Category: Uncategorized

Wow, I suck at deciding winners for competitions. Next time I’m just going to put GMail invites up on eBay or something… anyway. Congratulations to Matt & David, who’ll be receiving their shiny new GMail invites very shortly. Thanks to everybody, and since I’m such a good sport as soon as I get some more invites everybody else who entered will get one too.

Quick note: Hanni’s hosts seem to have disappeared and taken Pinksocks with them, so her site might be down for a while. You’ll just have to get your regular colourful underwear-related football geek posts elsewhere for now I’m afraid.

So everybody seems to be giving away GMail accounts lately (those who have one can invite a limited number of friends), and since I’m a GMail user with very few friends* I thought I’d give some away.

At the moment I have two invites to dish out, so you need to do something special to attract my attention. Something with skill. Something that shows you really really want that invite.

…I want you to write me a haiku. A haiku about Google and GMail no less. Leave it in the comments field and the best two I receive by Sunday will get my invites. If you don’t know what a haiku is, have a look here. Or, see my awful example:

“Gmail is so great
Now my inbox is so large
To fit more spam in”

You can do better! Leave your masterpieces in the comments. You can enter multiple times, so go knock yourselves out.

*By ‘very few friends’ I mean very few who don’t already have GMail accounts — of course….

New design is up, and I quite like it. More blog-like than the last one, and fits the screen better. I’ve also put breadcrumbs everywhere and installed a new (better?) gallery. The last one was fine – huge and powerful – but that was also its downfall. It was a git to fiddle with and templating was a no-no. This one is much simpler, templating is a breeze and it’s very hackable. I already added EXIF support to it (okay, so Gallery had that already…)

Anyway, thoughts and comments on the new design very welcome.

I got a two-two. I passed. I have a degree. Quite amusing that the subjects I’m most interested in also yielded the lowest scores…

Hooray for the Internet. I’ve finally managed to get a script together for capturing thumbnails of websites, for Blogwise’s blog info pages.

Last time I posted about this I was working on a Windows solution, and Brian started putting together a Java/IE combo tool (thanks Brian BTW). Both worked well but ideally I’d like a Linux based solution – that saves me leaving another computer on (which isn’t a popular move in this household).

A few weeks ago I spotted this little program. Webthumb is a Perl script that launches Xvfb, a sort-of dummy windows environment, so you can run GUI-based programs within it but not have it display anywhere. It loads up a browser (Mozilla Firefox) within that virtual screen, and takes captures of a website. A little Perl script wrapper of my own, with appropriate resizing and cropping instructions and we’re good to go.

I also made use of a Kiosk addition for Phoenix Firebirdfox to get rid of the toolbars, although it still needs some tweaking to get it working with the latest version of the browser.

There are still a few slight snags. Popups still appear when a plugin is required (e.g. Flash) but they go away when the next website is requested. I still can’t get Firefox to show full-screen either, so the captures are limited to 640×480, which is less than most sites are designed for these days. so I seem to get the top-left of any given website.

These are all minor niggles though, and progress is certainly being made!

I have a conference call coming up this afternoon, where I’ll be discussing, alongside people from (amongst others) AOL, BT and Yahoo!, how content ratings might be introduced to directories such as Blogwise. Should be good, but the prospect of having a conference call with 13 people seems a bit daunting! The last one I did had 3 and required a lot of phone discipline!

Anyway, more soon. My only regret is the crap land line quality here

Plane tickets are booked, hotel booked, conference tickets booked. Come beginning of July I’m going to the Blogtalk conference. First time abroad for me (I’m a hermit usually…) so I’m really looking forward to it!

Ooh this is a tricky one. My self-made templating system which is otherwise coming along quite nicely has hit a slight problem. The system works by running all .html files through a PHP script (via the AddType and Handler config instructions).  One of the principles of the templating system is that it integrates quite well with the host server, thus templates are set by .htaccess files in Apache. It normally works great.

When you set all .html files to use a particular handler, Apache doesn’t check that the file exists before it invokes the handler script. If that file doesn’t exist, the handler needs to return an error code to the server, and Apache will then kick off its ErrorDocument for a 404. The snag is, I can’t figure out how to get a PHP module to return an error code to the host server. The best I can do at the moment is echo back a custom 404 page from within PHP, which is not very portable at all – it should be using the document defined in the .htaccess or Apache config.

I’m fairly sure something like this is what I want:
if (!$mydoc=@file($reqfile)) {
    exit(404);
} else { ….

But exit(404) doesn’t seem to work. The Apache API docs suggested that I should be returning a HTTP status code as the error, and I can’t find any other information about it. Does anybody know what to do in this case?

SEX

According to A List Apart’s 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web, their eighth tip is to "Be Sexy". Therefore from now on I will be wearing revealing lingerie when posting and detailing my every sexual encounter. Nah… not really, but read the article – it’s very interesting! (Found via Pinksocks)

The week is up. I’m back in Gosport and things are going well. I am now no longer studying, which is a massive relief. I am also no longer working here as of today, and will be starting here in July (well… starting full time). Had three other offers (one of them from Netcraft – blimey!) but chose DuckDriver in the end. Partly because of the name. Also because they (well, me in a former life) built 1DO3, which continues to draw a tidy audience.

Here’s a random photo from Swansea. Enjoy.

And here’s what I’ve been spending far too many hours on today.

I’m still getting to grips with 3D rendering, so this was a good way to get to grips with boolean objects and NURBS. Fun fun fun.