Seek IT: Web Programmer for new Christian youth site

Fancy that.

Please be pray­ing we find some­one good (or, suit­ably sin­ful but repen­tant and appro­pri­ately tal­ented, because there’s nearly no such thing as a good person).

Ad proper after the break: Read the rest of this entry »

# by Josh Street on March 2nd, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
| No Comments »

St George Internet banking sucks

It requires Java. I can live with that, it’s a web application.

I had to call up to find out what browsers they offi­cially sup­ported, only to be told that sup­port was lim­ited to Inter­net Explorer on Win­dows, Mac (!!) and Netscape 7+ on both plat­forms. Fire­fox “hasn’t been tested”, Safari hasn’t been looked at. I’m not par­tic­u­larly keen on this, but hey, they’re a bank… we all expect them to be a bit backwards.

The appli­ca­tion sniffs for a Java Vir­tual Machine and refuses to load with­out even pro­vid­ing an error mes­sage if one isn’t detected. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that it checks explic­itly and exclu­sively for the Sun vir­tual machine… so any­one who doesn’t use that plat­form for what­ever rea­son (licens­ing, eth­i­cal, platform) — even if they have another fully com­pat­i­ble vir­tual machine — can’t get access.

My solu­tion? Dis­able Java (not JavaScript) alto­gether using the Web Developer’s tool­bar, then sign in (it doesn’t choke!), wait til you get to the main applet pane, re-enable Java, and press F5. Magic, it works.

There is absolutely no rea­son or excuse for this behav­iour. If this fits into some per­verted notion of secu­rity, I’m not com­fort­able hav­ing my money there. If it’s the prod­uct of an incom­pe­tent web team… well… they’re an incom­pe­tent web team. Grr.

I called up and asked why it wasn’t work­ing, then explic­itly asked for a report to be for­warded to the web team. Please lots of peo­ple do this (heh, you don’t even need to be with St George… they didn’t ask me for a name or account num­ber dur­ing the phone call!)… this ser­vice is unnec­ces­sar­ily stu­pid at present!

On a plus side, their phone ser­vice is good fun. I couldn’t find a sup­port num­ber quickly, so I called the drag­ondi­rect num­ber pro­vided on a let­ter (1300 30 10 20) and when none of the options matched “sup­port”, I just ham­mered “9” repeat­edly. Works on a lot of PBX sys­tems, and it worked there… I got through to a human within 30 sec­onds, who then put me straight into the queue for web sup­port. Good stuff.

# by Josh Street on February 15th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 5 Comments »

Andreessen: PHP succeeding where Java isn’t (CNet News.com)

An inter­est­ing arti­cle from CNet report­ing Marc Andreessen’s (of Netscape fame, amongst other things) com­ments on the future of PHP and Java. Per­son­ally, I think the whole thing is over­played. So what, we’re see­ing a diver­sion between where the tech­nolo­gies are applied? Okay… PHP has the higher level closer-to-the-browser lay­ers, and Java does the hard­core stuff. It is, as the arti­cle sug­gests, a pretty com­plex lan­guage, and it’s being used accordingly.

At the end of the arti­cle (sec­ond page), Andreessen is quoted as say­ing “I think Flash is one of the most excit­ing tech­nolo­gies out there that’s almost on the verge of great suc­cess and never quite achiev­ing it.”

What on earth is his def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess? Flash has 97% mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion, which is higher than any oper­at­ing sys­tem on the planet, let alone browser or script­ing lan­guage. He’s decry­ing the peril of Java as it shifts away from promi­nence on the web — and who needs Java applets, any­way? Google, if you try and get into that whole thing, damn you too. They’re slow to load, and gen­er­ally crap. Newer ver­sions are look­ing more and more like Flash clones, with video sup­port lead­ing the way in this area — to where? Why, to the sys­tems that sit behind the web. It still fits with Sun’s infa­mous “the net­work is the com­puter” par­a­digm, albeit slightly differently.

Me, I don’t par­tic­u­larly care about the back­end tools. I’m a fron­tend per­son. How­ever, if we can reduce com­plex­ity of sys­tems closer to the deliv­ery layer, we should — if this means choos­ing PHP for some­thing over Java, so be it. PHP, how­ever, doesn’t run on the desk­top (unless you’re some­one with BSD and too much time on your hands ;-), and Java does. This, admit­tedly, is slightly apart from Sun’s pro­claimed strat­egy — but it isn’t really such a bad place to be. The places this tech­nol­ogy is/has a strong­hold is the enter­prise desk­top. I can only see Java in this field mov­ing in the direc­tion of desk­top apps as a gate­way to the net­work, as that (so it seems to me) has always been one of the platform’s core advan­tages — it has great con­nec­tiv­ity powers.

Java, for a stand­alone app, seems a lit­tle… lonely. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like a real com­piled app, only prob­a­bly more com­plex and slower. Once you intro­duce the net­work, it starts to make sense. I think Eclipse’s direc­tor Mike Milinkovich has a quote that sur­mises the arti­cle flaw­lessly: “Java and PHP com­pete at some level. Get over it.”

# by Josh Street on October 21st, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , ,
| 8 Comments »

Solid Linux RSS reader

I’ve been look­ing for a nice, stand­alone feed reader for Linux recently, and I think I’ve finally found one that fits the bill. Read the rest of this entry »

# by Josh Street on September 22nd, 2004 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 11 Comments »

World’s biggest system monitor?

My cur­rent project (as of a few days ago, noth­ing long term ;)) is get­ting a work­ing php­Sys­Info page with trippy tem­per­a­ture mon­i­tor­ing and other such kah-razy features.

So, I grabbed the lat­est from the SF CVS server (2.3-cvs) and installed it, because my old ver­sion (2.2-release) has some seri­ous issues with SuSE’s way of doing things — it “worked”, sans Mem­ory Usage and miss­ing much of the Hard­ware Infor­ma­tion.  Not that that is really rel­e­vant any­way, see­ing I (of course!) wanted to try out the latest.

I’m not sure if 2.2 sup­ported the trippy hard­ware mon­i­tor­ing thing, but even if it did, I’m over it already ;)  2.3 has a nicer ver­sion num­ber :p

Yeah.  So.  Hard­ware mon­i­tor­ing.  I down­loaded a few (it sup­ports 4 dif­fer­ent back­end pro­grams) and tried to com­pile — xmb­mon down­loaded and com­piled fine (well, okay — mbmon com­piled fine, the x exten­sion didn’t… not that it mat­ters, because for my pur­poses I only want the CLI ver­sion)… except it’ll fail except when run as root.  It’s a doc­u­mented prob­lem, although the only ref­er­ence to it was in rela­tion to *BSD sys­tems, and the fix refers to some kernel-related file which appar­ently doesn’t exist.

So I gave up on that… it was prob­a­bly a sur­mount­able prob­lem, but still, other peo­ples code scares me off.  Mov­ing on to the next (non-BSD-only) option!

LM Sen­sors… hey, that’s okay.  Relies on ker­nel hooks, which prior to 2.6 ker­nels involved rolling your own with an i2c exten­sion com­piled in.  I am, for the first time, as great­ful as I should be for SuSE’s lean towards the cutting-edge!  Hmm.  That said, LM Sen­sors appar­ently won’t com­pile with­out ker­nel source.

So.  I want to install a 780KB app, and wind up down­load­ing ~700MB of stuff!  Hmm.  This works, really it does.  Ker­nel sources are only ~180MB (at least, the SuSE respir­i­tory RPM’s are that big… last time I checked the size of the ker­nel (admit­tedly, that was back when 2.4 was the new thing), it was about 60MB!), but I got dis­tracted in package-selection, and saw that a newer ver­sion of Opera was avail­able, so I grabbed that.

Appar­ently the old ver­sion of Opera had no prob­lems at all with­out a cer­tain depen­dency, but this lat­est one requires Eclipse… a ~170MB Java library thingo.  At least, I think that’s what it was… OSS is way too trust­ing with depen­den­cies!  Hehe.

So after hav­ing down­loaded all that, I’m think­ing the com­pile still isn’t going to work!  Doh!

Ah well.  php­Sys­Info is still cool ;)

# by Josh Street on July 16th, 2004 Tags: , , , , ,
| No Comments »