Posts tagged with meta

I got some really awesome comment spam recently. Here's an example, from my post on Nerdcore music (I deleted the comment because it contained a spam link):

LOL. I think you may have missed your calling. What you need to do now is get some oversized pants and some dark shades. Add a little bling, and they go on tour. You'll pull geeks out of the woodwork. Heck, I bet you could fill a decent sized coffee shop. On second thought, maybe you should stick to your day job.

If this was written by a human, they put some actual thought and energy into it. If it was written by a chatterbot, I'm seriously impressed. Either way, great work, whoever you are!

List of programming languages that I know* that appear on the Official Wikipedia List of Programming Languages**.

• * Or once knew... but I could pick it up again, I swear. It's like riding a bicycle. I don't include languages that I tried to learn but failed... like Scheme and Prolog.
• ** Commonly recognized as the standard in Lists of Things. Let it be known that I only include those languages that are turing complete, so CSS and HTML don't count.

Begin listing:

1. AppleScript
2. BASIC (Apple ][+)
3. Bourne Shell
4. C
5. C++
6. DLX Assembler (not listed, but it's a language...)
7. HyperTalk (my first, favourite language!)
8. Java
9. JavaScript
10. Lingo
11. MATLAB
12. Modula-3 (and don't I wish I didn't?)
13. Objective-C
14. Pascal
15. Perl (and don't I wish I didn't?)
16. PHP
17. Python (and don't I wish I didn't? :-)
18. Ruby (my third, favourite language!)
19. μC++ (is it really a separate language? Well, it requires a separate compiler...)
20. Visual Basic (sufficiently different from basic BASIC)
21. XSLT (yes it's turing complete) (my second, favourite language)

So. Thoughts. FIrst, I can say that I know more than 20 languages. Second, my # of languages isn't going up as slowly these days, but the depth is. Third, my big hole is functional languages. Only XSLT is really functional-ish (people get mad when I say that).

I'd like to learn oCaml.

All of this work courtesy of procrastion and needing to quote a number of languages on my updated Custom Software Development page.

Well, apparently I've achieved the vaunted and much-desired "trusted user" status on DKos. That means I can rate people down, as opposed to just up. I'm probably not going to do it much, just like I rarely troll rated people when I had privs on SlashDot (back when /. was interesting...)

Daily Kos probably gets as much traffic as /. did back in the heyday, but their rating system is much different. Ratings are simply thumbs up as far as normal users are concerned, so the higher the number, the more recommended that comment is. Whereas in /., every comment was rated from 0-5. /. allowed you to quickly filter to view only comments above a specific level, which filtered out a lot of gunk but also meant that most people were actually reading less. This I think probably led to a situation where important and interesting comments were not seen by many people, and it was almost a competition for cleverness, etc. Whereas the system on DKos leads to much more of an actual dialogue.

Anyway, what lead to this was my analysis on the subject of the 46-page 2005 "torture" memo by White House "attorney" Steven Bradbury, which you can read here, if you have the stomach for it. (it's really nasty stuff, to be honest, and I felt ill after reading it and writing about it).

Update: trusted user status is gone! Thank god, the stress was getting to me.

So I just made some major updates to the software running this site, which for now I'm calling "Simplelog-X". And the source code for simplelog-x is now on github.

This will probably interest people who are running the original SimpleLog by Garrett Murray which he no longer supports (and incidentally it doesn't run on Rails 2.x). Simplelog-X also has quite a few other changes aside from working on (presently) Rails 2.2.2, all of the details are in the README.

I'm not going to annouce this loudly just yet because I still have a whole ton of my own site files in the public directory, and I need to move them to public/system I guess and get them out of the repo but still capistrano-friendly.

I was just making a lot of changes and it struck me how much more I know about Rails now than when I started this journey...

Yup.

Got a new server.

The old box, was a Penguin Computing rack-mount purchased in 1999 or 2000. It had a PIII and was totally maxed out RAM-wise—at 512 MB. Anyone who's tried to run rails on a box with that much ram might understand why I had occasional downtime. mongrel would just give up sometimes. Trying to install new gems was fun as well. Still, the old box had a good run.

The new box is a Dell R300... Core 2 Duo... RAM is at 4GB right now, max 24. And we've gone with RAID-1 since we don't really need the space but like the redundancy.

Also, we switched from debian to ubuntu. Ubuntu is a bit less secure but a hell of a lot easier to deal with in terms of package management and installation.

Well I just cleaned up some bugs in the site, mainly in the static content area (so stuff in the Software and Content sections works now!!!)

Also I got some comments. For some reason I was scared of having comments on the site back in the day, but now... whatever. So I have some comments about good old FractalTreesX here and here.

Now I just need to restore all my old tags... and fix the previous/next navigation system so it's more prominent... and see if my google rank recovers...

I'm a terrible person. When I upgraded to Rails I totally broke a zillion URIs on this site, in particular most of the weblog links. I also probably lost a lot of google juice in the process. Well, now I have restored all of the weblog archive links in accordance with Cool URIs don't change (and I should practice what I preach...)

Incidentally I also made a number of other long-waiting fixes to the site, like installing the correct google analytics, fixing the top navigation links, adding a sidebar on the front page, speeding up the front page (somewhat.. still wrestling with that one). I still need to fix the tag browser so that it's as good as it used to be. And some day maybe I'll convert all of my old content over to some new CMS (well, I probably will never do that actually...)

Wow, WYM Editor is so cool that I can just like type in a new blog post whenever I want to. Wild!

So anyway, I've been saving up a whole load of links and stuff for months until I had this new site all sorted out. So here's something.

Hmm... where did my "stuff to blog about" folder go?

Oh, here's an awesome one. Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad. These guys kick ass. Watch as they take apart a MacBook Air and declare "No Waste Outside, Nothing but Waste Inside".

About 30 screws were used to attach the keyboard alone. "The total number of screws in the MacBook Air was several times the number used in a PC we make," one of the engineers said.

Burn, baby, burn!

OK, here's another one from the files. Nathan Fawkes Art. He's part of a network of film animators and illustrators and concept artists who all have their stuff up on blogspot.

And I'd like to remind myself particularly about this post about science fiction.

Hi there.

Well, I'm back. I was running this site on really ancient technology — AxKit — so 2001. Now I'm running it on modern technology, i.e. Rails 2. And doesn't it rock. Now I have a cool GUI editor to type into, I have easy programming in ruby, and I have of course polished both my design and my CSS/XHTML skillz considerably in the mean time, hopefully making this all easier to look at and navigate.

So I'm running on SimpleLog here, but it's not "stock". Oh no. Stock SimpleLog right doesn't run on Rails 2, but this one does. Also, I made it even MORE simple than it used to be:

• Support Rails 2.0 (no need to freeze an old rails)
• no themes—annoying to use anyway, and no one was publishing themes either
• replaced the editor/preview panel with WYM on Rails, which is by FAR the best WYSIWYG / GUI editor I've ever found, and the end of a long search for me

...and so on.

I just added two new features. First, now you can finally page through the posts 15 at a time (or whatever # it's set to show on the front page), using the "Previous Page" and "Next Page" links at the bottom. Second, you can save a specific post to Digg or delicious by just clicking on the appropriate little icon in the meta-data at the top of the post. As if anyone would want to do that. I don't, but I saw it on a bunch of other blogs so I thought I'd do it to.

I guess in theory you could use digg to discuss the post, if everyone used digg.

So Saxite is the new name for my siteware project. For those of you not paying attention, it's all written in XSLT and XML and it runs on AxKit.

I decided to make an icon so I came up with this icon, below.

Like it? I was inspired by a recent issue of Computer Arts Projects (one of the fantastic UK graphic design magazines that my local Indigo store carries) that was all about fonts, to do some of my own font work. So, I had a visual idea of what I wanted the logo to look like, with the X as a white space in the middle, and then I looked for a font on my system that was very blocky and thick and wound up with Arial Black. "ITE" on Arial Black are very generic, but I really didn't think that the S worked at all for me, and the A didn't fit, and the X I didn't like either (not wide enough).

So I started with the A. I actually did the A from scratch, not even bother to look at the Arial A. It's more like half of an A anyway. Next I got the X in the shape I wanted, and filled in the negative space on the right side with the I. Getting the hole in the A to look right was tricky, right now it's actually a white copy of the shape of the A!

Oh yeah, and check out the arrow in the A too :-) (it's pointing right). And check out the angle bracket on the right side of the X :-)

I spent by far the most time on the "S". I didn't like the original Arial S and wanted to replace it the most since it's by far the most identifiable letter of the ones I used. Also it didn't look blocky and aggressive enough in my opinion. There was quite a bit of variation in the width of stroke which I didn't like, so I drew my own "S" over top of it with a more even stroke (drawn with beziers). I also didn't like the flat ends so I switched over to ends on 45-degree angles. Getting it to balance was interesting ... the bottom end of the S actually extends out beyond the curve above it, while the top end is shorter than the curve below it. Weird.

I actually tried out another one which was even more streamlined, with the top and bottom strokes ending totally horizontally (like in the Star Wars logo) but that looked too, I don't know, sci-fi?

Finally I added the hole to the right of the X, before the I. And then I redrew the rest of the letters by hand so that they would all flow together. Now there's no Arial Black left at all.

Oh yeah, and post-processing in Photoshop to give it that 3d look.

I just spent a whole bunch of time sorting my tags. Because I have the best tag browser ever and so I'm having some fun going through and tagging my content and making my tags better now. For example, I had no rhyme or reason for uppercase, some were mixed-case, some were uppercase, some were lowercase. I decided to make them all lowercase.

So, a bunch of tags were renamed which will break links but too bad, backwards-compatibility is for losers. Also, I don't think people have really linked to my tags yet. But they will....

Anyway, I also added some new tags and went back and tagged a bunch more old posts too. Have a look at original/prediction (my "original work" making predictions about the future). Or how about computer/wi-fi (lots of developing world stuff in there...). Or how about just meta (navel gazing fun). Yum.

I came up with this image yesterday when I was thinking about Disney's role in the fantasyland movie that ABC just broadcast (Disney owns ABC and apparently backed the film).

To be honest, I just like the colours. I always thought this was a cool logo. But anyways, no more Mr. Nice Guy or whatever. I had a look at the font on their original logo and it looks to me like Rockwell Light so I had a go in PhotoShop and changed "Pictures" to "Politics". Now Disney can put this up on the front of all their political propaganda pieces.

It didn't make much of a splash when I posted it in my diary so I figured it wasn't that good, but I guess that there really isn't any proper correlation between Recommendations and actual merit on DKos—at least in the "long tail" of non-superstar diarists. I think that has something to do with their horrible, horrible tagging browser.

Well now I've got an even better tag browser . In fact I think it's the coolest tag browser ever. It's better than the flickr tag browser and the technorati tag browser and amazingly, even then del.icio.us tag browser . And what is delicious for if not tag browsing. Well.

Anyway, I used a sort of crazy CSS-float-left thing to make the big and small boxes all go inline together. It would have made more sense to use inline-block but it's not supported in Mozilla yet (weird).

Also, you will note that this new browser really brings out the awesomeness of my two-level tagging scheme because now for the first time you can see how the levels work. And I'm discovering that maybe I have some duplication oops, and I'm also completely inconsistent in how I capitalize. Hmm. I might edit my tags (I suppose that's bad for google though, oh well).

Anyway, the big names in the filled-in boxes are the "categories" and the names in the small white boxes are the "tags"... some day I might allow to view just the tags but I'm not quite sure what that would mean.

Note to self: I should add some category browser on the left side there.

I just can't get enough of these ravenblack.net quizzes! They're so awesome! The author is a genius!

Wait, the author is also really weird and has a RavenBlog !

While I'm here and screwing around, here's a Googlewhack: aquaplane wimax

Also, I'm redoing some fundamental bits of the XSLT that runs my site, so things might be a bit haywire for a few days.

I recently decided to customize the CSS style sheets on my Sympa mailing list manager -based semacode.org forums . It wasn't quite as easy as I think it should have been. The "instructions" in the Sympa docs are not exactly friendly. However after puzzling through it myself I found that it wasn't too hard. Here are the notes I made in the process.

set css_path in robot.conf e.g. css_path /var/www/lists.semacode.org/css #filesystem path css_url http://lists.semacode.org/css/ #fully-qualified URL! then set chmod the css directory, chmod a+rw so that sympa can change it then on "skins admin" page do "install static css" (static = not generated on the fly by tt2, I think) it will install style.css and some other .css files in the css directory then set the css directory back to whatever permissions you want it to have then modify the "static" css files however you like 

...and there you have it. So far I haven't done much, just a little bit on the archives view . Ultimately I hope to steal all the good looks from projects like phpbb and others.

Also my next appearance on Call for Help should be in episode #416, whenever that airs.

I've thought before about putting in a two-level tagging system on my blog. I guess that it comes from that I'm dissatisfied with "tags" per se. They're just not rich enough. With a simple tagging system, it's hard to organize your tags into groups, for example, which to me is a big problem.

I'm not the only one to do something about this: see also tag bundles on del.icio.us , and also "meta tags" (which are tags about tags I guess).

I think that the common "solution" is to give mix tags together, so if you're talking about developing software on OS X you'd tag with "development", "software" and "OS X". But that's an implicit, not an explicit relationship. Also, designing a tag browser that lets you see which articles are tagged with all three of those tags is a hassle. Finally, there's no sense of hierarchy.

On the other hand, going to hard in the other direction (totally formal hierarchies) is also not viable in my opinion because it's too much work. You can get stuck with a specific hierarchy that doesn't always work (like in a library catalogue), or you can get confused by deranged mazes of hierarchical relationships (like Wikipedia's categories ).

This is a problem in software development too. I remember when working at Apple. NextStep always had a single-level namespace, which meant that each and every library and application class had to have a unique name. This is a really big hassle and so people wound up prefixing their class names with two uppercase letters in order to prevent collisions. So NSThis and NSThat were the names for "NextStep" classes (provided by the system), and your own app would be MAThis and MAThat (for "My App" ...). Then of course what if two people choose the same prefix. Or what if the name of the app changes, and your prefix becomes historical and a little spurious. (Like in OS X, all of the system classes still start with NS...)

Apple introduced a two-level namespace at some point in 2001 I think, which made the problem go away (although the NS prefix remains). I think that two-level systems are good. People can remember two levels of hierarchy very easily, it's a sort of natural relationship (like having a filesystem with files and folders but no sub-folders ... wouldn't that be simple??).

So I decided to put into place a two-level tagging system here in my blog. The "top level" tag is the category and the "second level" tag is the tag . Top level categories include links , original , and a big one: dev (for software development). You can see all the categories by clicking "Browse all tags" at the top to take you to the categories and tags browser .

There's a couple more things I want to do. One is to integrate the rest of the site into the system, so that any of the pages on the site can be tagged and included in an overall tags-based browser for the site.

Also I need to improve the UE a bit ... one thing is to have the ability to see a list of each category and its sub-tags. Also, I need a page-overflow paging type system to deal with huge pages like the one for the "dev" tag.

Does that seem like a lot to you? It seems like a lot to me.

My CLEVER little blog now has a better tag browser , more like the one you are used to seeing in flickr and so on. Also the tag browser is finally fixed so that it actually displays all of the tags that I've used... the previous one had a little bug in it, which I will totally blame on the XSLT FAQ s article on Grouping which completely didn't work for me in this case. And their technique made no sense.

Will I ever release my siteware as open source? It could happen.. I won't say I'm not unmoved by gifts of small and valuable precious stones. Actually, I really ought to just do it. Bleh.

And finally, I still need to go through and tag some more actually.. but what I'm thinking of doing now is tagging the whole site and making RSS available for the whole site as well.

The blog finally has a name. It's CLEVER. Now when you refer to my blog, you can say, "as written on CLEVER", or "on CLEVER (by Simon Woodside)" or if you like, "on Simon Woodside's CLEVER blog" ;-)

I always resisted giving the blog a name before partly because I thought it was pretentious, but partly because I couldn't detect a strong theme to base it on. Then not too long ago I realized that a blog really should have it's own name. "So-and-so's blog" just doesn't cut it. So I started thinking again ... anyway, I decided that at least all of the things I write about are in fact clever, even if I didn't creat them myself.

For a list of topics, you can check out the index of tags by the way.

On another note, I also realized that this web site is almost 10 years old. Time flies. (My god... the blog is just over 5!)

Well I changed my mind and decided to call my categories "tags" after all. Just seems to make more sense. On the other hand, my siteware allows me to use multi-word tags.

Well, it's been a long time, but I finally added categories to my blog software. You'll notice the category browser up there at the top. Also, each entry that has a category indicated will list them at the bottom in [square brackets]. So you can for example view all my posts on the subject of Apple . Or whatever.

For a long time I was wondering how to implement this. One thing is the whole keywords vs. categories thing. Well, keywords (aka tags) are just ONE WORD whereas categories (aka key phrases) are, well, multiple words allowed.

The problem with tags, which I think you can see on flickr and del.icio.us is that sometimes one word just isn't enough. For example now that J2ME is called "Java ME" (which is better than J2ME since I'm always like, what's the 2 for?). But if I tag something with "java ME" then I'm going to get TWO tags.

OK, sure, you could build some kind of tag-combination system or a search interface or what have you, but none of them have, and it sounds like a bit of a tough problem. So, I'm not going to go that route.

However I do have a vaguely in mind idea that I might try to add tags or categories or WHATEVER to the whole site, maybe using RDF or at least exporting RDF or RSS or something like that. Like making the whole site semantic in some way.

Oh yeah, one more thing, entry titles are back on the title of individual entry pages, which I lost when I did the weblog upgrade a little while ago, but now I have it back. Important stuff for google searches!

It seems that AWStats is without a doubt the best stats package out there these days. And you can get it easily enough on debian with apt-get. But it still requires a bit of configuration. Here's what I've done so far.

First I have a number of virtual hosts so that I made a copy of /etc/awstats/awstats.conf to /etc/awstats/awstats.semacode.org.conf which is the blessed name for each virtual host. In that new conf file you need to have:

• LogFile="/var/log/apache/access.log"
• LogFormat = 1 - this is important because Sarge comes with apache configured to the combined setting at least in my recently-made fresh install.
• SiteDomain="semacode.org"

Now, apt-get will already have installed a cron job for you, but you need to make sure it's working because it won't complain if it's broke. So do this: sudo /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=semacode.org and it will complain if there's anything wrong.

Finally you will need to add the following line to your httpd.conf file: Alias /awstats-icon "/usr/share/awstats/icon/" .

I also am going to add password protection to my awstats page so that the general public can't access it. Partly because it could be a security concern, but mainly because it's slooooow.

RSS went away there for a while. I think that when I changed my back-end of the weblog a few months ago I broke RSS and never fixed it. Then forgot. So now I fixed it. But actually I don't know how, well, actually I did make this one change. Well.

Anyway, the link should be at the top of the Weblog page and here: RSS feed for Simon Woodside's What's New? weblog

For my talk today, the slides are available . Lots of pretty pictures! I didn't do the three about WiMAX, WiFi mesh and WiFi though.

Downtime... I know... I'll talk about it later.

OK, I've been waiting for four long, long years to tell you this. My "Secret Project" at Apple was Marklar aka OS X on x86, finally announced today! I'm not going to say today whether I think it's a good idea or a bad idea, or what, but I will say this. In 2001, my job at Apple was Program Manager for the Marklar project. When I started, Marklar was relatively moribund, being nursed by a handful of Core OS engineers. Lots and lots of new code had been introduced in OS X from the old Mac side, and new code written, since the last release of Rhapsody worked on Intel.

My job was to get the system working on x86 again and that's what I did. I traced dependencies like there was no tomorrow. I worked with engineers in a dozen different divisions, each time making first contact with the division manager, then finding just the right person for the job. Each time the same drill: "I'm going to tell you about a project that is Need To Know only. You can't tell anyone about this, even inside Apple. I'm not even going to tell you everything, just the minimum that you need to know in order for us to continue. If you're wondering who the hell I am and why you should listen to me, ask you manager who will just tell you to do it."

I went on leave in fall 2001 after the WTC thing, but by the time I left the Marklar team gave a demo to something like the top 100 managers of the company with a working Marklar system complete with Finder running and a whole range of apps. I kicked ass!

Obviously such an important part of my professional history, but until TODAY I haven't been allowed to breathe a word. A very SENSITIVE project, of all sensitive projects! But now, tell everyone, tell your friends!

The official simonwoodside.com server, froodily hosted by Paul Schreiber went down at 2005/04/26 at 9:30 PM (Eastern) and came back up at 2005/04/28 at 12:40 PM, after which time the web server was still not responding for some hours. Paul is travelling and anyway he lives in California while the server is in Toronto, so there's always a bit of lag time when it needs to be physically rebooted.

On the 27th I started to change over semacode.org to be hosted by a commercial hosting company. I chose Net Direct which is more of a linux consulting shop but I met their CTO, John van Ostrand, at a Communitech event and was impressed by his knowledge of Linux and languages. I'm not keen to be my own sysadmin or manage my own hardware, but I run a bit of an unusual web server because of AxKit. So having a technically profient organization that's prepared to handle some rather unusual configuration requirements is I think a big advantage.

So, at the moment semacode.org is running temporarily on netdirect's regular server space. It's just a static mirror of the site that I generated from my powerbook. Because of that there's a few issues and I can't update the weblog (for example) as easily as normal. Hopefully over the next week we'll get a new dedicated server up and running and everything will be back to normal but much more reliable!

(Based on the last few years, Paul's server gives about 98-99% availability which means, practically speaking, 3-6 days of downtime a year. It's OK for my personal site but not really good enough for a commercial server.)

I'm caught in an email death spiral. I have so many emails that I can't read them all without some serious pain. So I don't read them. Then more emails come in, and the situation gets worse!

There's lots of things that I want to do, and that I'm doing, that don't involve reading all that email. If you want to talk to me, email me again. Maybe I'll read it this time! hahaha!

I was snooping through my logs last night and I found the following oddities. Search terms (in google): retractable claws will bring up my page on Roarians, in my ever popular (actually surprisingly...) Edion Sourcebook ; km vs miles and all the variants you can think of bring dozens a day to another part of the sourcebook ; surprisingly my nokia hs-4w review brings in a few dozen more, in fact my review is apparently the 2nd most popular page on the site at the moment.

I really ought to automate the popularity list. But anyway, the top 5 most popular pages here to date this month ... skipping the root and the weblog ...

1. symbian/linux howto
2. HS-4W review
3. the sourcebook
4. the fractal trees software page
5. and finally, the photoshop forensics thing

I wrote an article for MobileWhack with some iPhone predictions . Amazingly enough, I'm now on the first page of google results for "iPhone" (although it may not last).

MobileWhack saw fit to publish my article about the rumoured iPhone. Now that I haven't worked for Apple for 3 years, I can feel free to speculate madly about the company without fear that my "predictions" will actually come from prior NDA-covered knowledge.

I just added some new pics to my flickr feed. BTW, you should be using flickr. You know how picky I am. It's good stuff.

Mine's Sierra Whiskey ...

I'm told that if you're old enough (like you were older than 16 when WWII broke out) and you live in Canada, you may remember the name Willson Woodside. He was my grandfather and gave a five-minute report every evening on the news for the CBC, from Europe, about the status of the war. He died when I was I was young, and was sick for a long time before that, but this voice out of the past still has a somewhat familiar sound (and familiar mannerisms definitely). It's an archived report on the CBC from 1950, where he analyses the Korean War. I'm happy to say that his foreshadowing of an escalation of that war failed to occur! I also just wrote an article in Wikipedia about him, and it's incomplete, so fill in the details if you know them (or email them to me and I'll do it). (Fast forward to time index 4:32 to hear him.)

whee, I just unlocked my Nokia 3600 using this free nifty tool that I found using Google Groups (formerly known as USENET...). It had a SIM lock which meant that when I took my Fido SIM and stuck it in, no go I got the "SIM not valid" message. Now that's fixed. Not that Rogers should complain since I've spent so much money on them. In other cell phone news, I just bought a P900 and I'm going to sell my P800 which I never used anyway. The P900 is just better for a development platform. I should actually make back a pretty substantial amount of the money I sunk into the P800 when I sell it on eBay. I hope.

The Nokia 7610 is stil the phone I use. It has all the goodies of the 6600, plus a few, and a better screen. The keypad, which I had some serious worries about, turns out to be OK. There's a big hassle from Apple because they DON'T SUPPORT it in iSync yet, which is just ... well ... anyway, I had to manually copy 50 or so vCards.

On the continuous quest to make this handrolled blog work better with other people's blogs, I added today the ability to track back to other people's blogs. You can't trackback to me (yet anyway). But I can do it to you :-). So, my last post was my first trackback.
There's a lot of stuff to do. Next I need to configure it to ping Technorati as well.
How does it work? It's my special brew. ALL XSLT. All the time.

Finally. After a week in dial-up hell, I'm finally back online for real, ethernet-style. What a relief.

Well, I finally added a graphic to my website. Do you think it looks OK? I had this sudden inspiration and here it is, weighing in at 1.4 Kb. Also, my sister's birthday present in now in Kowloon, Hong Kong. It was shipped there by accident by DHL.

That was quick. Is there some kind of unmet, pent up demand for Symbian Linux solutions? My Symbian / Linux HOWTO is now the #1 result in google if you type in symbian linux or symbian "OS X" . I've had 623 referrals from google so far this month, probably mostly for that. huh.

featured in this feature . believe it or not, progress is being made.

In other news, I wish I could make semacode popular with people without actually having to TALK to them.

semacode made it to the Daypop Top 40 Links today. We're number 18 right now. With an up arrow. And some green bars below. I have no idea what that means. But other people have blue and red bars and some gray ones. I think green is probably good.

Update: Made it as high as 15.

The blue bars are your existing score. Red bars are a decrease since the last update. Green bars are a gain since the last update. I also caught "semacode" as a wordburst, in position 17.

My web counter from digits.com has just crossed 20000. Actual number, probably much higher, since digits seems to miss quite a few. While I'm at it, here are more details. I won't bother with "hits" since it's such a misleading number. But so far this month I've served about 400 pages and had about 100 visits ... per day. Maybe as much as half of those are hits on my rss.xml file though. By a long shot my biggest referrer this month has been google. With 91 hits for the search string "d" ? What does that mean. Other search strings I got a few times are "expat os x" which makes sense, "iambic quadrameter" which makes less sense. "libxml mac os x" and "sdk2unix" seem reasonable.

Here's one that's interesting. Trivia, symbian is a british company. So, you know, those crazy brits (and canadians too) spell some words differently. So when I wrote up my solution to the symbian initialized data problem, I copy/pasted from the output and they use the spelling "initialised". I got a few hits for ".app has initialised data" (I'm first in google for that) (I'm second for just "has initialised data" (with the quotes)).

I just added more of a proper weblog archive that actually lists out all the entries in a list format, providing link-throughs to each entry on a separate page. Now you can see all of the entries at a glance. It's not as good as a by-the-year / by-the-month view would be, but it's a lot better than what I had before which was just every single entry, full text, all on one page.

I just did some ego-surfing and for the first time I own the first page of results for Simon Woodside . Oh yeah, that's me baby.

Hello world! I'm typing this in using the tiny numerical keypad on my 3650 and i have to say it's pretty damn awkward! I am using putty, an ssh client for symbian.

Later: That's right, I logged into my server using ssh from a cell phone. I had to type all the commands in using the numerical keypad. I'm not quite sure that it will ever be of any use though.

Technorati Profile . I just listed my blog with technorati and they want me to put that link into as a flag for their spider or something like that. Are they trying to boost their google results or something? Who knows.

My links page has no pagerank. Neither does my writings page . But my AxKit HOWTO has 7/10. What's up with that?

I just installed Virtual PC 6.1 and it's actually faster than 5 was by quite a bit. Also my google pagerank is 6/10. Is that high? I can't remember what it was last time I checked.

I upgraded to Panther (OS X 10.3) a week or so ago and I started having troubles with my development environment. Not so much XCode, that seemed to be working fine. But I coulnd't get AxKit to work. And mozilla / camino to build (but that might be another story). So anyway I'm trying to build AxKit and getting horrible error spews when I try to install the XML::LibXML perl module. I try to debug it and I find there's just too many versions of libxml installed. I can't figure out which one it's trying to use. So after pruning out some versions, that didn't help, things seemed even worse. Finally I decided to nuke my entire fink installation. Someone said that fink gave problems when upgrading to panther.

Then I reboot my machine and it won't reboot. It hangs at a seemingly random place in the boot process. So I finally did what I should have done at first, which is forget about the "upgrade install" and just wipe out my old system and do a clean panther installation. I can do that, because I keep my home directory on a different partition. I simply create a symlink to it on the root partition. Works like a charm.

Now I'm reconstructing my system again. Hopefully this time it will work better.

I just posted the wedding movie from my cousin Dave's wedding last september. Relatives might be interested.

The server is back online. It was never really down, so mailing lists on openict.net kept working, and maybe some other stuff. But AxKit was down because mod_perl was down. Now apparently an update of apache has fixed the problem. I remind you that debian dist-upgrade is NOT something you should be running every week.

So my sysadmin has broken his server again. No, this time it's just mod_perl that's broken. I think he uses debian package distupgrade without actually paying attention. Not a good idea. So none of my sites work. I have forwarded this site to my own computer for the duration of the outage.

This is kind of fun. The "Digital IQ Test" . I scored 196. There really isn't enough discrimination at the top. Also, apparently they think that "Most files on the Mac can be read on a PC" is true, which I would disagree with.

IE for Windows' problems would be cute if it wasn't so popular. So it turns out that @import directives in a CSS file aren't supported in IE... if they contain a media type. Which mine did ... so anyone looking at parts of the site in IE was getting a seriously garbled output. Well, I "checked" in Virtual PC just to be sure things were looking OK and they weren't. Now it's fixed. I still love that shade of red .

My email magically fixed itself today. The estimable Mr. Paul Schreiber is a bit miffed because he lost his error logs and now he won't get a chance to yell at Yahoo! or the Mail.app team or whoever was responsible for my emotional distress.

I've been having SERIOUS problems with Yahoo! mail in the last 24 hours. I pay extra money for their POP service. But some kind of wonky message got stuck in Mail.app on OS X and I'm pretty sure the problem is Apple's. Almost as soon as I had that working again, though, suddenly I started having trouble accessing my Yahoo mailbox, even through the web interface. I just couldn't download my messages. I've been getting partial downloads as well. It's really annoying.

I wish I knew someone who works at Yahoo. If I have trouble with Apple or Google I can just pick up the phone and start bitching to someone in the know. But not with Yahoo.

The problem is on-again, off-again and seems to coincide with failures to access on the web sometimes, like just now. I think this is Yahoo's fault.

I just updated the weblog on this site to the axblog release. In addition I have converted over the front page from displaying full blog entries to just a synopsis (just the first 200 characters for now). You can view the whole entry directly by clicking on the [...] link or view the most recent weblog entries all in one go by viewing simonwoodside.com/weblog or clicking "What's New" or whatever.

An update of AxBlog to what I use currently here and on openICT and semacode.org

It's all gone. It's all AxKit now.

Yeah, I changed the font from verdana to just sans-serif. That means you, that's right — you! — are now responsible for choosing a good default sans-serif font for your system. If you're on Mac OS X, may I recommend Gills Sans for sans-serif and Hoefler Text for serif? They look very nice.

These — special ∆ characters ∞ brought to you by the letters U, T, F and the number eight. I set the text encoding in my editor and encoding= in the XML header. No character entities have been used in the making of this entry.