Entries for May 2006
May 1, 2006 at 6:37PM Inform 7 Released
Now, here’s something worth blogging about! I’d been wondering why there was no activity on Inform for years.
Graham Nelson has just released Inform 7. Now, this is no incremental release, it’s a revolutionary release!
Inform is a system for developing interactive fiction (or adventure games, as they were once called) that targetted Infocom’s Z-machine virtual machine. Inform 6 was a great language for developing interactive fiction, and the Z-machine was versatile enough to produce some surprising results.
It also had an excellent natural language parser.
But now, after three years of work, you don’t need to be able to program to develop IF with Inform: Inform 7 was announced yesterday on rec.arts.int-fiction and now understands natural language (and compiles that to Inform 6 code), and has an IDE to make it simple for non-programmers--writers--to develop IF. What can’t be easily modelled in English can be described graphically.
I haven’t had time to give the documentation a proper read-through, but what I’ve see is pretty incredible! Go take a look.
May 4, 2006 at 1:49AM Despotism
Take ten minutes out of your day and watch this. It’s worth it.
We should all be immune to the idea that the country we’re from is immune from descending into this kind of state.
May 4, 2006 at 2:55AM Brian Kennedy makes me ashamed to be Irish
As we edge closer to the celebration of mediocrity that is the Eurovision Song Contest, one’s mind tends to turn to how one’s country is going to embarrass itself this year. Well, it appears Ireland’s got a bit of a whopper this year.
I lost interest in the whole affair some time just before puberty, so I don’t really take all that much heed of it anymore. But TCAL posted up a video of our entry, so I thought I’d take a look.
I wish I hadn’t.
Bad as most entries usually are, at least some of them are brilliantly bad, knowingly bad. But this is just so earnest, and yet so banal and trite, even those words fail to describe how awful it is. And that’s just the song. The video’s even worse.
In it, Brian prances around Dublin surrounded by a bunch of tools who look as if they’ve escaped from a special-needs school in Donnybrook miming along, making luvvy-luvvy looks and swigging back stout in a nightclub. All very ‘Oirish’ and yet so ‘modern’. But this scuther gets worse: Brian ditches his groupies and goes prancing around in the countryside. Still, I’ll give it this much: at least it had no lupracháns.
Twenty Major sums it up quite well too too. Now, go berate RTÉ and complain to them about how they could ever put this awful shite forward to represent your country. I can only imagine that they want us to lose and lose badly.
May 8, 2006 at 3:21AM Textuality: a text markup processor
On Saturday and Sunday evenings, I wrote a replacement text processor for this site and FusionWiki that I call Textuality. Inspired primarily by Markdown, it’s designed to be simple to implement, avoid bugs in the CF5 regular expression engine, accurate, and readable.
You can download a copy here, and try it out online here.
Update: Fixed a bug that messed up links preceding emoticon references in paragraphs. I also removed the <cfinclude> tag on the test page because it wasn’t needed any more and was conflicting with the global definition of Textuality() I use elsewhere in the site now that I’ve converted my weblog and comments over to use Textuality now.
May 9, 2006 at 6:28PM Reactor
Reactor is a game I’ve been meaning to write for a while. It’s a conversion of a board game I originally wrote on the C-64 called Reaction (not to be confused with Reaxion, a rather good tile flipping game).
Here’s some graphics I knocked out showing the various grid square states:
![[Image showing the various states a grid square can be in]](/images/blog/reactor-states.png)
I think I’ll make them smaller, but they’re fine for now.
Gameplay
The object of the game is to remove all your opponent’s tokens from the grid.
The game is played on a square grid, and each of the two players puts tokens on the various squares on the grid in turn. They can place them on empty squares or squares containing tokens of with their colouring.
Squares can only hold so many tokens and remain stable, and that number is determined by the number of vertically and horizontally adjacent squares. So a corner square is stable if it holds less than two tokens, an edge piece if it holds less than three, and any other square if it holds less than four. If their token limit is exceeded, they become unstable and a reaction throws the tokens on the square onto the adjacent squares. A chain reaction starts if those adjacent squares also exceed the number of tokens they can stablely hold. The chain reaction continues until either all squares are stable or the grid contains tokens of only one colour: yours.
It’s important to note how you get rid of your opponents tokens. If a square containing your tiles goes off next to a square containing tokens belonging to your opponent, the tokens in that square switch sides and become yours.
Quite a simple game, and a good one.
History
The original was written in Commodore BASIC and used a numeric grid. I later converted it to the Acorn Archimedes (confusingly calling it !Reaxion) and wrote it in BBC BASIC (I hadn’t learned ARM assembly language or C yet) as I’d picked up enough of the language from reading other people’s programs to write it (thank you, Acorn User, and in particular the two Daves who ran *INFO).
I never did get to convert it to a desktop application like I intended, and the half-arsed AI engine was based on a poor description of Minimax I cogged from a book on AI for children, and a better version of the same game was submitted by another reader, it languished in MODE 13 hell on a floppy.
Today
I’d like to rewrite the game, possibly in Haskell. All I have right now is some graphics a drew while I was watching Lost, and a vague recollection of the AI algorithm I designed for the computer player. Network play would be nice too. And on top of that, I have to decide if I should make it shareware or open source it. Either way, it’d be a nice exercise to write a proper piece of software in a language I’ve only ever written short programs in, usually converting the result to another language.
And I’ve a chance to make the computer player much better now.
So, here’s the question: going off the what you’ve read and seen so far, would you buy a networked version of the game if I was to make the non-networked version free and released the game’s core logic so people could read and learn from it?
And does anybody know the proper name for the game?
May 11, 2006 at 2:07PM Linklog: your days are numbered!
It won’t be dying today or tomorrow, but it will soon.
I tweaked the DB schema to account for some ideas for integrating the two I’d sketched on paper. The changes are ones I might find useful on my weblog anyway, such as the addition of the summary field and attaching a related link and attribution to the link source. I’m going to dump any of the extra data I had in the linklog table (such as the to_read field) that I wasn’t really using.
When the work’s done, entries with no body text will use one template (the linklog/asides template) and ones with body text will use the standard entry template.
Technically, the change is trivial, and I have the SQL statements to make the remaining schema changes sitting in a file, but I won’t be doing any of that until I switch over my feed to Atom.
In other news, the site now uses Textuality everywhere save the wiki, which will be changed over when I’ve time to muck through it all some evening.
May 14, 2006 at 10:35PM BlogPing now hosted on SourceForge
I submitted a request to host my BlogPing project project (which drives the Irish Weblog Ping Proxy) on SourceForge ages ago. The request came through today so I set up the Subversion repository and created a simple Blogger template for the project site.
BlogPing 1.1 is available for download, so if you’re interested in setting up something like it for another country, head over there and grab a copy.
May 16, 2006 at 5:42PM BlogPing’s project site’s been all prettied up
Much nicer! The site was using just a basic template and looked kind of ugly, so I did up a much nicer one before bed and I’m just after uploading it to Blogger. What do you all think?
I think I might have a slight addiction to light blue (#07F) and the corresponding orange (#F70)... ![[smile]](/images/smilies/smile.gif){kind=small}
If anybody out there likes the design and wants to use it on their own site, just ask me for the template and I’ll degunk it of all the BlogPing specific stuff and send it on to you.
Update: Forgot to note the addition of the shiny new logo. The typeface in question is the excellent Yanone Kaffeesatz, negatively kerned for that sexy Web 2.0 look.
May 18, 2006 at 6:05PM Fisking Kevin Myers: “Why I belive same-sex unions can never be called a marriage”
Sigh. There’s nothing I dislike more than poor logic, and Myers, as always is a veritable font of the stuff. More awfulness in the Bindo this morning (registration required). Mind that I’m not expressing an opinion for or against such unions, just that Myer’s logic is flawed. It’s a long one, but let’s fisk this mother:
What decent person...
I.e. somebody that thinks like the good Colonel...
...did not quail in abject terror when “The Rights of De Facto Couples” was published last week?
I did: terrible title for a report, isn’t it? Such an abuse of the English language.
It marked yet another intrusion by lawyers into our lives, ...
Yeah, it’s awful living in a common law country, isn’t it Kevin.
...and another recitation of the governing matra of our age: rights.
More nasty stuff there, Kevin. Could be worse: they could be talking about democracy. You know, that strange political system where people the right (there’s that awful word again) to express their opinions on things, and worse yet: work to convince others of their point of view. Thank goodness we don’t have any of that democracy rot here.
Thus, one of the co-authors, Fergus Ryan wrote: “International law does not require that the various states permit same-sex marriage, however it does say very clearly that if you exclude same-sex couples from marriage, and you reserve most of the rights and obligations to married couples, then you have sexual orientation discrimination.”
Well, I’m glad that international law doesn’t--quite yet, anyway--require us to permit homosexual marriage.
I’m glad you see it that way. It’d be terrible if you realised that means that there simply isn’t a direct requirement, but an indirect requirement, because not recognising such unions is discriminatory and therefore... wait for it... illegal!
Equally, I’m glad it doesn’t oblige us to swim underwater to Holyhead with a cement-mixer on our backs, or have sex with molten lava, or pluck the eyelashes from wild bears, or anything else that is impossible.
Excellent strawman. You see, these are all things that nobody in their right mind would attempt, and yet aren’t illegal: if I was suitably enamoured with some magma, there’s nothing legally stopping me from making sweet, sweet love to it.
Same-sex marriage is not the same: it is one of these things that needs to have legal recognition to be legal because marriage itself is a construct of law. So, Kevin, your argument doesn’t quite hold water.
For I simply don’t accept that a homosexual union is merely a mirror image of a heterosexual marriage, or that it even qualifies as marriage.
Notice how Colonel Myers doesn’t explain why he considers this so, or how a heterosexual union is different. Of course it’s different: you’ve got two people with different sets of sex-determining chromosomes in a relationship in one, and the same set in another. The other difference is that a heterosexual couple can have reproductive sex whereas a homosexual couple can’t.
But wait... there’s nasty edge cases here. What about couples where one or both of the people involved is sterile? What about men with female chromosomes (aka XX male syndrome), or women with male chromosomes (and both exist)? Or hermaphrodites/intersexuals? Tell me Kevin, what about these people?
Now, before the screeching hullabaloo starts, ...
The Colonel believe that any opinion that differs from his own is a “screeching hullabaloo”.
...a homosexual union is not of necessity intrinsically worse than marriage, for I know some terrible heterosexual marriages, and some terrific homosexual relationships, but it is intrinsically different. A swift is a swift, not a swallow. The only people who can actually get “married” are men and women, to make a husband and wife. And whereas same-sex couples should should certainly be able to enjoy civil unions, with inheritance and pension rights and so on, that union cannot be called a “marriage.”
Myers believes that marriage has this certain ineffable quality, so utterly beyond description that he fails to even allude to what it might be aside from oblique metaphor.
Best I can tell, his argument boils down to the fact that the state should get out of the marriage business and leave that up to religious bodies, instead recognising the marriage contract as being the same as a civil union.
You don’t have to agree with my opinions here, ...
But if you don’t, you’re not a “decent person”.
...but I trust that you would both allow me to think them privately and express them publicly, without leading me to the stocks and pelting me with rotten sheep’s eyes.
Yes, Kevin. You have a right to your opinions. There’s that horrible word again! Run away!
Because it’s not just a matter of freedom of speech. Once you declare a homosexual union a marriage, then then you give that couple adoption and fostering rights, ...
Think of the children! Being around gay people might turn them gay too!
Now, if you extend this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, this means that somebody who’s bisexual in a heterosexual relationship shouldn’t be allowed near their own children or adopt or foster children, or that gay people shouldn’t be allowed employment as child minders, and that homosexuality is something you get from your environment. After all, the only way you could possibly arrive at this opinion is if you think that gay people are somehow less capable of caring for children than straight people.
To let my own opinion intrude, I’d much prefer see children being taken care of by parents in a loving, stable relationship than parents who are not, be they bent as an Irish road or straight as Roman one.
...to be enforced by our old enemies, the equality courts, ...
How are they our enemies? There was me thinking the courts were their to enforce the law and nothing more. Tilting at windmills...
...manned of course by lawyers, ...
No, judges accountable to the people. Lawyers (solicitors in the lower courts, barristers in the higher) are employed by plaintiffs as skilled legal advocates to argue their case in front of the court, but beyond that have no power in the judgement.
for whom no illogic is too outlandish, no egalitarian nonsense too fatuous, no fine point too microscopically infinitesimal.
The good Colonel has a lot in common with them then, aside from his lack of a grasp of the legal system.
Now, I don’t say that homosexual couples should never be allowed to adopt, merely that they should not possess the same legally-enforceable adoption rights as heterosexual couple.
Last time I looked, the closest you got to adoption rights for heterosexual couples was that they had to stringently prove that they could provide a stable, loving environment for the children in question, and were capable of providing for any special needs the child may have, and that they wouldn’t abandon the child.
Those aren’t rights: they’re obligations.
Again, for this point to ring true, Myers needs to show how homosexual couples are less capable of taking care of children than heterosexual couples. No sign of that happening any time soon.
The fact that two lesbians are not legally “married” should not of itself preclude them from raising children, as do many lesbian mothers, who have become pregnant: and if the circumstances are right, and they have proved their parental merit, then there’s no reason why an adoption agency shouldn’t give them children.
His first cogent, if convoluted, statement in the whole piece. Give him a pat on the head.
But as for male couple being given babies for adoption? Oh, please...
So maybe his point is that men are worse parents than women. As a man I find this deeply offensive.
Yet we cannot in law differentiate between men and women. Why? Because of the obsession with “equal rights”, the TB of our times, transmitted through the unpasteurised milk that is the legal profession.
And our constitution too! Let me quote Section 1 of Article 40 (Fundamental Rights):
Áirítear gurb ionann ina bpearsain daonna na saoránaigh uile i láthair an dtí (All citizens, as human persons, be held equal before the law).
Pretty clear cut, don’t you think?
For it is lawyers who have hammered home the ideological myths of equality, ...
Like Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Enfranchisement movement. Or maybe being Protestant makes you a better person and therefore entitled to better treatment before the law. Or maybe giving women the right to vote and reach their potential as human beings was wrong, or maybe the colour of your skin is a reflection of the quality of your heart and mind.
My point being, if you’re to restrict the freedoms of an individual or group, you have to have a good reason. What is your reason, Kevin?
...lawyers who have invented an entire range of human rights, lawyers who define them, ...
No, politicians did that.
...lawyers who judge their alleged infractors in their lawyer-only rights-enforcing forums.
You mean, courts of law? Are you saying we should get rid of the courts? Yay for vigilante-ism and lynch squads! Who needs these forums where people can hammer out the facts.
No question of whether these “rights” are right: no TB or not TB.
Groan!
The companion-disease to the rights affliction is the doctrinaire liberal conformism...
Which is to say that if you’re one of those people who thinks parsimoniousness in law is a Good Thing, you’re a bad, bad person.
...which is now so triumphant that it is close to stifling the voice fo the Catholic Church on moral questions.
The Colonel seems to be a little confused here: he confuses the church hierarchy with the church itself. A common error, but a bad one.
And remember that this is after decades of the church hierarchy stifling any opinions within the church as a whole that differed from their own.
But that Catholic Church is the Catholic Church.
That it is.
It is not the Phoenix Park Rent Boys Association or the Sapphic Society for Sizzling Sex.
See how he tries to make his point by making gay people somehow less morally capable than the high-and-mighty hierarchy by casting foundationless aspersions and making blanket remarks? That’s a cheap trick.
It has always taught hat sex outside marriage is wrong, regardless of the imperfections of its teachers.
Fine if you’re Catholic, and fine if you think Catholic doctrine is something the state should be enforcing. Maybe the good Colonel would feel more at home if he converted to Islam and joined the Taliban.
I’m quite puzzled though as to how this relates to the article.
But now dogmatic liberal conformism is trying to outlaw the possession of even privately held Catholic opinion.
“Dogmatic liberal conformism”: how’s that for cognitive dissonance!
And he seems to confuse the idea that the state is not in the business of enforcing the dogma of any particular religion with the idea that because of that, you can’t hold a particular belief system. Where is his proof that these are one in the same thing?
Ruth Kelly, the first Irish Catholic in the British cabinet, is now under attack because she refuses to say what her unspoken thoughts are on homosexuality.
Last time I looked, the UK was a separate jurisdiction from the Republic of Ireland. However, I agree that people should be judged on their actions and not their words or thoughts.
Peter Thatchell, the homosexual activist, declared fatuously, ...
He does love that word, doesn’t he. Heres the definition: Fatuous adj. very silly, idiotic.
So while he was doing it, he jumped up and down, running his fingers across his lisp and rasping?
“Her appointment suggests that the government does not take lesbian and gay rights seriously. Tony Blair would never appoint someone to a race-equality post who had a lukewarm record of opposing racism”.
And maybe he’s right. Maybe she doesn’t have the experience for the post. Maybe she has “I hate fags” in a mural painted onto the side of her house. And maybe Thatchell is full of crap. But rather than actually explore the accusation and whether it has a foundation, the Colonel paints it as part of a vast liberal conspiracy.
There you have it, to perfection; the illogical but typically liberal confusion between involuntary condition and voluntary deed.
A confusion the Colonel appears to share when it comes to the fitness of men to adopt or foster children.
No-one can help their orientation or their race, but neither is a sure guide as to how one behaves.
Gender too, Kevin.
Or is Peter Thatchell saying that black people behave in a certain way because they are black? He apparently is saying much the same of homosexual men and women.
There’s been so many strawmen in this piece so far, Myers could start a business selling them to farmers.
No, you see, he’s saying that people behave a certain way towards black people, and in some people this manifests itself as racism, and that if somebody was appointed to an anti-racism post, it would make sense to ensure they weren’t racist themselves.
Or Thatchell could be committing the logical fallacy that being Irish and Catholic necessarily entails that you hate gay people. But that’s inconvenient for the Colonel to consider.
Indeed, such a perception has even entered the legal culture in Britain, to the point where that the “right” of homosexual men to have casual sexual dalliances with strangers in public parks at night-time in London is now widely accepted, even by the Met.
“Right” my arse. It’s illegal under public decency laws, but such laws are largely ignored. The Colonel fails to point out that they’re largely ignored when it comes to heterosexuals too.
In the world of “gay rights”, it is now apparently wrong for and Irish Catholic who privately believes in traditional Catholic teaching on sexuality to be permitted into government in Britain.
But OK, if you’re all-but-Catholic like Blair is. The question is, would that person enforce the law of the land, or would they enforce religious doctrine.
All right, it’s not quite the penal laws: but equally, for half of the gay population it could be said to be the penile laws, and the other half it’s absolutely the non-penile laws?
Myers needs an editor to clip out awful copy like this.
So, far from the thought police emanating from the right and the left, as they did in Orwell’s 1984, today they try to enforce their dogmas of doctrinaire secular liberalism.
As opposed to doctrinaire religious conservatism, right? Or maybe people aren’t capable of thinking for themselves and questioning the opinions of others.
And maybe appropriately, for George Orwell himself was viciously anti-Catholic, so perhaps even he would have approved of such thought-police. And that, now, would be truly Orwellian.
It took some amount of mental gymnastics, but he Colonel would appear to be implying that George Orwell would have thought gay marriage to be a good thing because it would bring about the kind of thinking he warned against in his books. Wait, that makes no sense whatsoever. And he gets paid to right this incoherent nonsense? I’m in the wrong business!
Update: Fixed a typo (where I entered ‘day’ rather than ‘say’), and added some links to Wikipedia articles explaining some of the terms.
May 19, 2006 at 3:38PM Vote Lordi for Eurovision!
You know it’s right!
May 19, 2006 at 8:53PM The Knife videos on YouTube
I was hopping around YouTube earlier and the idea popped into my head to look up some of their videos, so here goes:
Heartbeats
Handy-Man
This is extraordinarily camp!
Silent Shout
This creeped me no end when I saw it first a few months back. Great song and great video too.
You Take My Breath Away
The 1980s-style video...
...and the dodgy CGI one.
Pass This On
And I must say, We Share Our Mother’s Health is probably the best dance track I’ve heard this year, and one of the best tunes overall. Go buy it!
May 21, 2006 at 3:36AM Yay for Finland!
Congratulations to Finland, and congratulations to Lordi for winning the Eurovision! To celebrate, I thought I’d throw their flag up:
Yay! Sorry if I didn’t get the proportions just right.
May 25, 2006 at 9:05AM Sick SQL: Getting the IDs of all the entries in the past seven days with entries
Here’s a bit of SQL (albeit simplified to remove needless details) that I used to use here to generate the frontpage until its slowness, even using query caching, drove me to simply list the last x entries instead. Now keep in mind that what this does is find all the entries in the last seven days that have had entries posted on them, and those days do not need to be consecutive, which is what makes this query so horrifyingly fascinating in my eyes.
SELECT E2.id FROM entries AS E1, entries AS E2 WHERE E1.published >= E2.published GROUP BY E2.published HAVING COUNT(DISTINCT TO_DAYS(E1.published)) <= 7
Frightened? You should be. Absolutely nothing can be done, best as I can tell, to make this query more efficient, and I haven’t been able to discover an alternative way of doing it that doesn’t entail resorting to cursors. The best I’ve been able to do is make an index that consists of the published and id columns.
Here’s what MySQL has to say about it:
| Select Type | Table | Type | Key | Rows | Extra |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SIMPLE | E1 | index | ix_published | 144 | Using index; Using temporary; Using filesort |
| SIMPLE | E2 | index | ix_published | 144 | Using where; Using index |
Urgh! That’s correlated subquery nasty! Mind that there are 144 rows in the table, so it’s scanning the whole bloody thing! It was ran against an old backup of the DB I use locally for testing.
Now, if you think you’re hard, I challenge you to come up with a better way of doing this. Buggered if I know! There’s no reward here except my undying admiration.
Update (2006-06-08): The published column is a DATETIME, not a DATE, hence the use of TO_DAYS().
May 26, 2006 at 4:27AM Would everybody please stop stating that O’Reilly are going after Tom Raftery for trademark infringement?
They’re not. Tom made a mistake in his post. Please, go reread the letter they sent him. Read it carefully. ORA are mentioned once and once only, and only to state that they co-organise the Web 2.0 Conference with CMP. It’s certainly nothing to do with Tim, but it’d be good if he’d publically tell CMP to screw themselves. It’s possible that CMP may claim ORA are behind them, but I have my doubts: doing so would be bad for ORA’s business.
The bad guys, the guys with the dodgy trademark claim, are CMP. The claim is groundless. They’ve only submitted an application, and then only in the US. They can go to hell.
Update (March 26th, 11:40): It turns out I gave O’Reilly far more credit than they deserved. They apparently approved of the action on CMP’s part. I’m disappointed. Not so much because they’re defending their service mark, but because of the manner they went about it. A C&D letter is about as nasty and aggressive as you can get. Had this been dealt with the right way, that is to say with a polite letter stating that they’d a pending service mark, but that they’d allow IT@Cork use it this year, that would have been another thing entirely. That said, I’m with Twenty on this, and they can still go to hell. I already avoid CMP’s magazines, and now I’m going to prefer other publishers over O’Reilly where I can when buying and recommending books. I may only spend a few grand on the things, but that’s less cash in their pockets and more in the pockets of their competitors.
And before anybody thinks to counter the claim with the argument that the service mark has no validity here because it hasn’t been registered with the Irish Trade Marks Registry or the Office for Harmonisation of the Internal Market, that’s not a valid argument. Ireland since 2001 and the US since 2003 are both signatories of the Madrid Protocol, which makes trade and service marks registered in one signatory country valid in another.
However, there is one positive upshot of all this: I intensely dislike the phrase Web 2.0, and if this has a chilling effect on the use of this bullshit phrase, which I predict and hope it does, all the better.
Update (May 28th, 5:00): I’m informed that to be covered under the Madrid Protocol, the individual or group with the trade or service mark has to pony up hard cash to the WIPO. I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous: the nasty little racket the WIPO are running or CMP/O’Reilly’s stupidity for not taking advantage of it in the first place.
May 27, 2006 at 2:02PM Ok, I give in. I’m going to give Last.fm a try.
I’ve signed up, downloaded the iTunes and Winamp plug-ins, and I’m installing them as I type. Here goes nothing!
Update: It is teh werk! But I really need to change this site to use UTF-8 rather than Latin-1. As you might be able to see, the Last.fm listing on the front page goes screwy when there’s non-ASCII characters in it. Converting the site’s not too difficult. I wrote some code for doing that a while back for doing that for another project, and everything’s 7-bit clean except for the contents of the DB since I fixed Demoroniser() (the moron being me for still using Latin-1 and whoever wrote the HtmlEditFormat() and XmlFormat() functions for making such a godawful mess) to remove the character literals it contained and to convert some characters I’d missed.
Yesterday (Saturday) I wrote the front-end for version two of the weblog code. It’s much, much better. I have to write the feed generator, entries-for-tag page, and the comments code, but the rest is done. I’m using agressive page fragment caching as a compromise between baking the site and frying it, and the caching code is pretty lightweight and unobtrusive. I might post it up here. It’s a disc- rather than memory-based cache, so there’s no danger of me tying up the server’s resources! Then I can tackle the backend. Because I’m separating the backend into another application, the frontend doesn’t use sessions at all, so the only thing standing in the way of effective use of caching is whether whoever’s visting the site has commented before (and so has cookies, which kills HTTP caching), and CF5 getting in my way.
Hell, I might finally have at least the weblog section of this site in a state I can be proud of, and all because Last.fm uses UTF-8 and doesn’t encode characters.
I’m working on finishing it later today, and when it and the new design are stable I’m killing this weblog, throwing up the new code, and merging the linklog and weblog entry tables together.
Now, if I could only get the rest of the site under the wiki or some kind of a page manager...
May 29, 2006 at 2:17AM Röyksopp: What Else Is There?
When I saw them at Electric Picnic last year, they were very, very disappointing. They had this whole “Kraftwerk lite” (but I like that photo) schtick going and it just didn’t work. Their last album redeems them completely though.
May 29, 2006 at 11:01AM The Zany Web 2.0 World
This cartoon by Tom Morris is just genius:
Thanks, James!
