legitimate, it’s quoting legitimate text and therefore no spamtrap in the world will catch it. I could hack WP to check previous comments for the text they’re posting, but that’s easily get-around-able by changing the comment spammer script to replace “o” with “0″ and all the other tricks we’ve seen in spam emails (”C1Al15″, anyone?)
Suggestions?

Dates and the site are now up for the @media 2006 conference, which looks good. Especially since I’m a a speaker; PPK, Simon Willison, and I will be talking about DOM scripting (no big surprise there, then!)
Sign up now, you know it makes sense.

Well, the New Year’s celebrations begin soonish. In about an hour I’m going over to Jono’s and we’re recording the New Year edition of LugRadio, ready for release on Tuesday; and then the LugRadio team are going to party hearty until the dawn, or possibly until we all fall asleep drunk at 12.01am. I’ve also just driven somewhere to drop off a parcel and was guided there perfectly by my wonderful new satellite navigation box. Plus, Andy gave me The Dark Knight Strikes Again for Christmas yesterday, which I haven’t even had time to read yet.
In other Andy news, he left his computer here because it’s broken. If I drop an Ubuntu install CD in and hit Enter to boot, I get loads of segfault errors before it even gets to the first menu. The same thing happens with a Knoppix 3.4 CD, and it’s apparent that the thing that’s segfaulting is busybox; when Knoppix chucks a wobbler on booting it drops me to a shell, and using “cp” to copy some files throws a segfault. Why might this be? I’m totally at a loss. Booting the Windows 2000 setup CD also errors before it gets to asking any questions. I’ve run memtest86 from the Breezy install CD and that says that all the memory’s fine. It’s an Asrock K7V88 motherboard with 512MB RAM in it. Suggestions welcome.

Just implemented hCards on the development version of the firm’s website, due for deployment soon. It was pretty easy, too. Cool.

LugRadio Live 2006 is happening, and we now have the official LugRadio Live 2006 website to boot. Thanks mainly to Jono, who will, I am sure, shortly be writing up the process by which you take a MediaWiki and make what looks like a normal (but not publically-editable) website out of it.
In further LugRadio news, episode 3 of season 3 is out, too, and it was great.
I’m really looking forward to LRL2006. If you’re interested in doing a talk (web people, I’m looking at you here), contact us on show@lugradio.org.

Yay! I got a schroedinbug. Hoorah for that. I hate debugging at the best of times. Better still, this manifested itself in schroedinbug form (it didn’t happen at all until someone discovered it, at which point the bug manifested for everybody!) but is also a heisenbug, in that it doesn’t occur in the debugger. Great. I hate debugging.

—–

The dating game in the UK is pretty complex. Frankly, I’m glad I’m out of it. Those of you who aren’t, though, will be all too familiar with the complexities involved when you try and find a boyfriend or find a girlfriend. Dating’s tough. A friend of mine, though, has come up with a pretty good solution. It’s called Compa, and it’s designed to orchestrate group dating in the UK. A clever idea, actually, and originally Japanese: the plan is that, instead of going out there looking for love by yourself, you get a group of you together. Then, on the website, you find a similar-sized group of the opposite sex, and arrange to go out on a big group date. If it works, great, and some of you go home together; if it doesn’t, you all get to have a laugh, and there’s no cringingly embarrassing blind date moment when you realise you can’t stand the person you’re in the pub with. It’s an intriguing idea, and I wish him the very best of luck with it. And all the rest of you who are in the market for a date might now be in the market for a group date, too.
Nice clean (although sadly invalid) CSS-styled HTML, too. The designers did a reasonable job there (although I would have liked to see validity). I consulted a little on security issues, and they seemed like a good group of guys.

Matt has begun a series on the use of marketing in open source, at least partially as a response to an argument he and I had in the most recent episode of LugRadio. He begins by explaining very briefly what marketing actually is (as opposed to what programmers think it is) and then goes on to a more detailed analysis and review of Linspire’s new OooFf! product—a retailbundling of Firefox and OpenOffice together—where he pays specific attention to its branding and marketing. My feelings about corporatism and its potentia linfluence on the open-source world were not all that well explained in the LugRadio discussion—I suspect we’d need a whole episode just on this, and I intend to return to the topic with a few more well-considered essays here—but one of Matt’s major arguments is that I don’t understand what marketing is. Perhaps this is true: if it’s so, I’m certainly not alone, and it’s rare to find someone who is capable of explaining it to a programmer: not many hackers can explain hacking to a marketeer, and none of them understand hacking, so why do we expect that we understand their discipline? Matt’s work should help bridge the gap: if you work with free software and you think that marketing waste time and money, or even if you don’t but think you can see effective marketing techniques that they can’t, then you need to read this series. More please, Matt!

Some fucker spammed my private wiki with loads of links. I suspect it was some kind of spamming robot. Anyway, that’s gotta stop. Fortunately, since it’s a private wiki, I don’t need to leave access open to people. That being the case, what I want to do is enforce authentication on URLs with @edit in them. This is done using the Apache LocationMatch directive: I added the following into the VirtualHost section that defines kryogenix.org in my httpd.conf.

<LocationMatch "wiki/@edit">
 AuthType Basic
AuthName "No spam"
AuthUserFile /var/www/kryogenix.org/html/wiki/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
</LocationMatch>

The really annoying thing is that you can’t use LocationMatch in a .htaccess file. Why? Why does this require me to have root access to edit the main server configuration file? It’s really bloody irritating.

So, blogging technology goes mainstream. The really cool thing about this, from my perspective (a shamefully egotistical perspective, admittedly), is that I invented Pingback. In truth, I came up with the original idea, Simon Willison and I enhanced it, it was further enhanced by various people through discussion on the Blogite mailing list, and then Hixie applied some real rigour to the thing and wrote the real spec. Nonetheless: wow. I’m well pleased with that!

I’ve got a new phone, a SonyEricsson K700i, like Andy Budd and Ross Burton. Ross is a nutcase: he had a T68, just like I did, and he transferred his contact details by multisyncing them from T68 to PC and then from PC to K700i. Me, I just beamed them all directly from one phone to the other via infrared. (I’d have done it via Bluetooth if I’d have thought of it, but I’m old-school and haven’t really got on the Bluetooth vibe yet. I’m going to, though.)
Anyway, it’s really superbly cool. New trick, which I picked up off a guy; when you get someone’s mobile number from them, take a picture of them as well and associate the picture with their addressbook entry. That way, when they ring you, you’ll get a picture of them and it’ll help you remember who they are. This applies more if you’re a sales rep or something, admittedly; if you need a picture of your mum to remind you who she is then you are doing something wrong.
I shall be syncing it with my online calendar and contact details at Mobical too, but I’m holiding off on that until my proper number propagates to it in a week or so (I switched providers, so I needed to transfer my number—it was even easier than it was last time!) and everything works right.
It’s cool. Looks really nice, works really well. Plays mp3s, which you can add as ringtones. The only complaint I have so far is that I tried posting here using MIDlog and it didn’t work. Said “Error” but didn’t tell me what the error was, so I shall investigate further. Pretty cool that it runs Java applications; it’d be cooler if it ran Jython, but it seems that a mobile phone with J2ME is too poor an environment to run Jython.
Lots of fun times ahead fiddling with this!

And we’re cruising onward further into a new season. LugRadio season 2, episode 3 is now available for your listening pleasure. Hear us slag off Powergen! And Novell! And Microsoft! And people who buy software! And all corporations! And the National Health Service! And Sparkes! And Jono!
Update, 3.08pm: and the Isle of Man and everyone who lives in it!

—–

JWZ writes about a record company who release their works under a Creative Commons licence and goes on to quote Chuck D on sampling :

Public Enemy’s music was affected [by copyright lawsuits] more than anybody’s because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn’t have been anything—they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

—–

Unless you are the richest person alive, it’s a pretty safe bet that I now have at least as many pianos as you do, and probably more, by which I mean that I have one piano. Tragically, they failed to deliver piano-playing ability to our house along with the instrument, so we’re currently limping through one-finger playing and stopping after every note to work out what the next one is. Pointers to excellent references and tutorials (on the net or off it) or suggestions for how people with no previous piano-playing experience at all should learn are greatly welcomed. Sam wants to play Christmas carols; I want to be Fats (ha!) Domino and play blues and jazz.

So, I got a wiki. Those of you who listen to LugRadio will have heard me being extremely abusive about wikis, and may therefore (charitably) be wondering why I’ve got one myself, or (uncharitably) be laughing hysterically at how the mighty are fallen.
No so, I say. Official update to the Castle Kryogenix Software Policy coming up.
What I don’t like about wikis is not the general concept of the thing: it’s the way that software developers think that they can throw together a wiki instead of documentation, presumably in the hope that

1. Their users will create their documentation for them
2. They don’t have to do any work
3. It is somehow easier to understand how to use a piece of software by reading a wiki filled with random disconnected notes and arguments than it is to read a fucking manual (this is the sort of thing that Matt rants about all the time)

Anyway, mine is not really for you lot to read: it’s for me to read. You are, of course, welcome to read it (Danny O‘Brien has talked before about “working in public“, and it’s a laudable goal), but I’ve thought more than once about having a “projects” weblog to note down ideas I’ve had. Since one of the major ideas is “rearchitect kryogenix.org so that other weblogs work properly“, there was a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there. So, a wiki. Looks like a good one too, if you don’t need a lot of features, which I don’t; it’s not a proper website, it’s a collection of online notes.

I anticipate that Winamp will continue to limp along for a little while longer. With minor bug fixes and updates for some time to come. Over the long term, I anticipate Winamp’s identity will change to fit the goals of those at AOL who don’t really care what Winamp means to the millions of our loyal followers.
A sad day. Windows Media Player for everyone, it seems.

In January my daughter Niamh starts school. So today people from the school came round for a home visit. Basically it’s done so they can ask her questions: they asked her to count, to recognise some written numbers, to write her name, to draw a picture of herself, that sort of thing. I assume that they also wanted to take a quick glance around the house to ensure that we weren’t keeping her in horrendous squalor, which we aren’t, much as my mum might like to think that we don’t tidy up enough. What I want to talk about, though, is reading ability.
You see, we’ve been teaching her to read. It’s going pretty slowly, as you can imagine, but she can sound out letters and, given a bit of prompting, put them together into words. This is phonics, a dirty word in the argot of teaching children things, but it’s what both Sam and I know. I’m quite prepared to believe that the “whole language” sort of method might be good, but I don’t know how to teach it. Now, the nursery that Niamh currently attends write a Record of Achievement (or some such named thing) which is a summary of her academic progress to date. Apparently it would seem that the school completely ignore this and start teaching everything right from the beginning, leaving one to wonder whether the nursery might as well have just let her play with toys solidly for two years: the school have given her a couple of books with pictures. No words, just pictures. She graduated from picture-books to books with words in (which she has read to her, and reads along to some extent) some considerable time ago.
Even that, though, is not the main point here. Dm comments, over on Crooked Timber (first comment after tha main article) that “the teaching technique used was far less important than whether or not students arrived at school knowing what books were and how they worked“. You might think that that’s a ridiculous statement, but it isn’t. Three years ago, a woman from Sainsbury’s visited the toddlers’ group that Niamh attended with news of a great special offer: Sainsbury’s were, in an effort to help literacy, giving away free children’s books! All you had to do was go to the store and pick them up; you didn’t even need to buy anything. Needless to say, we went, and got a rather nice cloth bag with five or six books for very young children in it. No problem, right? Except that, without fail, all the mothers who turned up with children in tow to get the free books were in nice middle-class families and really didn’t need them.We’re just the same. We have loads of books. Niamh has loads of books. The people who this kind of thing is aimed at, those who don’t have books in the house, wouldn’t dream of buying any, don’t visit libraries: they didn’t turn up. And why? Because they don’t care about books. That’s why they don’t have any, and so if they feel like that why would they ever want to turn up somewhere and get some? So it didn’t work at all, despite being done with the best of intentions. The real horror, for me, was the reasoning behind the need for the scheme, and something to which dm alludes in the comment linked above: apparently, there are now a non-insubstantial proportion of kids turning up to school at the age of five who do not know what a book is. Not “are unable to read”—they’ve quite possibly never even seen a book, and don’t know what to do with it. They’ll pick it up and shake it, or chew it, or wave it around. I find it almost impossible to conceive of a five-year-old child who doesn’t know what a book is. They might not be able to read it, but they should know that reading is what you do with it when you’ve got it. I was horrified; really, seriously horrified at this.
Obviously, Niamh is not one of these children.

A new script and description: DOM Image Annotation. This describes how to achieve Flickr’s neat trick of annotating bits of an image with a box and a tooltip through simple unobtrusive DHTML.
This is a minor celebratory script, since I have now (wait for it, wait for it) finished writing the book! Well, nearly all; I’ve done all the technical bits. The introduction and stuff remains to be done, but all the hard and useful stuff is out the way. No, I still don’t know a publish date. But this script came to mind in an instant after reading about Gina’s image annotation, and so I put it together.

John Siracusa on Delicious Library for the Mac:

As is customary, the background image helpfully includes the “installation instructions” (if you can even call them that). [ those being “drag the icon to your application folder to install”—sil ]

I’m pointing these things out not because Delicious Monster is unique among Mac developers in the quality of their artwork and their attention to detail, but because they aren’t unique. Nearly every popular Mac OS X application is a single-icon drag-installed affair, sporting an attractive icon, distributed in either an internet-enabled or meticulously decorated and arranged disk image. Even open source applications like Fire and multi-platform ports like Mozilla meet this standard on OS X. Heck, even Real gets it right. Real software…think about that!

The is an example of the best kind of peer pressure. There is simply a “climate of excellence” on the Mac platform. Any developer that does not live up to community standards is looked down upon, or even shunned. Commercial, open source, freeware, shareware, it doesn’t matter: pay attention to detail, or else.

Windows users, think about what your typical download and installation experience is like. How many dialogs are you presented with? What do the file names and icons look like? Do you have to run an installer? What kind of manual clean-up is required afterwards?

Linux users, when you look at the carefully laid out disk image contents in the screenshot and links above, think about how far “desktop Linux” has to come before it can even begin to think about details like how single-icon drag-installed applications are arranged in their disk image windows.

Yes, I know, all of this is “pointless” and “dumb” because looks are meaningless. It’s the software that counts—the code, the bits, not the packaging, right? And so we come to an important difference between Mac enthusiasts and other computer users. Mac users understand that the packaging counts too (and are willing to pay for it). Happily, you get a lot of nice things “for free” on the Mac platform these days: composited windows, large icons, rich disk image and application bundle standards, etc.

And why don’t we have this on Linux? Well, the ROX Desktop does, which is why I always liked it so much; it just doesn’t have a lot of the other stuff that makes a good desktop environment, and it doesn’t have enough applications (or enough developers). And we’re not going to get it on Linux either, not with the packaging system in the mess that it is. Now, one big hope for sorting out packaging (if you ignore everyone saying “make Red Hat and SuSE use .debs”—Jono, I’m looking at you here) is autopackage. And what do they say about single-drag-and-drop installation?

What’s wrong with NeXT style appfolders?
One of the more memorable features of NeXT based systems like MacOS X or GNUstep is that applications do not have installers, but are contained within a single “appfolder“, a special type of directory that contains everything the application needs. To install apps, you just drag them into a special Applications folder. To uninstall, drag them to the trash can. This is a beguilingly easy way of managing software, and it’s a common conception that Linux should also adopt this mechanism. I’d like to explain why this isn’t the approach that autopackage takes to software management.
…
Update: As of 21st May 2003 I’d consider AppFolders broke on MacOS as it appears that most Mac software is now shipped using installers, even Apples own software. Wise is also forging a business in InstallShield style wrappers. It seems they really are too simple at this stage in the game, even for the Mac.

Gordon Bennett.

In response to Khendon’s rather tidy desk picture , I present: my desk at work.

An ongoing conversation between Tom (rabid public transport fan and car-hater) and me (thoroughly loves driving; buses smell of piss) over on Aurlog, prompted by some anti-car activists’ distortion of facts. Or, y‘know, a pressure group’s vital unearthing of some of the hideous truths about car driving that the petrolhead lobby try to conceal. Depends which side of the fence you’re on, I suppose…

It’s a tragedy that Top Gear slagged off the Chrysler 300C so much, because it’s stunning to look at. And stunningly cheap, too, if they do release it here in the UK for (a pitifully low) £29000. I mean, that’s nothing. There are some of you out there who will be thinking: that’s thirty grand! You could get a Boxster for that! Yeah, I could, if I liked Porsches, which I don’t. The 300C looks like the Mafia’s dream car. Fantastic looks, especially in black. I mean, look at it. Wow. Looks like it should be armour-plated or something. I’d feel like Adam Susan driving around in that. Cool.
I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that whatever my next car will be is basically not going to be any faster than my current one, because for it to be so I’ll have to buy something like a BMW M3, and that’s a cool fifty thou or so. So I’ll stick with current levels of performance and instead more luxury. The Chrysler, in addition to looking like the car that Lucky Luciano would be driving around in if he were still with us, has everything built in. Everything. Say what you like about the Yanks, they know about chucking in all the electronic wizardry stuff for nothing. But, if the Top Gear crew are right, it wallows like a fat hippo when you’re actually driving it. Damn. My quest to know what I’ll be buying next (no S2000, it’s only got two seats; no M5 or M3, they’re too expensive; no 300C, it drives like a pig) continues unabated.

Two years ago, in response to another Guy Fawkes night and its associated pathetic firework display in my back garden, I spoke of how annoying home fireworks were. Since then I have learned my lesson: go to a public fireworks display. Last night I visited Spooktactular at Himley Hall (warning: crap conversion of a PDF), which cost us a stupendous fifteen quid to get in (£6/adult and £3 for parking; Niamh was free), after queueing for half an hour in the car.
And it was bloody excellent.
The fair was rather packed. The bonfire was large, but had no Guy on top of it. And the firework display was superb. Long and strong and definitely worth it. They had music playing all through it, taking shameless advantage of how Hallowe‘en was a week ago; there were songs from The Lost Boys and The Addams Family and Ghostbusters. And there was Bring Me To Life by Evanescence, and a few others. Went well with the music: a touch of the dramatic, some big beats, that sort of thing. None of them, however, could hold a candle to the music that played over the huge sky-lighting rainbow-shaded crashing explosive finale of coloured lights in the sky, because that music was Orff’s Carmina Burana (well, O Fortuna from same, for pedants). It’s such a good bit of music for dramatic things. It is, in fact, one of the three best bits of classical music ever written, along with Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach (and even then only the beginning bit, and only if played on a really massive church organ) and the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem, and that’s not only equally dramatic but also terrifying. Rodrigo’s Concierto d‘Aranjuéz gets an honourable mention at number four, but it is for guitar which is silly. Plus, Gladys once corrected me on the pronunciation of “Aranjuéz” in such a patronising way that I had to shoot him.
How did I get on to music? I was talking about fireworks.
If you even remotely like fireworks then you should go to a public display. If your gsrden ones disappoint you because they say “Global Thermonuclear War” on the wrapper and look more like “Light Green Ejaculation” once lit then go to a public fireworks display. Half the time they’re run by the local council anyway, so you’re helping them to get money to do useful things like fix roads and so on, which can’t be a bad thing.

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Bonfire Night, the day in which we, the citizens of the UK, celebrate the life and death of the only man in history to enter Parliament with completely honest intentions. Guy Fawkes: tried to blow up the House of Commons. Now, that sort of thing is, admittedly, Not Cricket, but you’ve gotta admire the largeness of the bloke’s thoughts.

“This thrice-damnéd Government perpetuates itself at the expense of the people! What say you, Alcazar?”
“Verily, I cannot but agree, Tobias. How shall we, as True Catholic Men of England, put an end to their villany?”
“Mayhaps we should rouse the common Man to our cause? With silvered words might we not educate those beneath us to a more depthful understanding of their lot? How say you, Guy?”
“No.”
“But Guy! What manner of persuasion propose you to use to shew the men of Parliament their errors?”
“Gunpowder. A shitload of it, too; I’ve got 36 barrels lying around here someplace. Incidentally, don’t tell King James that I said that.”

…and the rest, as the man said, is history. I wonder what dear old perfidious Albion would be like if he’d succeeded? The view from Westminster Bridge would be quite a bit crapper, I expect, as would the opening credits of News at Ten. Still, we can’t have everything. Can’t even have anything, some days.
Which is a neat segue away from the topic of politics (of which everyone is bored anyway) and into Ubuntu Linux, which has also been failing me recently (much as did Fawkes 399 years ago: big celebrations next year!). In particular, while I’ve been impressed with Ubuntu’s looks and easy installation and basic stuff, I recently actually tried to do something with it. Two things, in fact: plug in a USB pen drive, and browse to a Windows share. Neither worked. Plugging in teh pen drive did, apparently, nothing. Reading @/var/log/messages@ made it clear that the kernel had recognised it and identified it as @/dev/sda@, but Ubuntu utterly failed to then mount this device. The “Removable Storage” applet (which is actually gnome-volume-manager, as far as I’m aware) has “mount removable media when inserted” and so on, and it didn’t happen. What I’d expect to happen is for a mount point to be created for the drive and the drive to be mounted on that mount point, and then (at base) for a new drive to appear in “Drives“, or (better) that and an icon appear on the desktop, and (best of all) the drive to be called “USB Pen Drive” or the name of the manufacturer or something rather than “sda” or “hal-disk-3-1” or something equally meaningless. In fact, none of these things happened. That’s not very good, and it’s obviously not a fault with the kernel setup because that worked. Yes, it might be a fault with hotplug or something, but Ubuntu and Gnome 2.8 are meant to make this sort of thing Just Work, and they failed dismally. In the end I had to create a mount point and mount it myself from the command line, which is pretty alarmingly arse. Perhaps I didn’t have something installed, but I can’t see why this shouldn’t work as part of the install, especially since I was upgraded to the Warty release.
Secondly, browsing to Windows shares in Nautilus doesn’t work. Not even a little bit. It doesn’t even seem to understand smb:// URLs, let alone show anything under “Windows Network” in “Network“. This is also very pants indeed. PLus it means that I can’t print anything from my laptop, because I can’t find the printer (which is connected to a Windows box). Again, maybe I’ve not installed something (smbfs wasn’t installed, and I wondered if installing that would fix it, but it didn’t) but I shouldn’t have to; isn’t this sort of thing pretty basic functionality?
So, Ubuntu fails on the “actually do something” test rather than the “start it up and browse the web a bit” test, which isn’t good. Plus, there seems to be something wrong with the applet that lets me configure my network cards; half the time it locks up, and it refused to configure the wireless card to come up at boot, so I had to edit @/etc/network/interfaces@. Now, I’m aware that warty is an early release, and I have no major problem with stuff not working; it just means that (and the Ubuntu team might well entirely agree here) that it’s perhaps not as ready for prime-time just yet as I have been thinking it was.

From Powergen, via Bill:

We currently support Microsoft Internet Explorer (Version 5.0 or above) and Netscape Navigator (Version 7.02 or above).
Whilst not officially supported the site can also be used with Opera (Version 7.20 or above) and Konqueror (Version 3.1.1 or above).
Your Current Browser: Netscape
Your Current Version: 0.10.1 (Debian package 0.10.1+1.0PR-4)
It is recommended that you upgrade your browser to one of the below.

I would have thought that they were clueful people (we support Konqueror! look!), except that they clearly all still use Internet Explorer at work (or one of them would have noticed this).
Alternatively, is the Debian version number wrong?
Nonetheless, regardless of which it is, this shows, very very clearly, the flaws of browser sniffing from the user agent string. Don’t do it, kids!

001 007 009.

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Paul Hammond bemoans how everyone’s sites are looking the same, prompted by Heather Powazek’s exhortation for new design. I wrote about this a couple of years ago, saying that Orient looks pretty much like kryogenix looks pretty much like Caveat Lector looks pretty much like Simon Willison’s weblog looks pretty much like Textism looks pretty much like Zeldman in a discussion of “anonymity of style“. I did then go on to say that “perhaps this era of relatively plain (but very pretty looking, and fairly minimalist) site designs is an interim period while we find our feet in this relatively new medium“. Has this happened? For a while, I thought that the Zen Garden was the counterpoint to this argument; it shows how design can be incredibly varied on exactly the same content. No-one’s actually doing that, though. It’s not just that we’ve got too many people who are just using the default templates for their weblogs (and all sites are weblogs now, right?), meaning that their sites look exactly the same, but that, as Heather says, “I long for the diversity of the time before weblogs (BW) when life was more than a two or three column layout“. Look at the three best designers I know, Zeldman, Jon Hicks, and Douglas Bowman. While their sites are very pretty, they fall into Heather’s black hole of two-and-three-column designs. If the best and the brightest are coming up with simply graphical variants on this type of design, what hope the rest of us?
Possibly the reason that everyone’s got this type of design is that it makes the best sense for usability. I mean, all buses are roughly the same shape: they’re a big long box with wheels on. No-one builds a bus that is one person wide and 144 people high, for example. This isn’t because bus designers aren’t creative, or becuase they’re unable to do anything other than copy their predecessors, it’s because that’s the best shape for a bus. So one concentrates (if one concentrates at all on bus design) on little things: the shape of the wheel arches, the fittings, the doors. Look at cars that are acknowledged as a triumph of design, like the Aston Martin DB9 or the Jaguar E-Type (or the Fiat Coupe, heh heh). Yes, these are beautiful cars. But they have four wheels and a steering wheel and a windscreen and the pedals are in the same place as a Lada Riva. Apart from how the Riva looks like two boxes in a pile and the E-Type looks like a big shiny dick with two chairs in, they’re the same in concept. Perhaps weblog sites have to also be the same: two column layouts aren’t like design, they’re like wheels. You have to have them to go forward, and that’s not negotiable.

See, at work I used to use Visual Sourcesafe, because we’re a Microsoft shop. At home, well, nothing. I had to use CVS to get other people’s project code, but I never really got on with it. Then I discovered Subversion. It seems pretty cool. I use it at home, and we use it at work, along with TortoiseSVN, the Windows Explorer extension that makes it easy to manage your svn working copies.
So, the choice was between CVS and SVN at home, and VSS and SVN at work: pretty easy choice.
Then came loads of other source code control systems. Now which should I be using? Arch seems sort of interesting, in a BitKeeper-ish sort of way; BK must be pretty good, because they’re using it to manage the Linux kernel, and so arch should be reasonable if it works on the same principles. Ned is talking about darcs, which operates without a central server, which seems pretty clever (although what do you do if the bloke with the one working copy isn’t onlne? Sounds a bit like it might have the BitTorrent problem, where there’s got to be at least one person with a full dataset online at all times.)
Which do you use? Do you stick with the old standbys like CVS or SVN, or are you using some of these “next-generation” SCC systems? Why, or why not? Are you doing anything interesting with them other than source control, like, say, Roberto’s weblog backend, or something even cooler?

It’s always nice to be mentioned places. A chap has written something which includes my name, as well as Simon Willison’s and Christian Heilmann’s. It seems to be about unobtrusive JavaScript, but it’s a bit difficult to tell. The online Hungarian translators I can find don’t help much (except for how I believe that “Simon” is the Hungarian word for “Stroke“, heh heh). Can any Hungarian speakers out there furnish me with a translation?

Coral is a seamless transparent system for distributing HTTP traffic over a set of web cache proxies to reduce bandwidth demand on a central resource.
What? What the hell does that mean?
Stops your server going down under the weight of a Slashdotting, dude.
Really? That’s cool. How does that work, then?
Easy. Take the URL that you want to not get Slashdotted: let’s say it’s http://www.example.com/something/cool. Then add nyud.net:8090 at the end of the hostname, like so: http://www.example.com.nyud.net:8090/something/cool. That’s the URL you give to people. Now, when someone requests it, the content at that URL will get transparently given to them from one of Coral’s many caches, instead of from your server.
Neatness! How many caches are there?
This is unclear. The website makes reference to people running Coral caches, but doesn’t seem to say whether anyone is actually doing so.
Nonetheless, that’s smart. Hey, I’ve got an idea! Why not use this for LugRadio?
I was just thinking about that. Of course, we already have the mirror network. Moreover, Coral won’t let you serve files more than 50MB: LR shows aren’t that big, but they might reduce it still further. It’s a pretty cool idea, though. It would be most handy if Slashdot themselves Coralized the URLs they post, which would stop anyone getting Slashdotted (or would help, at least).
Ooh, good idea? Do you think they’ll do that?
Hell, no. But it would be good. Would have saved my website when I got slashdotted, for example.

The government’s Office of Government Commerce has released its report on open source software, saying that “open-source software is ‘a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users’ and ‘can generate significant savings‘.” Steve Ballmer from MS riposted with the rapier-like observation that “the findings do not align fully with feedback we regularly receive from our customers in the market place“. Really? You asked a load of MS customers what they liked and they all said MS software? I am shocked. Shocked, I say. I asked loads of car-owners whether they thought that owning a car was a good idea and, wouldjabelieveit, they all said “hell yes!” and followed up with “you won’t catch me on a damned peasant wagon bus“. When I asked Tom about his opinion, he said tghat cars were the terror of the modern age and we should all use pushbikes. Something like that, anyway. Again, the government leap another notch or two. Whether such a report actually changes anything remains to be seen, but we could be on the cusp of a free software surge here. Fantastic.
Full report available in RTF, HTML, PDF, and Word formats.

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APLAWS is an Open Source Content Management System developed to assist UK local authorities deliver services online .
The APLAWS content management system. Its development was funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. It’s in use by loads of local councils. It runs on Linux. It’s based on Red Hat’s CMS. It’s entirely GPLed. It implements web standards for accessiblilty, navigation, and metadata.
Yay! Someone somewhere is getting it right. I was losing hope in our government, but they’ve just gone up the ladder quite a few notches. Well bloody done!

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I’ve got two machines; my desktop machine, and my laptop. The desktop machine is always on. It runs Gaim for instant messaging, and has all my files on it. I use Thunderbird to read my mail, which is on an IMAP server on that desktop machine. My laptop has a wireless card in it, which means I can use it elsewhere in the house. The problem is this: when I’m on the laptop, I’ve not got access to everything. I mean, I could set up Thunderbird or Evolution on the laptop and have it read mail by IMAP from the desktop machine. What do I do about instant messaging, though? If I put Gaim on the laptop then (a) I have to set up all my accounts on the laptop as well, and (b) how do these systems react to you being logged in from two different locations? If it logs me out on the desktop then that’s a pain, because it won’t log me back in again when I close down the laptop.
So, maybe I should just use the laptop as a terminal, and have everything actually happen on the desktop. How, though? I can’t have the laptop just do XDMCP to the desktop: if I do that, it starts a second X server, and then Gaim starts up again on the second X server, which is the same thing as running it in two different locations. I don’t want to use VNC from the laptop to acess my existing running X session on the desktop, because the desktop runs at a higher screen res than the laptop is capable of, and because VNC isn’t great if you’re using it all the time (it’s fine for using another machine for a while, but not as your primary means of using it).
How do other people solve this problem? Jono tells me that he just has duplicate environments on the desktop and laptop. I could do that, but it seems a pain to set up, and the twice-logged-in IM problem seems like a bad one.

Some guy called Wheels has been talking about how statements like KDE is about choice and choice is good are bad things. Instead, he’s advocating, for the KDE desktop, that the whole deal of allowing configurability all over the place is harming their usability. I couldn’t agree more. Gnome took this path some time ago, at least partly prompted by Havoc Pennington’s rant on free software UI, and I’d love to see KDE go down the same path. People over in the KDE camp are aware that this sort of thing is a problem; it remains to be seen whether those people can pull the project back from the precipice it’s on, but I’d love to see KDE as a real competitor to Gnome in ease-of-use and innovation. At the moment, for me at least, it isn’t even close. Again, there are people over there who are aware of this, and are thinking of ways to change it. I wish them every, every success.

After our summer break (which it must be confessed lasted longer than we expected), the Magic That Is LugRadio returns, bigger and better than ever! Get thee to lugradio.org and fear our mighty words!

Chris Metcalf has built a digital picture frame out of an old laptop. Very cool. I’ve heard about people doing this before, and thought it was cool (in a, well, heavily spod sort of way), but it’s triggered off a thought or two. Somewhere on my list is a telly in the bedroom; I wonder whether I should do this instead? I’ve got a Toshiba Tecra 520 here: it’s only a P166, and I don’t use it much. However, pretty much anything should be able to watch telly with a hardware TV card, no? PLus, it can be a picture all the time that it isn’t being a TV. This would be startlingly cool. I’m not sure that the laptop’s up to the challenge: what I really need is to get hold of a PCMCIA hardware TV tuner card (without, y‘know, paying £200 for it) and check it out. This would be a pretty neat Christmas present. I shall ask Jon at work: he knows about this kind of thing. I’ll bang a noddy Debian install on it and then freevo, perhaps. It’s only got a 12.1” LCD screen, but then it’s a bedroom TV so that’s not too unacceptable. Interesting idea.
I really need a “projects” category here so I can put all these cool ideas in it.

Has anyone written anything which takes the output from Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser and writes it back out to, say, Atom, or RSS? I can’t find anything, and I don’t want to have to spend all the time that he spent understanding RSS/Atom in order to know that what I write out is valid.

I need some t-shirts. I was looking at some of the ones at NTK, T-Shirt Hell, and ThinkGeek, but I’ve decided that, well, everyone’s got one of those. Besides, I’m sure I’ve got some of that magic transfer paper lying around here somewhere. So, I’m looking for t-shirt slogans. In the spirit of those sites mentioned above; you can imagine the sort of thing. Not something copied from somewhere else, though. Not the Mozilla logo, mind, given their policy on using their logo, which is a shame—I like Ade’s Mozilla t-shirt. Suggestions gratefully accepted: actual PNGs or whatever even more so, so I don’t have to go digging through my list of fonts. Prize is you get to see a picture of me wearing your suggested design, if that counts as a prize. Plus, I might not actually get around to doing it; you know how it is with me and doing projects rather than talking about them. Anyway, go for suggestions. Ideally designs should be for a white t-shirt, ‘cos I’ve got some of those. YOu can go wild with the colours, too, since I get to print it out on an inkjet; they don’t have to be monochrome (although they probably will be if it’s just a text slogan). Anyone got any idea whether you can laser print to transfer paper?

We did record the first episode of the second season of LugRadio, and it should be out at some time on Monday or within the few days afterwards (Mixer Boy Jono is busy enjoying himself rather than doing work, I am afraid to report, which might account for a slight delay; a fatal beating has already been administered on behalf of our loyal and long- (long, long) suffering fans.
Meanstwhile, if you ache for the spirit of the LR team and you’ve already listened to everything in the archives, I cannot do better than to recommend QI, a television programme I discovered last night. It, a comedy quiz, embodies the true glory of LugRadio, just on telly. Stephen Fry and four panellists ramble and tell jokes in a manner at best peripherally related to the questions at hand and one which astounded me in its likeness to our own glorious LR. I would claim that we got there first but (a) not even I think that we are as funny as professional comedians, (b) if we didn’t then I might be sued for libel, and© although it seems like a lifetime we have only been doing it for eight months and we took three of those off, a working schedule of almost Bushian laziness. Oops.

So, Matt’s got married. That means that all the LugRadio team but Jono are now hitched, although Jono is basically married without benefit of ring. Sorry, ladies: the world’s best-looking free software radio team are all now unavailable. I expect a rash of suicides of hot 15-year-old girls with LiveJournals, or possibly an upsurge in sales on Gary Barlow’s last album.
Am I old for even knowing who Gary Barlow is, now?
It’s weird, watching someone you know get married. There was a present and card on a table addressed to “Mr and Mrs Revell“, and it makes you think, “cor, Mr and Mrs Revell.” Matt’s got married. I mean, that’s a pretty big deal, that. It takes a while to get used to it. I’ll let you know when I finally manage it :)
Pretty good reception, too; Jono and I drank a heinous amount of wine, the disco guy had a comprehensive enough collection that he could impress both Matt (by having some Marilion) and Sam (by having Chesney bloody Hawkes). (That’s his full name, by the way. Little known fact.) Slightly odd choice on the food front: there was Chicken a la King, which is fine, but with rice and noodles and potatoes and pasta? Hope no-one there was on the Atkins diet.
Didn’t stop me eating some of each, though.
And I am still disappointed that, contrary to the foul barking dogs of rumour, the wedding photographer did not make Matt stand on a box for photos. I was planning on pimping this with Matt for the next ten years. Still, humour is provided by how Annable the Cannibal drove around Ironbridge without finding the wedding, although he cannot be blamed for this because the directions were lies. I had to stop and ask an old guy, thereby forswearing my manhood for ever. Damn you, Revell(s).
Speaking of LugRadio, which we were, tonight is the recording for LugRadio Season Two Episode One. (We’re recording in seasons in a pathetic attempt to disguise the fact that the summer break lasted a month or so longer than expected.) It should be cool: Matt will not be present since he is unaccountably on honeymoon! Can hardly blame him there; his new wife’s dress was lovely. Caught lots of confetti, too.

So, I went to LinuxWorld 2004. It was quality.
No, not the expo itself. Linux expos in the UK have been getting steadily more shit as time has gone on. There was virtually nothing, no stand, that was even remotely interesting. A great big Novell stand full of SuSE presentations, a great big HP stand full of big servers and a load of Oracle shit, a big Sun stand full of the Sun Java Desktop, a big Veritas stand full of people trying to bring the horror that is BackupExec to Linux, and some people flogging hardware. Woo. Oh, and OpenAdvantage, who rock the world.
The point of the expo for me, though, is not to get sold products. As Jeremy Allison said in the Great Linux Debate in response to me asking whether the corporate dominance of the expo was a bad thing, it’s not about technical stuff. (My question didn’t relate to technical stuff, really; it was more about small companies, and I was seriously disappointed that there weren’t more small firms there. Speaking to a couple of people, stand pricing might have something to do with that.) The point of it all for me is to meet cool people. And to get drunk on the first night. I managed both with stellar success.
Firstly, a big shout out to Matt Bloch and Patrick at Bytemark Hosting. It is deeply reassuring to disaocver that the people from whom you purchase hosting are not only providing a superb technical service but are also really cool guys as well. We also met up with Schwuk, and he and I had a barney about Mono. That was really rather fun. The usual suspects were all there: Paul Sladen for Debian, Brian Tiemann, Jon Masters, and it was cool to see them all again. It was also marvellous to catch up with Kam, who made it down for a couple of hours; I bent his ear about Ubuntu, and he was most helpful. It’s pretty cool knowing a massively influential guy :) We also had lunch with Phil Hands and Matthias Ettrich—how cool is that, eh? Matthias was a really interesting chap: serious and committed, but a real technical star, and he’s got some strong ideas. All in all, it was a great, great couple of days. I love going down to the Expo. Jono will have photos, I suspect.
Oh, and Jono’s talk was pretty darn good, too, but don’t tell him I said that.

Looks like we won’t be using Firefox at work, despite how it now does seamless authentication and everything. You see, one of our business critical applications has a web client, which all the staff will be using. And (go on! go on! guess!)…that client only works in Internet Explorer. It totally, totally does not work in Firefox. It uses IE-specific HTML. IE-specific JavaScript. There’s not a chance it’ll work in Firefox. Great.
What’s the fucking point in writing a web client if it only works in one browser?
This is what vendor lock-in means. All hail the mighty Microsoft.
The stupid thermal coffee mug the company has sent me does not make up for this.

The XFree86 Synaptics touchpad driver is the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. It changes the action of the touchpad on a laptop so that dragging a finger down the right-hand edge works like a mousewheel, a two-finger tap works as the middle button, tapping in the corners works as a middle or a right-click, and loads of other cool stuff. Even better, you can adjust the sensitivity of the pad to clicks; no more does lghtly brushing the pad by accident act as a mouse click! Have Windows people had this for ages and I just didn’t know about it? It’s a shame that Ubuntu doesn’t install it by default; it’s in Debian (and Ubuntu) but it requires hand-hacking the XF86Config file.

William Heath and others over at the Ideal Government Project are putting together a list of what an ideal e-enabled government would look like, in order to present it to the government CIO (formerly known as the e-Envoy), Ian Watmore. This sort of grassroots activity is really important. They’re well aware of the success of FaxYourMP and TheyWorkForYou, which are aiming to make it easy for us to get in touch with our MPs and know what those MPs are doing. Ideal Government is more about defining the utopia we could be in; a list of proposals for how government can be more accessible, more open, and more enabled for all of us. I’m currently involved in a discussion about how your tax return might let you communicate back to the Revenue what you wanted to see that tax spent on. They need your ideas, because they’ve got a chance to present them to the one man who might actually be able to make them happen. Does all this neat stuff we do—RSS feeds for quick alerting of new things, easy access to data, quick ways to comunicate back to a site owner, weblogs, context-based searching, Atom, public-key authentication—have the potential to make the government better? If it does, if there’s any way that it does, then this is the chance to tell them so. Get on over there, read, and propose.

The LugRadio forums are back!

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