| As Advogato's trust metric does not appear to trust me enough to allow me to post a reply, this is in reply to mchicago's post about .Net and Browsercaps:
As someone who is currently in academia and will not qualify as an engineer for quite a while, I feel qualified to give you an unhelpful answer which has no practical application to your current real world problem.
Trying to keep up to date lists of every mobile device is like chasing the wind.
This is what Content Negotiation in the HTTP specification is for, in this case Server-driven negotiation would probably be preferable. A user agent should send an Accept header as part of the HTTP request which specifies which formats the user agent can render and the server should respond accordingly.
Unfortunately a lot of browsers send a wildcard instead of a real argument in Accept headers and claim to be able to render all formats, which of course they can't. Apache has partial support for Content Negotiation and if you're using IIS you'd probably have to write it yourself.
So the answer is to get manufacturers of mobile devices to get their web browsers to send proper Accept headers and Microsoft to think about Device Independence for their server products. Good Luck.
In other news... tola.me.uk is nearly ready to roll, despite accidentally looking uncannily like Elliot's web site. That's what happens when you use stock themes! Once I've moved over, then hopefully interesting things will happen with hippygeek.co.uk
I've ordered a Nokia 770, I have evil plans for it.
Me and Sam spent several hours today trying to fix the BurnFM web stream, the web part is fixed but we can't get the sound engineering part right. I blame poor sound engineering kit. A poor worker always blames his tools. Sam's planning to swap out the server with one running slackware and icecast, I've almost convinced the station manager it's a good idea. 'Cept I vote for Ubuntu Server.
University are making me use Access :(
Now of to Tom's to see how many people we can fit in his house, I reckon about 130. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| "We did the calculations, and we reckon that it's possible to make a yoghurt with roughly the same processing power as the entire European population." --Ian Pearson, Futurologist: The ITWales Interview
The idea of "Ultra Simple Computing" appealed to me:
"Computers can be redesigned from the ground up with tens of thousands of little chips to distribute the load. It will mean there will be no need for an operating system or even a hard disk, as everything can be saved on the chips".
To me, a computer is just a network of networks of networks - right from a network of semiconductors on a chip up to a distributed supercomputer over a international stupid network like the Internet.
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| I need some help with Drupal...
Blogroll Friends list Block
This is the simpler of the two problems. I use the Drupal aggregator module to create a blogroll of blogs I read at http://tola.me.uk/friends. On the front page of my website I'd like a "friends" block on the right hand side which lists the names of all the feeds in my blogroll with a link to respective websites. So far I can only see how to make a block which displays recent blogroll posts.
Do I need to write my own PHP block to do this (I've found a function in the aggregator API which does something similar and I've nearly figured out how to tweak it) or can I do it more simply with a view which presents itself as a block? Surely this is a pretty standard thing to want to do, list feed sources.
Import Blog from LiveJournal
I've asked this on Drupal forums but had no reply yet, so I thought I'd throw it to a wider audience.
I'd like to import nearly three years worth (219 entries) of my LiveJournal to my new Drupal powered blog. LiveJournal allow you to export entries as either CSV or XML files, a month of entries per file (that's 33 files for me).
There is a page entitled Migrating from LiveJournal on the Drupal web site, but I think it may be slightly out of date. It offers three methods of migration:
1) Use IFRAMEs - not really what I want
2) Using Node Import - by using an RSS feed it says that the actual content will still be hosted at LiveJournal, which isn't what I want. I think it's also now out of date because contrary to what it says, RSS feeds are now available to all LiveJournal users.
3) Use the Livejournal Module to import the raw data into Drupal - This sounds like the best method. Unfortunately, the module is no longer available or maintained.
I'm now thinking that my best option is to use the Node Import module to try and import the CSV or XML files, but I have no idea how to do it and the documentation for that module doesn't mention supporting the blog post content type. Alternatively, the new Import/Export API module might do this?
If I can use the Node Import module, What XML format do the blog posts need to be in to be imported and what date format do they need to use?
I don't think I will be able to preserve all LiveJournal features like "tags" because they don't appear in the exported XML files, but I'd quite like to convert all instances of a custom [lj user="joebloggs"] tag with an [a href="http://joebloggs.livejournal.com"] tag. This makes me wonder if I should somehow utilize the RSS feed of the blog which already has this conversion done, as well as other useful things like a link to the original LiveJournal post and comments.
If I have to write my own module to do this in Drupal 4.7, might this be a good use of XSLT? I've been meaning to play with that for a while.
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| wonchop.hippygeek.co.uk has a new home! Following his recent dazzling academic success, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wonchop has launced a new site, wonchop.net which has a back catalogue of all his old animations, forums and a cafepress shop. Me and djkoa are lucky to have been the inspiration for the characters "b3n and wez - the IT geeks", two members of the wonchop family, and we've now even been made into t-shirts, mousemats and clocks! Go along to wonchop's cafepress shop and buy some merchandise (like I just have) to support his work :)
Wonchop was the first project to start off life nestled in the bosom of hippygeek.co.uk, back in 2003, and has now well and truly flown the nest. In this spirit, I hope that hippygeek.co.uk will be the home of lots more new ideas. Over the coming weeks I am going to be moving my personal homepage to the new Drupal powered tola.me.uk (still in its very early stages) and hippygeek.co.uk will solely become a home for new ideas, mainly providing trac hosting for software projects. The hosting for hippygeek has been kindly provided by FFDesign, and then Moose Computer Services up until now, but it will probably now move to its own Debian box, leaving tola.me.uk in its place.
Watch this space.
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| An announcement (not a permalink) from PlusNet says that their Broadband connectivity, Webmail, CGI, MYSQL, Some mail Relays and wait for it.... "The Phone System" are currently suffering downtime due to a power outage in Telehouse!
After the recent email data loss fiasco where I lost two years worth of email archives I'm starting to get a bit irritated. If I can't rely on telehouse for uptime, what can I rely on? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| SecondLife
I finally managed to try out SecondLife last week (by transplanting all the best hardware I own into a single box so that I could run the thing!). Apart from slow rendering caused by the awful packet loss of my current Internet connection the experience has been a good one, it's cool. I can fly. I can build awesome objects with 3D modelling and logic.
Blender
I've downloaded and installed Blender, "open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback." It looks complicated, I really want to play with it but so far I've only had time to export a cube as X3D to see what the XML looks like. I know it's capable of great things.
Ajax3D
In December last year I blogged " X3D + AJAX = ...I wonder". Today I found Ajax3D, which was announced at the beginning of the month. I think it was started by the same people who make Flux, the X3D browser plugin, which I also want to play with.
and more...
I've been reading about 3D standards like X3D, OpenGL, KML etc. recently as part of my research into the multimodal web. I've also been thinking more about a RESTful and semantic web, separation of concerns, software design patterns like MVC, content negotiation, device independence, XML transformation etc. etc. I've started to try and channel all this thinking towards one or more actual software projects to work on and have started wrting stuff up. So many ideas, so little time. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| I have a question about RESTful URLs which is going to sound pretty trivial and boring unless you're a RESTafarian... apparently they exist.
Say I have a resource with the URL http://widgets.com/widget/1 to which I can GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. If I want the user to have an overview of widget 1 they can GET this URL, similarly for DELETE. But if I want to point them to a form where they can edit the widget (which I don't necessarily want to display by default), what would a RESTful URL be?
http://widget.com/widget/1/edit ?
http://widget.com/widget/1?action=edit ?
http://widget.com/widget/edit/1 ?
What if I have a page which lists all my widgets, should that be
http://widget.com/widgets
or
http://widget.com/widget ?
There's an article on URI design by Timbl which contains lots of "don't"s but not many "do"s.
In other news...
I am furious with PlusNet for losing two years worth of emails I had stored on their IMAP server (along with everyone else's). I had "backup email" on my to do list for about a year, shame I relied on an ISP to back up my data. There were a lot of important emails in that inbox. I'm going to start looking into running my own mail server so at least if I lose data I know it's only my own fault. I've been meaning to play with Hula for ages but I've been waiting for their first stable release for over a year! They gave a talk at LugRadio Live and it sounds like the stable release is coming, but it's still going to be a while (I can't help but feel they've missed the boat a bit). I also have a book on Postfix which I might dig out.
Continuing in the theme of storing my own data, I've started on a new Drupal version of my now 5 year old homepage, which I plan to migrate my LiveJournal blog to if and when I figure out how to do it.
I found out that I didn't win the IET Write Around the World Competition again this year, no suprises there really. The judges' feedback boiled down to: well written, technically sound but boring as hell! I admit they have a point, I didn't like it myself once it was finished. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Summer Placement
I've now been on my summer placement with Senokian Solutions for a week or so. We're working on version 2.0 of the Enterprise Groupware System. We've written the basics of the framework pretty much from scratch in a couple of weeks, it follows the Model View Controller design pattern and uses ADOdb database abstraction, the Smarty template engine and Simple Test unit testing amongst other free software projects.
Now that phase 1 of the framework is complete (pending the completion of unit testing) my job will shift focus to the ERP and accounting module. I'm mainly working with Greg who is leading the development of EGS 2.0 and Paul who is another summer placement student.
The office is cool (in both the froody and air conditioned senses of the word), we have a fridge full of free drinks, coffee machine and even an office dog called Archie! The development environment is Linux/Apache/Postgres/PHP with Subversion and Trac and Ubuntu thin client workstations with Firefox, Thunderbird et. al. Perfect.
LugRadio Live 2006
It's probably a bit late for these images but...  
LugRadio Live was great! Bigger and better than last year for sure. There were a couple of very dull talks (especially for lauperr who actually fell asleep) but also a lot of very interesting ones. I particularly liked the talk by Simon Phipps from Sun who articulated the changing direction of the software market brilliantly in "The Zen of Open Source".
Poor old Jono lost his beard but raised about £600 for charity.
In other news...
I now finally have the Internet at home again (home as in temporary home in covernty) thanks to lauperr's cunning router configuration skills. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Summer Placement with Senokian
After a stretch of working in the fields picking vegetables (great money by the way) and desperate job searching I've managed to secure myself a summer placement! It's perfect in every way except that it's in Coventry. Luckily lauperr happens to be renting a house in Coventry and isn't having much luck finding a job at home so we're both going to live there for a couple of months and work. I'll be working for Senokian Solutions writing open source software and I assume contributing to the Enterprise Groupware System. I'll be part of the Shell Step program, though not eligible for any awards because it's only really meant for 2nd and 3rd years (shh!). I should be starting on Wednesday.
LugRadio Live 2006
For anyone who's still in the Bourne area I'll hopefully be back every weekend except next week when I'll be at LUGRadio Live 2006 in Wolverhampton. Be there or be... not square I suppose.
Ubuntu Dapper
I've spent about a week using the latest (long term support) release of Ubuntu Linux, Dapper Drake. I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a bold statement.
I believe GNU/Linux is now ready for the desktop.
Dapper Drake isn't perfect, but it's damned good and it's definitely easier to install than Microsoft Windows. That's understandable when you think how many years it is since Microsoft last released an operating system, but I believe that the perpetually delayed release of Windows Vista is going to alienate a lot of people, especially the minority who actually care about things like the Windows Genuine Disadvantage. I for one can't afford a PC which could run Vista and I'll probably only install it if I get a free copy from University. Dapper probably isn't as good in terms of usability or style as Mac OS X but it has its own advantages. I'm not saying that GNU/Linux is going to suddenly dominate the desktop, I'm just saying it's ready for use by the general public in ways it perhaps wasn't before the latest release of Ubuntu. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| All those fed up of hearing about Google, look away now.
In the Google Newsletter today were a few useful tools I didn't know existed.
- Co-op - Another way of getting users to help organise the world's information
- Notebook - Basically a wiki for Joe Public, you can have private or public notes. The intereting bit is "AJAX" UI for inline WYSIWYG editing, pretty much exactly what I meant by my WizziWiki idea on my ideas wiki.
- Trends - An incredibly useful tool (for some people) for graphing search trends on just about anything - kind of a build-your-own zeitgeist. For example, Good vs. Evil
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