28 Sep 2005
I stumbled across this post on RMW Web Publishing’s blog today, and it struck me the app they mentioned could be useful for doing this whole CD/DVD thing for the year 12 photo website.
The purveyor’s website is horribly Flash encumbered (i.e. I’d have never found it if I were looking for it in a search engine — I actually temporarily lost the developer’s URL for a bit there, and had to trawl through my browsing history to find it again!), but the app itself is rather useful if you’re looking for a run-from-the-desktop gallery kinda thing. My only qualm is the difficulty of generating metadata for it to do interesting stuff with, but a quick spot of shell scripting should see that problem met, hopefully. (Or even just nagging Ben until he hacks support for this gizmo into Cat-scan natively… wink wink? :P) This is the kind of app that’s a prime candidate for XML application, not in the least because of Flash’s reputedly excellent support for that kind of stuff… but it uses boring and rather confusing (mostly because I don’t speak German so a few words are odd) flat files instead. With that one caveat, it’s an otherwise helpful application. Just don’t make the mistake of confusing applications with websites.
27 Sep 2005
So I hadn’t upgraded until a few days ago, when trying to solve a problem someone was having with CurlyEnc. The main reason was that I was simply lazy, and that it was trivial to plug the security flaws addressed by the 1.5.2 update (which seemed inconsequential in terms of actual features mentioned on the WordPress development weblog). However, there’s one minor feature change to WordPress in this release that’s important in my eyes, to the way RSS feeds are built.
At long last the comment feed item title includes the name of the post people are commenting on! This makes things infinitely more sensible, and I’m no longer reduced to hovering my mouse over the URL in order to see the link stub to determine who is commenting on what. Good stuff.
27 Sep 2005
Seriously. It’s crap. And I have no idea why! Does anyone have an explanation? Opera and IE manage relatively well… and Safari, being an Apple app, would probably perform in a manner typical of that company’s products in the print field, but Firefox screws up margins, text spacing, links, and all manner of other things. It’s just broken!
I’ve had problems with Windows versions of Firefox as well, so don’t try and tell me it’s just Linux (though that may be a part of it). Any ideas/links to Bugzilla?
27 Sep 2005
Look carefully at the screenshot above. Something is incongruous.
Yes, that’s right, this “Static IP demonstration” is all about Telstra’s spam filter product (which, incidentally, they charge for — boy am I glad we aren’t using Telstra email as well as Cable in this house!). I clicked through to the demonstration because I was interested to know how exactly one explains the purpose of a static IP to Joe Smallbiz — and the idea that one could creatively demonstrate a number–and a static number no less–seemed too good to miss.
It seems, however, that BigPond’s answer to the great (or should I say bulk…y…) unsolicited email question that floats above the present Internet generation like a puddle doesn’t, is simply to assign everyone static IP addresses and be done with it. Wow. What forward thinking from one of the world’s most notoriously backwards ISPs!
Of course, the whole thing would require an adoption of IPv6 to function, which would defeat the purpose as there would be ample spare resources to acquire once any given IP/subnet got blacklisted, but you know… an interesting concept.
26 Sep 2005
find . | wc -l
Outputs all files in current directory piped into the wc utility with -l switch (count number of newlines). The find command outputs directory names as well, so it’s not entirely accurate… but fairly close to.