You’ve found a project which interests you. It looks in fact like it might be incredibly useful. You start to play around with the code. You have some questions, find some bugs. You post queries and bug reports. Nothing happens. You find some more problems – some architectural issues for example, which result in queries you’d like answered. Still no reply. You even send in patches – still nothing. You like the idea of the project, just not the current implementation or the way its being run – so when do you make the decision to fork, or even re-implement it?
After thinking it over for a while I decided to upgrade to Movable Type 3. The install process went well and everything seems to be working fine. Rather than simply going for the free version I decided instead to reach for the credit card and purchase a Personal Edition license – I had a beta testers discount so it made it stupidly cheap for what I was getting. Anyway, the earlier versions of MT gave me excellent service, and I thought it was time I contributed toward the development costs. As always, if it looks like anything is bust, “let me know(Contact Me)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/contact.
Along the way I discovered I nifty little freeware (for non-commercial use) ftp tool called “SmartFTP”:www.smartftp.com/ which is worth a look if you’re in the market for a graphical FTP tool.
I have on occasion been bitten by online retailers. A recent nasty experience has prompted me to list a few bits of advice to people thinking about buying online. Needless to say my recent bad experience was caused by not following my own advice…
If they don’t have a contact phone number on their website, don’t use them
If nothing goes wrong, all well and good – but if it doesn’t, you don’t want to be dealing with customer support via email if you don’t have to.
If their website looks more stale than last weeks doughnuts, don’t use them
Last update times of 2001 are a nasty sign that a company can’t afford to update its website, which can speak volumes about what they do have money for.
Continue reading…
A rather long gap between posts, this has not been down to laziness on my part, nor the fact that I have noting to post, more the fact that I’ve been doing things rather than actually posting about it. Anyway, more details to follow…
The Overall Aim
Eat lunch.
My aim
Eat Cake.
The scenario
Ten programmers in the centre of London.
The result
No clear vision, everyone wanting to achieve the aim of eating lunch in a different way. Group fragments – some go for bagels, others opt for fish and chips. Lunch takes 30 minutes more than it should, and I don’t get any cake.
The moral
Stuff working as a team, go eat alone…
I’m slowly working my way down my website todo list, and today came to the topic of webpage compression. Webpage compression, when done right, is a robust solution to decreasing the size of your pages and hence speeding up page load times, all whilst coping with older browser types. Thanks go to posts at “Textism(Textism – Bigsmallbig – 21 November 02)”:http://www.textism.com/article/632/ and “Mark Pilgrim(Mark Pilgrim – A warning to others)”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/11/21/a_warning_to_others for putting this on my radar in the first place.
The conventional approach to compressing your webpages is to use “mod_gzip”:http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-gzip/. This module is run by Apache after all other modules have run – so it will work on dynamic content. Firstly, it determines if the client can understand gziped content – if it can it the webpage is compressed, otherwise the normal page is sent. This does require you have mod_gzip installed however and you have to associate the correct mine with the module. An excellent overview of mod_gzip can be found at “Web Compression(Compressing Web Output Using mod_gzip for Apache 1.3.x and 2.0.x)”:http://webcompression.org/gzip-compress.html, which is an excellent resource on the topic of website compression as a whole.
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So occasionally when I order my lunch, the person serving me remembers me. Then, the conversation goes even smoother than “normally(Ordering sandwiches and GUIs)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2004/04/28/sandwiches:
==
- Server
- The usual?
- Me
- Yes thanks
==
As Rajkumar “points out(Adaptive UIs)”:http://jroller.com/page/rmadhuram/20040428#adaptive_uis, its one thing for the user to learn from the UI, but another for the UI to learn from the user.
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I frequently pop down to the canteen to buy a sandwich. The early conversations with the person serving went a little like this:
==
- Me
- I’d like a sandwich please
- Server
- What would you like on it?
- Me
- Erm, Cheese and coleslaw please
- Server
- On what kind of bread?
- Me
- White sliced please
I’m a big fan of the “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ bookmark service. I started using it primarily because it enables me to keep bookmarks synchronized, but have come to appreciate the ease with which you can categorise your bookmarks into multiple categories, and enables you to look at the bookmarks of other people have linked o the same sites as you, thereby providing you with a vast amount of other links you might be interested in. The one annoyance is that I have to visit the del.icio.us page to access my bookmarks. At a pinch it would be great if they could offer a view of your bookmarks which could sit in the Firefox sidebar (like “blo.gs”:http:/blo.gs), however even better would be a firefox plugin which would load your bookmarks into Firefox itself.
The beginnings of such a plugin may well be found in the new “Bookmarks Synchronizer”:http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=41742. Currently it only supports the import of XBEL format XML, but it should be an easy job to parse and load del.icio.us’s RSS feed of your bookmarks.
Well, my first foray into the world of networking has gone surprisingly well. Spured on by the fact that my new company “laptop(My company laptop – The Dell Latitude D600)”:http://catalog.us.dell.com/CS1/cs1page2.aspx?br=3&c=us&cs=04&fm=10435&kc=6W300&l=en&s=bsd comes complete with wireless networking capability, I thought it was time to clean up some of the mess of wires in my house, replace my IpCop box which was cluttering up the space under my desk, retire my slightly grubby stingray ADSL modem and buy some brand spanking new wireless kit.
After much research, I eventually plumped for a “Belkin ADSL Modem With Built-In 11g Wireless Router”:http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=201576&pcount=&Product_Id=158009&Section.Section_Path=%2FRoot%2FNetworking%2FWirelessNetworking%2F80211gWi%2E%2E%2Etworking%2F, and one of their 11g cards for my desktop machine, both purchased from “Dabs”:http://www.dabs.com/. Belkin claim the modem can be installed in 5 minutes, and I must say if anything it was quicker. The card took slightly longer to install, but that was due to the incredibly tight fit on the motherboard – but I’ve had trouble with that in the past and put it down to the motherboard rather than the PCI cards themselves. Anyway, after 10 minutes usage, I can highly recommend both the modem and the card. So, I now have a fully functional (WEP-secured) wireless network which will allow me to access the Internet from anywhere within my small, one bedroom flat. Still, it means I can blog on the toilet…
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