Colin's Journal: A place for thoughts about politics, software, and daily life.
July 16th, 2003
Mozilla movement
AOL has finally decided to stop employing Mozilla developers, closing down (at least) the browser side of their business. On the bright side this happened at the point where we have a high quality free web browser already available.
Additionally there is a new foundation funding continued Mozilla development (in addition to all the unpaid work done by volunteers). With the huge importance of Mozilla to the open source world its safe to say that the project will carry on improving.
July 16th, 2003
Travelling again
Travel seems to come in clumps. I haven’t been travelling much for work recently, and I was starting to miss it. Now I’ve just come back from a quick trip to St. Louis, and I’ve already got another two trips lined up. It’s almost as though busses and travel have got something in common…
Talking about transport, the article in the BBC’s News Magazine about how to cool down the tube is pretty interesting. In the comments there are the inevitable silly suggestions on how to solve the problem, as well as some more plausible ones. Unfortunately I doubt the £100K prize is likely to be claimed any time soon as this type of problem requires a lot of detailed knowledge regarding the technical and financial restrictions. The London Underground’s FAQ on the subject indicates that some work is being done on the issue, but holds out little prospect for a full solution.
July 12th, 2003
Release 3.4 of SimpleTAL
Release 3.4 of SimpleTAL is now available for download. This release brings a slew of enhancements regarding the handling of XHTML. A DOCTYPE can now be provided for the resulting document, and XML singletons are maintained in the expanded template if they can be.
The unofficial, but useful, ?varname TALES syntax is now supported, the template cache should work under Win32, and the problem with DummyLogger is now fixed.
All of the changes made in this release are the result of people giving me feedback, so many thanks are due to those who sent in bug reports, provided patches, and tested out development versions.
July 10th, 2003
A rock and a hard place
According to the BBC the UK government is planning when to admit that there are, and were, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That this is happening is of no great surprise, after all if there really had been weapons present they would have been found by now.
At this point however I find myself stuck as to what my preferred outcome would be from this mess. On the one hand we have a PM that has mislead the houses of Parliament, and the country, into supporting a war on false pretences. On the other hand I’m not sure there is anyone who could put together a competent government that didn’t feature the tainted members of the current one, and the alternative of a change in governing party is equally unattractive.
To top it all off, I’m not actually against the outcome that has been achieved in Iraq, it’s the process by which we got there that I find worrying and distasteful. If the current leadership does survive this episode it will inevitably set a precedent for others to follow, and that is probably the most worrying aspect of all.
July 7th, 2003
Traditional post-weekend update
These “what happened to my weekend” posts are becoming a habit. This week included a July 4th barbeque on the deck (complete with thunderstorm!), a trip to listen to some music played during the Yonge street festival, and dinner and anime with Donald.
On the technical side of things there’s been:
- A fix to my backup script to be able to delete symbolic links correctly.
- Limited Photo album support added to PubTal (scheduled for version 1.1)
- Numerous fixes to XHTML handling in SimpleTAL (scheduled for version 3.4)
July 4th, 2003
Speed walking
The BBC has a great article on the trottoir roulant rapide, an extra fast moving walkway currently undergoing trails in Paris.
The animation is neat, and the description reminds me of the moving walkways described in Isaac Asimov books. It only goes up to 9km/h at the moment, but that’s still a pretty fast way of getting around stations and airports.
July 2nd, 2003
Post long weekend, the dull stuff
I design my website for CSS1&2 compliant web browsers. In practise this means I design for which ever version of Mozilla I happen to have installed at the time, although I try and avoid anything Mozilla specific. Once I have a design I try and get it working in Internet Explorer 5.5, and thanks to help from Robin I also get some feedback on IE 6.
My original design didn’t work well in IE. The page contents were being laid out underneath the page subject, rather than next to it as it should have been. This, it turns out, is due to flaky support for floating boxes and the clear property in IE. After some considerable messing around I found a work around (only using three instead of four floats) that seems to work in IE 5.5 OK, and the pages still draw fine in Mozilla.
Now I’ve found that IE is putting random white space between some lines on some pages. Not most, just two that I’ve found so far (for example About SimpleTAL), but it’s still very irritating.
So I either need everyone in the world to upgrade from Internet Explorer to a browser that can layout and display basic CSS pages, or I need to find yet another work around for a bug that is best described by the phrase “IE randomly inserts white space in my content when using floats”. I’m not entirely sure which is more likely to happen…
July 2nd, 2003
Long weekend, the fun stuff
This last weekend was fun. Friday was my birthday featuring Laotian/Thai food at Ban Vanipha, followed by drinks till closing time. Saturday was a house-warming in the dark for Gavin and Lindsay (the power went out due to a fire at the local sub-station).
Sunday was brunch at Mitzi followed by the pride parade. I’ve got 180 photos, mostly of peoples heads, to sort through during a spare moment. There were some really good costumes, and we even spotted some friends in the parade. In the evening was YAP (Yet Another Party), this time out in Mississauga.
Monday was a day of relaxation, and yesterday was Canada day. We spent the evening backing up Shana’s laptop ready for repair, and then went out for the Chin picnic. We heard Gianluca Grignani play, and while he was OK I wouldn’t say that it was the best musical performance I’ve ever listened to. The evening ended with fireworks over Ontario Place, which we could watch from Exhibition Place for free.
July 1st, 2003
It’s summer time!
Hopefully everyone will like, and more importantly be able to see, my new summer theme for Owlfish.com. It’s taken some tweaking over a week or so to get the final design done, and I much prefer this new look to the older grey/blue colour scheme.
I’ve tested the design under Gecko based browsers, so Netscape/Mozilla/Galeon readers should see everything as intended. If you are using a different browser then please drop me a note letting me know whether it works or not. Feedback on the design is also welcomed, as I’m still new at trying to produce “proper” web designs.
June 26th, 2003
Broken HTML
I feel like I’ve been catching up ever since last weekend, and now another one is almost upon us again. This time it’ll be different, with a national holiday on Tuesday and a day off on Monday, it’s going to be an extra long, long weekend.
The combination of Harry Potter, various birthdays (including my own), parties, and work seem to have consumed most of my week. The latest distraction was implementing a work around for broken HTML in my RSS aggregator.
My aggregator strips out HTML from RSS descriptions for a variety of reasons. Rendering HTML delivered via RSS is a security problem, is unreliable, and almost certainly means that the resulting web page will not be valid. To solve this I strip out all HTML tags and just display the plain text.
This has worked well for many months until the past couple of days. The problem is that someone’s feed I subscribe to contains severely broken HTML. They have entered some HTML comments in their RSS feed (sigh), only instead of using <!-- to start the comment they have instead put <! //
This was causing TALAggregator to log exceptions when trying to parse the feed, resulting in an email to me every 24 hours informing me that it was having difficulties. The solution I’ve used is to abandon using the standard SGML parser that comes with Python, and instead resort to some regular expressions.
Hopefully I can now turn my attention to something more interesting…
Software
The full list of my published Software
Email: colin at owlfish.com