Entries for April 2006
April 4, 2006 at 6:48PM “Do you eat cabbage?”
Here’s an oddly entertaining exchange with my father:
Him: Do you eat cabbage?
Me: No.
Him: No?
Me: No.
Him: No?
Me: No.
That’s flavour and excitement.
April 4, 2006 at 10:05PM “At War with the Mystics”: disappointment or grower?
The Saturday I was coming back from the first night of Electronic Renaissance (plug! plug!), I dropped into Zhivago to pick up a copy of At War with the Mystics by The Flaming Lips.
Boy, was I disappointed.
Usually with a FLips album, the songs stick with you after the first listening. I’ve been playing it since then and not a single song sticks in my head longer than five minutes after I’ve played it. It’s an album without even one song I could point to and say it stands on its own. That’s fine if you’re the kind of band that produces music to play in the background. The FLips are not that kind of band. See where I’m going?
Now, I really like the FLips, so I’m hoping this is one of those albums that doesn’t blind you with its brilliance, preferring a more, how can I put this, fungal approach.
I’ll give it another few goes and see what happens.
April 5, 2006 at 9:58PM My photos from the first Electronic Renaissance night
I’ve uploaded them to Flickr, and you can see them here. If at all possible, I’ll see if I can get photos that are appropriately tagged on Flickr to show up in the Electronic Renaissance gallery when I get around to writing it.
April 6, 2006 at 5:32PM How to make your instant coffee taste better
Most instant coffee is crap, but if you’re left without a percolator (which is hardly the best way to make coffee anyway: boiling water is bad), a drip-brew coffee maker (better, but the coffee ends up tasting a little flat: use a metal filter rather than a paper one, kids), or a plunger (the best way, I think), it’s ok. I prefer Kenko Rappor or Maxwell House myself. They’re fine as far as instants go.
But I digress. If, like me, you like to ruin your coffee with cow juice, there are good ways of ruining it, and bad ways of ruining it. Most people ruin it the bad way. What’s that, you ask? By putting the milk in last. Big no-no.
You see, by putting the milk in last, you end up scalding the milk, which destroys its flavour because the proteins in it have become denatured, and destroys the coffee too. So what do you do?
What I do is I first warm up the mug with some hot water. Then I put the coffee granules into the mug and add a teaspoon of water to dissolve them. Next I pour in the milk and mix it with the coffee. Finally, I slowly add the hot water, stirring as I go. Doing so slowly heats the milk and prevents scalding.
Try it. You’ll find your instant coffee tastes an awful lot better, and you’ll find less need to add sugar to it too to mask the coffee’s bitterness.
April 8, 2006 at 3:26AM I hate lambchops
That is all.
April 9, 2006 at 9:15AM This server treats “Content-Location” oddly.
I’m not sure if this is an IIS 6 problem or a ColdFusion 5 problem, but one of the two of them is deciding to mangle my response headers if I add a Content-Location header to my response, interpreting it as a Location header and changing my response from a 200 OK to a 302 Found, causing it to redirect temporarily.
This is not how it’s meant to work! Content-Location is for specifying resources which are variant representations of the entity represented by the request URL, i.e. “that over there contains the same information as this here, but in a different form”. It doesn’t mean “bog off over there for now”.
I wanted to use it with my feeds, but that appears to be out of the question. Am I reading the RFC incorrectly, or is the server just acting the maggot?
April 15, 2006 at 6:16AM On Comments: Yet again, I suck
The new comments code turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. While I’m stuck using CF5 on this server (oh, to be on CF6 or CF7, and not have to put up with a server running a copy of MySQL 4.1.0 alpha: yes, alpha). It appears to be intent on mangling my headers no matter what I force it to do. CF7, which I have on my laptop, doesn’t do this.
So, I’ve removed any header mangling or anything else that could break on CF5. That should also mean I’ll start getting comment notifications again. Many apologies.
Our lesson for the day: if you have something working and testing on your development machine, don’t forget to test it again in a live environment.
April 19, 2006 at 7:50PM PLGX: a DHTML-based presentation system to put me to sleep
My sleep patterns are really screwed up.
I ended drifting off to sleep at 9pm last night, and woke around 3.30am. In an effort to send myself back to sleep, I knocked out PLGX, a small DHTML-based presentation system for those of us who neither want nor need PowerPoint. It’s been tested Firefox 1.5 and Opera 8, and works fine in each. IE6, on the other hand, I quickly gave up on because it didn’t seem to support using onkeypress on the window object to capture cursor key presses. Ah well, I’m not too bothered.
And I also uploaded a wee registry hack I scribbled ages ago to add an option to the Windows Explorer context menu to open a command prompt in the currently selected folder.
Nothing big or complex, but somebody out there might find them useful.
April 24, 2006 at 8:34PM The ‘Religion’ Question on This Year’s Census
So, how many of you all marked yourselves down as Pastafarians?
April 26, 2006 at 8:49AM Irish Weblog Ping Proxy version two online
I’ve just uploaded it, and you can use it here.
So what’s changed?
- I gave the code a good scrub;
- Removed the introductory blurb;
- Converted it to use antifwk (a minimalist PHP framework);
- Made it more error tolerant (so now unresponsive aggregators don’t cause it to keel over);
- and made the interface much more friendly (no more debugging XML!).
Go take a look.
PS: ColdFusion 5 sucks so much ass. It’s converting all my 301 Moved Permanently (to perform permanent redirects) responses into 302 Found (for temporary redirects, which is absolutely positively not what I want) responses. Oh, if only I was on a machine running CFMX...
