Thu, 20 Jul 2006
FireFox 2 Microsummaries - Initial Thoughts
Microsummaries are regularly-updated succinct summaries of web pages.
They are compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label,
provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and
are regularly updated as new information becomes available.
--
Microsummaries - Mozilla
Wiki
I've spent a little while playing with them now and while I like them, smarter page titles are nice, they have their limits. Firstly, they are not the easiest things to install. Most people are not going to understand them or get them working without some hand holding. IMHO they are going to be a niche tool unless the user experience is heavily tweaked. Secondly, and this caught me for a while, you only see the dynamic behaviour if you add the microsummary to the bookmark toolbar. It doesn't work in the normal bookmark menu, which I think would be a lot better. There has been some discussion about putting them in tab titles but this seems to be a bad idea based on how much space they typically have available.
I've also noticed a couple of odd things, although this is a beta so it's understandable. When you add a microsummary it doesn't pick up the favicon, even when it changes the content. It does however pick it up when you go to the actual site it refers to. I also didn't get any errors when I tried to install (via a href link) a microsummary that didn't exist.
In general I think they're interesting but the way they are installed and activated is too awkward for my liking and RSS already satisfies a lot of the use cases where they could be very powerful. I've not finished playing with them yet (and they're refreshing my XPath and XSLT knowledge) so expect my prototypes to be on here in a day or so.
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Posted: 2006/07/20 13:18 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 19 Jul 2006
FireFox2 UnixDaemon.net MozSearch Plugin
I ended up writing a number of Unofficial Mycroft
Searches for FireFox1 and Mozilla and now I've started to have a
play with FireFox 2 Beta 1, one of the FireFox features I thought I'd
investigate first is the new MozSearch
search plugins.
I've not dug too deeply yet (I'm on training so I'm playing in the breaks) but I have pulled a basic search together for UnixDaemon. If you're running a FireFox2 Beta head over to either the UnixDaemon blog or the UnixDaemon.net main site and then click the downwards pointing arrow on the search box on the top right. Click 'Add "Search UnixDaemon.net"' and it should then be a valid search option. And unlike mycroft in FireFox 1 this time you can actually delete search plugins without editing your profile directories!
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Posted: 2006/07/19 13:35 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 18 Jul 2006
Oddly Missing Features - Bind per Zone Logging
One of the great things about Apache is that you can override most of
the configuration settings on a server, virtual host or directory level.
This fine grained customisation makes it both flexible and damn
powerful. Unfortunately the people behind bind don't seem to have grabbed
on to this idea.
A prime example is bind logging. I want to log all queries to a domain I want to retire (actually a number of domains I want to retire...); but bind doesn't allow this. It considers logging directives to be a global, per server thing that can't be customised on a zone level. Which is annoying and leads to logging a LOT more than I care about and then chainsawing it with perl and grep.
I know it's open source and I should start trying to add this functionality but I use tindydns for my own sites and so I don't care enough to scratch the itch - and my C is terrible. But, just maybe, someone out there, who's very bored, will see this post and fire up their editor of choice...
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Posted: 2006/07/18 22:04 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 17 Jul 2006
As If, Sinchronicity and Star Spotting - Jemima Rooper
If you're of a certain age (the same one as me :)) then you may fondly
remember As If. It
was broadcast on T4 (when T4 was still tolerable) and was on late
enough that you were awake from the Saturday night clubbing... Compared
to most of the pap targeting the late teens / early twenties market at
the time it was well written, funny and was blessed with good
casting.
Last night on BBC3 a new series called Sinchronicity started, it features a number of the same cast, production crew and aspects that made As If stand out. I'm mentioning this not just because it's a decent program (and those should be encouraged) but while walking through Liverpool Street on my daily fight home tonight I spotted Jemima Rooper, one of the stars of both. And went to say "Hello". She's nice to speak to, tiny - about 5' 3 - and absolutely gorgeous.
Now to find the set of As If episodes...
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Posted: 2006/07/17 19:29 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 15 Jul 2006
HTML Tidy, FireFox Envy and the Command Line
Tidy is a great little HTML lint
tool, that goes a lot further than the W3C Validator, but it requires
you to remember to run it. The FireFox HTML Validator
extension uses tidy and the FireFox status bar at the bottom of the
screen to show you tidy output from the current page.
This extension removes the need to run tidy by hand, you get it for free on every page you visit, but it does mean you need to visit any pages you want to run tidy against once you get spoiled by its output. And you will! The biggest annoyance with the tidy command line tool the requirement that pages must be on disk, not on a live website, which isn't what I wanted. The tidy_page.sh command line script is my little wrapper that could; it wraps tidy and wgets the pages for you. It then displays the results and removes the temp file so no traces remain on disk.
With the addition of a little wrapping script around this and I've now got a daily lint check on my main webpages. And you can have one too.
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Posted: 2006/07/15 15:00 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Superman Returns - Good but no Spiderman
I'm not a huge fan of the Man of Steel, I find his comics boring, the
Christopher Reeve films were watchable but nothing that stands out from my
childhood and Smallville is mostly dull. I'd heard the hype about Superman Returns and
considering how well the second X-Men film went I thought I'd give it
ago. On opening day. Because it's a comic book based film dammit. And
Spiderman 3 is taking TOO LONG. HEAR ME RAIMI?!
I wasn't really grabbed by the film as a whole. While Brandon Routh does a decent enough Superman with enough of a boy scout look to be passable, Kate Bosworth was a very weak Lois Lane compared to all the other incarnations I've seen and I just don't see the appeal of James Marsden. As either Richard White or Cyclops (in the X-Men, the first two of which were also directed by Bryan Singer) he's bought nothing to the screen. He's not a good actor, he's not extreme eye candy and he always looks too much like an everyman. And we've got Clark Kent for that in this film. The special effects were decent if not ground breaking and Kevin Spacey seemed to be the only person enjoying himself. He's not my favourite Lex but he did a decent job.
5/10 - Watchable but don't rush.
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Posted: 2006/07/15 14:08 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Don't do This With 'find' - part 1
Hell is other peoples code. -- Not quite Sartre.
I don't mind using other peoples code. I'll even submit patches if I
find a problem, but discovering the same mistakes in almost half-a-dozen
projects is enough to drive me insane. Here are three common red flags
involving the find command and how to get around them:
If you want to be portable, don't use GNU/Linuxisms.
Compare these two commands -
find -name "*.log" # not portable
find . -name "*.log" # works everywhere
The first one works with GNU find so it's fine for (almost) all Linux distributions. It doesn't work on older Solaris, HPUX or AIX machines and saves one dot. Lesson: specify your paths.
Know what happens when you match nothing.
The first example (shown below) works fine as long as it matches. If
the find doesn't return anything you get a syntax error.
find . -name "*.tmp" | xargs rm # pray for a .tmp file
find . -name "*.tmp" | xargs -r rm
The second example exits silently if there is nothing for it to do. As
noted by Dave
Cantrell, the -r option is a GNUism so be careful where you
use it. You can also get around this by using find options -exec foo
instead of xargs. But that comes with its own baggage. Lesson: Plan for
errors.
If you're using GNU/Linuxisms then use them properly.
The GNU utilities add a number of powerful and convenient options. If you've decided that your script only cares about Linux use them and save a lot of hassle.
find . -ls | awk '{ printf("%s %s %d\n", $NF, $5, $7) }' # horrible
find . -printf "%p %u %s\n" # better
The first example is (possibly) more portable but it's horrible. And not
something you want to see in an init script. The second one is tied to
newer versions of find but is much clearer to read, once you've looked up
the escapes using man find. Lesson: Know your options.
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Posted: 2006/07/15 13:36 | /codinghorrors | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Is the DragonLance Movie Happening? We Have a YES!
I played a lot of ADnD at school, and while I only took part in a couple
of short DragonLance campaigns, I'm a Forgotten Realms man, the books
written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman really grabbed me. Over the
years, where ever ADnD fans gathered in sleepy, huddled masses, the topic of
a DragonLance movie would occasionally crop up and we'd all say how great
it'd be but that it's never happen; looks like we were wrong...
It seems that a DragonLance Movie based on the Dragons of Autumn Twilight is undergoing production. It's going to be animated rather than live action (even though The Lord of the Rings big screen adaption showed what can be done in this genre) and I have to say the news fills me with both excitement and dread.
The idea of seeing those characters bought to life is exciting, I want to know how other people perceive Tanis and Raistlin, but I can remember the Dungeons and Dragons film (which was bad, very bad) and the script is being worked on by George Strayton, 'whose credits include "Cleopatra 2525", "Xena: Warrior Princess" and "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys".', three shows that I've seen and have never inspired me to think the world epic. Well, not in a good way.
These books are some of my favourites, let's hope he's very careful with them.
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Posted: 2006/07/15 09:30 | /movies | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Webcomics and Deadtrees
Another day, another Amazon package... This time it had both the laugh out
loud funny Penny Arcade - attack
of the Bacon Robots and the ever impressive Megatokyo: Volume
4.
In addition to the comics the Penny Arcade book has a short paragraph of commentary for each cartoon and, fortunately, they're as funny as the cartoons themselves. While Volume 4 of Megatokyo isn't as amusing as the first couple of volumes, and no where near as funny as PA, it's evolving in to a great story full of impressive art. The highlight for me (I've already read all the comics online) is the expanded Circuity, which is a much easier and enjoyable read than the original online version.
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Posted: 2006/07/15 09:14 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 10 Jul 2006
The Late London PM March Techmeet Wrap
The March
2006 London PM Tech meet went well, we had 35 people turn up and most of
them came along to the pub afterwards. While everything seemed to go
according to plan there are three things anyone hosting an event should
know...
Firstly get a copy of all the slides on a single machine (if possible - if you have speakers using magic point, keynote and Powerpoint good luck...). This will make lightening talks run a lot smoother, saves you trying seven laptops with the projector and stops people from bringing their own electronic baby, with a full head of wires, up to the podium.
The second thing is to get the speakers (or your single laptop with all the slides) to turn off power saving modes and screen savers. Yes, we all like long lasting laptops. No, we don't like watching you type your password in every five slides. While this didn't happen on the night I can see it catching me in the future.
Finally, lightning talks rock. Lightening talks are limited to five minutes and can be used to coax inexperienced speakers in to contributing something. They can also bring an audience back to life and if you get lucky with the speakers (Nicholas Clark and Tom Hukins spring to mind) you can get the whole audience almost bouncing. Which was great to watch.
All in all it was a good night, I enjoyed the talks, the audience were nice and I learned a couple of new tricks.
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Posted: 2006/07/10 18:10 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 09 Jul 2006
Jeff Barr - Developer Chats in London
Jeff Barr, who we were lucky enough to have deliver an excellent and
entertaining talk a couple of months ago, is coming back through London
in July. This time he's interested in having some 1 to 1 chats with
developers using Amazons Webservices.
More details are on the Amazon Web Services Blog - Calling London blog post.
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Posted: 2006/07/09 11:50 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
July and August Events
I'd originally planned to get to all of these, and even though I'm no
longer sure which ones I'll be able to attend I thought I should at
least mention them:
LUG Radio Live 2006 - Sat 22nd and Sun 23rd July 2006. Jono Bacon and one of the most talked about events from last year (which I'm gutted I missed). This is going to be excellent.
YAPC::Europe 2006 - Brummie Edition - 30th August to 1st September 2006. It's a YAPC, if you do Perl then you'll probably be here.
Exim Course 2006 - Tuesday 18th July to Friday 21th July 2006. This is being paid for by the company so it's the only one I know I'll be at :)
Linux 2006 - Thursday 29th June to Sunday 2nd July. When it comes to UK tech conferences few people have the experience and ability of Alasdair Kergon. It also has a free introductory track on the Saturday.
And a bonus one nighter in London:
Techa Kucha Night -
25th July, London. Steve Coast is one of those people that seems to have
discovered the 34 hour day, and he uses all of them up. This looks damn
interesting.
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Posted: 2006/07/09 11:34 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Apache ETags and Clustered Webservers
This one's as much for my own memory as for everyone else, I've already
used it at two companies and had to rediscover it at each...
If you have a number of load balanced apache servers serving the same site and you use ETags to help reduce the number of page requests make sure that the generated ETag doesn't consult the file inode; these will hardly ever be the same across servers - unless you build from a gold image - and will cause the client to download the page again each time it hits a different server.
And a bonus tip: make sure they use ntp and the clocks are synced, time differences make the ETag hashes differ.
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Posted: 2006/07/09 11:13 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Do You Work to Requests?
How much of your work is done based on a request? Does the task you're
working on have a an RT ticket, a Bugilla id or story ID associated with
it? If it doesn't should you be doing the work at all?
Even some of the more routine tasks can fit in this model, rather than remembering to check for the expiry dates of SSL certs or domain names have scripts that check and put any actions in to RT for you. You get an audit trail and a task list for (almost) free. You were going to write the checking scripts anyway. Right? Good.
I know this is overly optimistic but by thinking about it, and keeping track of how many changes you make that don't have an external driver your percentage should get better. And improvement is about all we can ask for.
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Posted: 2006/07/09 11:04 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
