Month: March 2003

It seems I’ve forgotten to mention the addition of stevenberlinjohnson.com to my link list (to the right, if you’re using a graphical browser; below for a text browser.) Mr Johnson first earned my attention with Emergence (link to amazon.com for illustrative purposes, you can find it cheaper elsewhere), which introduces the idea of complexity emerging from simple systems, like the simple behaviour of ants and neurons causing higher phenomena like ant-hill behaviour and consciousness. I read this a year or two ago, but didn’t know he had a website until last week. He recently wrote an article on Fear and its relationship to memory for Discover. An interesting read; it’s about the educational level of a BBC documentary, except that BBC documentaries are crap these days so I get my documentaries online now.

Me

Hello?

Female Voice

Hello, this Margaret from Eircom. Can I ask who I’m speaking to?

Me

Rory

Margaret

Hello Rory. Do you use the internet?

Me

Yup

Margaret

Okay, ley me just see how much you spend…

At this point, Margaret goes silent for several seconds as she checks my phone bill for last month. This is despite the fact that she works, as I will find out, for Eircom.net not Eircom proper, and therefore shouldn’t have access to my phone bill. I know she’s checking the phone records not the ISP records because I don’t use Eircom.net. I use IOL.

Margaret

Ooh! You spend a lot. Rory we recommend that our customers [“I ain’t one of your customers Maggie,” I think] upgrade to high speed internet access.

She gives a very general description of Eircom.net’s new service. So basic that she neglects to name the service. I think it’s DSL. She also neglects the price. I think it’s €45/month-ish.

Me

Go on…

Margaret

Can I send you out some information on this new service?

Me

Sure [At least written information might actually tell me something other than “It’s fast”].

Margaret

And would you like us to tell you about some of our other offers when they become available?

Me

I’d rather you didn’t.

Margaret

Can I ask why not?

At this point I’m expected to cave. Saying “oh, go ahaid and ring me whenever you want” is easier than saying “I don’t like getting phone calls from marketing people”.

Me

I don’t like getting phone calls from marketing people.

Margaret

Oh… [long pause] … thank you for your time.

So Eircom are abusing their telephone monopoly to steal internet customers from Esat. Shame on them.

Homer Simpson says to push the anger deep inside until it finally bursts out in a terrible rage like "when Daddy hit the refferee with a whisky bottle" (this may have been a whiskey bottle; he doesn’t specify). Well thanks for the advice Homer but in this case I’d rather just rant. It’s therapeutic (fun too).

Here I was trying to get my user stylesheet to work in Mozilla and nothing I did would persuade it to consider my ‘suggestions’. So after many attempts during which time I fell on my virtual ass many times (and my real ass once), I decided to create a new profile, on the basis that all of my screwing around (that being of course the technical title for my research) had broken something. Before I altered all of my settings for this new profile I checked that the rules set out in userContent.css were being obeyed. They were applied with all the giddy satisfaction that Mozilla always seems to feel when it completes a task successfully. So I began the Herculean, or perhaps Xenan, task of altering my settings. Disable popups; Don’t loop GIFs; Open tabs in the background; Change theme… Damn! My theme was ‘orbit’, which isn’t available by default. No problem, I’ve got it on this computer somewhere, I just need to install it. And with this simple thought I fell, once more, on my virtual behind. Mozilla does not, in fact, have such a feature that can install a theme that lives on the local machine. My journey of discovery had begun.

Of the succeeding minutes there is little to tell. I visited themes.mozdev.org, the home of orbit, and discovered that it weighs in at a considerable 1.6Mb. No way will I download that if I can help it. The solution that I chose, and there may exist others, was to copy the ‘javascript:’ link from the site, paste it into my address bar, change the target URL to one at localhost, fire up my own server locally and let the magic work. This, it should go without saying, was more effort than clicking a button would have been.

Just as I get into the right frame of mind to make some progress on Phry (another update today added the preview function I was after), not to mention the right frame of mind to use unimaginative idioms like ‘frame of mind’, I have to go back to college tomorrow. This will also interfere with my ability to watch the Oscars tonight. Actually, on second thought, that doesn’t make sense. Staying up to watch the Oscars will most certainly interfere with my ability to go to college though. Either way, I’m not pleased.

Along with this displeasure is something that the late, and, although it’s a cliché, great, Douglas Adams called Farnham. This is the feeling you get at four o’clock when you haven’t done enough. Multiply this by three-hundred or so, and you arrive at the feeling that it’s five weeks to your (or worse, my) exams and you haven’t done a thing. Actually, not doing a thing is fine. You can convince yourself that there’s not much to do. I’ve done just enough to know that I haven’t done enough. I am suffering from Farnham.

I find it surprising that at no point during Phry’s weeks of development did I think to add a ‘preview’ feature. I only get to see what my entries will look like after they’re posted. This can only end in tears. Think malformed HTML, and many many spelling mistakes. Of course this wouldn’t be too bad if I had fixed the problem that I did know about, which is my inability to usefully edit entries in retrospect. I can only do this via FTP and direct editing. As well as all of this, only a single day after going live and Phry is at version 1.0.1, which is a bugfix update due to a minor coding error in the original. This will not be uncommon.

Slashdot → MozillaNews → Jesse’s Bookmarklets Site – It’s a little known fact that most modern browsers will execute javascript that’s typed into the addressbar. This is not hugely useful in itself, but it leads to a rather wonderful result. If you bookmark the javascript then it can be executed at your whim. Jesse Ruderman has some great examples. My favourite has to be the ‘test styles’ bookmarklet which allows me to apply CSS rules to any page that I’m looking at. This could conceivably be used to alter the look of ugly pages that I stumble across, but it’s primarilly useful for design. I found this quite delightful to use when I was cleaning up some sloppy design descisions earlier today.

You can ignore this. It’s just a test to make sure that everything I fixed after the last attempt is now working. Now I can start cataloging the inevitable slew of more minor bugs that will surely show up. I’ll start with that slash that got added to the previous post’s title.

for being just a little bit proud of myself? This will be the first test of posting with Phry running on netsoc’s servers. Everything else worked except for a few strange errors, now fixed. I’ll be very happy if the world ever sees this entry, and very sad otherwise. Blow on this for luck…

I’m typing this in the working version (v1.0) of Phry on my own home computer. Right now I hope that I’m ready to just upload straight to the netsoc servers and I’ll be in business (figuratively). If all goes well, Phry will be online in about five minutes’ time. I can’t possibly imagine that this will go well, but I have to hope. I will post immediately if it works.

Yes all of the above listed will be crammed together uncomfortably into a standard fun-sized designed-for-travel package. And, no; it shouldn’t be. But seeing as how I’m still not ready to unveil Phry (for that is the suitably Futurama-inspired working title of my home-grown CMS), I’m really not all that keen to separate my thoughts into clean-cut, subject-oriented Journal Solutions™. But you can catch all my deranged, sleep-deprived ramblings (complete with hyphenated, comma-separated adjectives and meaningless, flow-disturbing interjections (are they still interjections if I’m the only person involved?) (can I nest parentheses like that in legitimate written English?) (take a moment to recall our position in the main clause before continuing)) in this bumper (though previously, incorrectly, advertised as fun-sized) omnibus edition. Normal programming, having no real bearing on what usually appears here, is not expected to resume, or indeed commence, in the foreseeable future. Have a nice day.

Hmmm? Oh yes, of course. The post. Well here it is, in all its wonderful, unnecessarily punctuation-filled (oh give it a rest) glory. Phry is on the way. Briefly, it works like this: I have a separate file, in a particular format, which contains all of the information about any particular journal entry, specifically title, date and time of posting and content, as well as the capacity to extend this structure to cover things like topic, related links etc. When you visit Soylent Red, Phry finds out which of these entries are less than a week old, and it puts them in a handy little HTML file which it sends to you. It looks to you like any other web page with nothing to indicate that the file you are in fact, by this point, looking at does not exist on this server. It was put together on the fly. So far all done. But what about older entries, like from last week? Well, you’ve got the archive for that. The plan is that you’ll be able to get a list (all nicely HTMLed) of all the entries I posted for any particular month. I haven’t done this yet. Why? Because I spent too long writing this entry. I’m reluctant to set a date because I really could just give over a day to this and have it done and online in a matter of hours, but I won’t and I’ll just miss the deadline. It would only serve to get your hopes up. Soon.

Related news: I’m going to change the look of the site a little. Maybe totally, but probably not. At the moment I’m looking at a change in color scheme. This will come in with Phry. That’s how you’ll know. That and the fact that I’ll actually post every now and then, of course. Interesting aside: I wanted to copy the color of Mozilla’s Orbit theme, and managed to guess the hex value of the color to within four (for those that don’t know, colors in web-pages are generally specified in the form rrggbb where each of rr, gg and bb is a hexadecimal number, equivalent to the range 0 – 255 decimal. The actual color I wanted is EEF3F5. I guessed EEF3F9, which is almost indistinguishable). So I can now identify a color’s hex representation by sight. What an odd and geeky skill.

http://www.reinvigorate.net/system/ – has some nice pie-charts showing popular browser usage and platform usage. Being, as I am, in the business (or hobby) of web-design I find it peculiarly depressing that more than ninety percent of surfers seem to be using IE/Win, one of the crappiest browsers in the world today. Anyone who says, “but it works” is horribly misinformed and/or delusional. Can I be forgiven another plug for Mozilla?

this is the latest version of security update, the “March 2003, Cumulative Patch” update which eliminates all known security vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer, Outlook and Outlook Express as well as five newly discovered vulnerabilities. Install now to protect your computer from these vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could allow an attacker to run executable on your system. This update includes the functionality of all previously released patches.

The above is taken directly from (what is presumably) the most evil e-mail I’ve ever received. I say presumably, because I can only assume, not being stupid enough to check, that the attached .exe is a trojan horse (similar to a virus). The from address is ‘lkeeszu_ugykjxwrr@reroute.microsoft.com’, which might convince some otherwise sceptical people of its authenticity (if they rationalise the odd username part and ignore the ‘reroute’ part), with the displayed name ‘MS Corporation Security Section’. There’s a ‘uol.com.br’ address in the headers. That domain seems to be a Brazilian ISP. Anywho, in short: scam/trojan = evil.

I’m enjoying Warcraft III, I’ve ordered Mortal Kombat and it’s been dispatched. More on games another time perhaps. I’m too tired to bore you further.