Entries for March 2006
March 1, 2006 at 3:47AM Mobile Test
Testing how easy it is to use the site with a mobile phone. Not too impressed so far, but better than I’d expected.
Nice to see that IrishBlogs.ie have followed my lead with a ping form in addition to the XML-RPC interface. Of course, their extra feature following my wee hack could be coincidental... ![[smile]](/images/smilies/smile.gif){kind=small}
It’s good to see that PotB has fixed the problems it was having with its ping interface.
Was out cold yesterday. Tried staying up, but started getting those chest pains I get when I’ve been up over 36 hours and drank too much caffeine. I still feel like crap. Whether this is just exhaustion or the tail end of whatever I picked up in Boston, I don’t know.
And as if the snow while I was in Boston wasn’t enough, it’s followed me back to Sligo, and laid a thick blanket of the white stuff outside. Aarrgh! Enough!
Update: Ok, never trying that again. It cost me EUR 10 for 20 minutes. That’s ridiculous!
March 3, 2006 at 12:56AM When did heart disease become cardiac disease?
Bit of background on this first. About a fortnight ago, my father started getting chest pains. He went to the doctor, who told him to go to the emergency room in Sligo General Hospital. After a week waiting for this test and that, he eventually had an angiogram revealing an artery close to blockage. A few months more, and he could have had a heart attack, which would have caused serious damage to his heart. It’s too far gone to be cleared chemically, so he needs to get a stent put in the artery to keep it open. All in all, he’s pretty lucky.
However, it’s caused an awful lot of chaos. Between everything, this is the first free moment I’ve had since I got back from Boston. It’s also costing my parents quite a bit, so I’ll see what I can do to help them out.
Anyway, this morning I travelled up to Sligo with my mother to visit him in hospital (and later spend the rest of the day delivering books for the Irish Independent!), when a piece can on the radio about heart disease and heart attacks. Except they didn’t use those regular familar names. Instead they called them “cardiac disease” and “sudden cardiac death”.
Why?
What’s wrong with the names we’re all familiar with? What is it that motivates people to invent new names and phrases--sayeth the conlanger--for commonplace things and events with names and phrases we all know? Is there any reason why the terms “heart disease” and “heart attack” are deprecated? Muppets!
March 3, 2006 at 1:10AM Weblog Ping Proxy upgrades!
I’ve upgraded the pinger with all those features I mentioned before. It now lists all of the irish regional blog aggregators I know of, and includes the ability to ping weblogs.com and Technorati, and it saves your details between pings.
One nice little feature I’ve added is that if you want to use it programmatically, add the parameter quiet. This will force it to send back nothing in response, which might save you a wee bit of bandwidth. I might change this so that it sends back a list of responses instead.
One server I’ve been having problems with when it comes to prompt responses is Planet of the Blogs. I’m sure this is probably down to server load, but it’s the only one that times out on me. I must add some proper error handling around the ping code to cope with timeouts.
March 9, 2006 at 4:20PM CIÉ are completely taking the piss!
Is it just me or are they purposely trying to make it hard for we culchies to drop in for a visit? I’m heading up to Dublin tomorrow to attend the blog awards (and welcome respite it is too), not that I’m up for anything. Not only do they charge a small fortune for their shitty service, but the hours timetables are ridiculous. Here’s Bus Éireann:
Yep, three stops and four hours between departures. Gobshites. And here’s Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail):
Three hours between departures, but at least it’s direct.
Seriously, are they pulling the piss or what?
March 11, 2006 at 7:04PM If you’re at the Irish Blog Awards, avoid the Smithwicks!
There’s something wrong with the pints in the bar outside the conference room. The bar upstairs has ones that taste much better.
And 15-9: woohoo!
March 11, 2006 at 8:06PM Feck, this is feeling uncomfortable!
First Irish Blogging Awards mini panic attack.
Lovely. At the Blog Awards and’ve got old social phobias I thought I was pretty much over resurfacing.
Here’s the thing: I know only one person here personally, and that’s Tom. I haven’t seen him since the techie talk earlier, and never got to say hello. He hasn’t resurfaced since he went off to do that interview I’m a bundle of nerves. I’m pretty introverted--actually, that’s something of an understatement--and one of the reasons I started blogging was to release some of the social tension I feel. Argh. Typing all this isn’t doing a good job.
There’s nobody I already know personally here within eyeshot, and I’m surrounded by strangers. It’s so bloody hard to go and talk to somebody, and the few people I know from talking to them online are all busy doing stuff, are already surrounded by swathes of people, or missing!
Humm...
Update: Bizarre! A minute after I posted this, Roger from Irish Blogs came up to talk about the pinger, then Dermod, and then David from TCAL. Coincidence or not, thanks guys! You all made my night!
March 11, 2006 at 8:31PM Moved Planet of the Blogs to the bottom of the ping proxy.
Seeing as PotB takes aaaaaaages to respond to pings, I’ve moved it to the bottom of the ping list.
And Tom just won best Tech blogger! Yay!
March 17, 2006 at 8:18PM Converting typewriter quotes to proper typographer’s quotes
Here’s how to do it in a nice clean way that works in everything from ColdFusion 5 and on:
function MagicQuote(txt) { var prefix = "(^|[ " & Chr(9) & Chr(10) & Chr(13); // Left quotes txt = REReplace(txt, prefix & "'])""", "\1&##8220;", "ALL"); txt = REReplace(txt, prefix & "]|&##8220;)'", "\1&##8216;", "ALL"); // Right quotes txt = Replace(txt, """", "&##8221;", "ALL"); txt = Replace(txt, "'&##8220;", "'&##8221;", "ALL"); txt = Replace(txt, "'", "&##8217;", "ALL"); return txt; }
March 19, 2006 at 9:06PM CesarFTP Argly Bollocky!
The FTP server running on this machine is CesarFTP. CesarFTP is a piece of crap. For the past three days, it’s done nothing other than blink at me and reply Connection limit reached, you’re disconnected. Three days. You’d think by then it would have realised that all these dangling connections that have been sitting there doing nothing for three days should be, I dunno, cleaned up?
It was St. Patrick’s weekend, and I’d intended on taking photos of the village parade and uploading them here, uploading ElementNode, and upgrading a couple of things on the site that suck. But no, I can’t.
Yup, first free weekend I get and I can’t do a bloody thing.
Oh, well. I guess at least posting this up is a chance to test the one thing I did manage to get uploaded before the FTP server decided to die: conditional GET on my weblog feed, which might save a wee bit of bandwidth.
Double Bugger!
Joy of joys! When I updated the weblog code, I stupidly forgot one little detail about how the syndication code worked. Up until a few weeks back, each time I posted or updated an entry, the syndication code would be called to delete the cached feed. It didn’t really know anything about conditional GETs, but I figured at the time that given how little I’d probably be generating the thing, and how time-consuming the old frontpage SQL statement was, it was best if I deferred feed generation until somebody eventually fetched it.
But I eventually copped on that it was a false economy, that the complex fetch-me-the-real-last-seven-days-of-entries SQL statement was overkill, and that the way I was doing things, I was getting all the disadvantages of baking my feed with all the disadvantages of frying it. So I decided just to fry it, and ripped out a whole bunch of now pointless code.
Including the bit that checked if the feed was meant to be deleted.
So now, the first time I’ve posted since I uploaded that code, I find the problem. It’s still calling the syndication code, but now with the conditional statement seperating the feed deletion and feed generation code gone.
Kaboom! Each time I post, it tries to write the feed to HTTP response.
This would never have happened if I’d left stupid optimisation like my lazy feed generation till I needed to optimise feed generation.
There’s a lesson in there.
Update: Woohoo! Peter’s got replaced CesarFTP with the utterly sexy FileZilla Server. Cheers, buddy! You’re a lifesaver! All fixes uploaded.
March 19, 2006 at 10:16PM Bill Bailey’s remix of the BBC News theme’s a top tune!
Ok, this is old news to many, but I got to see his Part Troll set yesterday on the telly.
Now, for a news program, BBC News has a pretty good theme tune. Compared to the usual hackneyed themes that most news programs have, it’s got a bit of kick and originality to it. It’s essentially orchestral hard house. How many serious broadcasters out there can say they have dance music leading into their news bulletins?
Which is why I probably shouldn’t be all that surprised when I heard his apocalypic rave remix of the theme. Here’s a clip of it from his site.
Argh! I’d love to get my hands on a proper clean copy of it.
March 22, 2006 at 7:03PM Wednesday Miscellany
Not as cool sounding as ‘Monday Miscellany’ or ‘Saturday Sundry’ (gotta love that alliteration, eh?), but this should let me catch up on a few small things I’ve been meaning to post.
Firstly, I’ve uploaded ElementNode, my Java XML builder. The original PHP version was developed for my Syncope framework, but I’m not happy with it yet so nobody’s getting a peek at that! Go take a look: I think it’s pretty cool.
Secondly, I’ve uploaded the pictures from this year’s St Patrick’s day parade here in Aclare. It’s mainly of interest to locals though, I’d say.
Finally, I’ve fixed a whole pile of niggly bugs on the site. The fixes have been sitting here for ages and now that there’s decent FTP server running on the box hosting this site, I’ve been able to upload them.
Now, if only I could find time to write up my experiences of the blog awards and stuff...
March 22, 2006 at 10:21PM Electronic Renaissance
Electronic Renaissance is a monthly revival of The Warwick’s old Thursday night indie event, but better! It’s being organised by my buddy Seamus, and he has a site promoting it here. I’m going to help with the coding side of it once I get a decent amount of free time, which means this weekend.
The first night is March 30th, so if you’re in Galway around that time, you like indie, and you’re up for a good time, go!
March 25, 2006 at 3:11AM My ideal email client
Here’s an excerpt from a mail I sent to the TDD list as part of an offtopic thread on what mail clients we use. I use Thunderbird for non-work-related mail, and I’m pretty happy with it, but it’s still not quite right. I decided to have a bit of a moan about how my ideal client should work. Here’s what I wrote:
I wish there was a mail client out there that eschewed the whole concept of labels and folders and replaced them with tags and views, where emails could have multiple tags and views would would be listings of emails with certain tags applied (or not) to them and other filtering criteria. Just store everything in one big DB and use tags and email headers to identify unread mail, unsent mail, trash, spam, archived mail, sent mail, mail to certain lists, from certain people, whether the email should be referred to later, &c.
Oh, well...
Now, if somebody was to write a mail client like that, I’d switch to it immediately.
