Rory Parle

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.

Do people even read the titles of posts? I know I don’t bother reading them on other people’s journals. It’s not as if I’m going to skip a post because the title seems unappealing. I’m not that short of time. Which, without conscious effort, leads me to the topic that I couldn’t find an entertaining title for: I’m short of time. But not really, since I’m on three weeks holidays. But a combination of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (12 hours straight from 20:30 Sunday to 08:30 Monday – thanks Gary), Micro-Machines for PS2 and Warcraft III has conspired to reduce my available study time. I had also hoped to get a working CMS in operation, which would make posting here much easier, or at least faster, but I’m stuck on a particular problem that I’m convinced should be very easy to solve. When I find the solution I’ll kick myself hard enough to break both my legs. Damn it’s frustrating. Until then, expect posts to be fewer and farther between than usual.

On a design note: Apparently the old dashed borders didn’t look too well in IE/Win, so I’ve replaced them with solid borders. I figured that anyone who uses IE/Win obviously doesn’t care about attractive rendering, but apparenly I was wrong.

I had intended to come up with a number of possible expansions of PHP and to include them in a big list here, possibly with some or all of them conveying the messages of ‘I now have PHP processing at my disposal’, ‘my blog will be based on said PHP soon’, and ‘I’m happy about this state of affairs’.

Would it be too much to ask you to pretend I managed to find these expansions, and that we all had a good laugh? Yes, I supose it would. Well then prizes for any that you can come up with.

Well if Meg‘s going to complain about spelling, and I fully support her in this endeavour, then I’m going to vent some grammar-related fury. A prize is on offer to the first person who can find a legitimate spelling or grammatical error in this post.

When did ‘to used to’ become an infinitive verb? Granted the usage (that is the correct usage) of the construct “subject used to infinitive” is more complex than the similar (in meaning) “subject verbed”, but it’s not so complex as to be incomprehensible. To give an analogy for those who don’t see the error in “I didn’t used to”, consider the phrase “I didn’t must”. Would anyone try to form a sentence around such an obviously erroneous fragment? Neither ‘must’ nor ‘used to’ should be used in this manner. So what’s the alternative? You used not to know but now you do.