JADB

Migrated to a separate page. Why? Cause it’s my blog, I can do that if I want to!

You are a Self-Discoverer: You’re not religious, but you’ve created your own kind of spirituality. Introspective and thoughtful, you tend to look inward for the divine. You are distrusting of all forms of organised religion. You especially dislike religious gurus and leaders, who you feel are charlatans.

I’ve been fairly lax in updating my blog for a wile, so here’s a slew of snippets:

I finally got around to downloading the new version of drivel from CVS; and then I, of course, had to go and turn into an RPM to install… Some days I’m just too much of a geek for my own good.

While I was at it, I also downloaded the newest version of RSSOwl, version 1.2, which does very well on Java 1.5.0 on Fedora. Now they just have to get it going on GCJ and compile it, and I will be well satisfied with it. Hmm… Wishful thinking.

My blog’s look seems to have settled for the time being, even though the Girl has voiced her displeasure at my choice of brown. Mind you, any brown would be considered a no-no, not just this particular shade thereof.

Unfortunately, like most guys I’m capable of identifying the tree primary colours with black and white fairly accurately about 80% of the time. The secondary colours give me slightly more problems; and beyond that I don’t even try. No wonder I stick with simplistic colour schemes…

Now I need to actually do something about my main site, Joomla! might be the answer there, but that means I’ll have to spend some time gluing them together with a wee bit of PHP and some CSS magic. Not difficult, I grant, but time consuming none the less.

And lastly, as a note to myself, I really do need to update the blog more often…

Hey, who the hell am I to fight a meme?

Unix [is] like the old Legos. Each piece might be a different size or shape, but the bottom of one snaps onto the top of another and the ordering and number of pieces used is left as an exercise for the reader. With experience, anything can be built with the pieces, and yet each piece is simple and easy to understand.

Windows is like the new Lego sets. You get specialised pre-molded parts suitable for one specific task, plus two or three additional add-on pieces that give the illusion of being fully configurable for any task. You can build anything you want with the new Legos, as long as you only want to build what is on the cover of the package.

Thanks to Slashdot and Tsiangkun for this…

One of the RSS feeds I get in Liferea is Gnomefiles. This as background only, of course.

One of the recent articles to have come through on said feed was one announcing an update to something named Drivel, nominally a LiveJournal client with some other back-ends hacked into it.

Curious, I downloaded the application, built a Fedora Core 4 compatible RPM, dumped it in my YUM repository and installed it; this is my first attempt at posting to JADB with it, and herewith my impressions.

The first of the things I like about it is that it supports categories, something I use fairly extensively. Unfortunately, however, it only supports posting the entry under a single category. That’s okay in general for people who only use primary categories, I suppose, and even I can always go in after the fact and add multiple categories, but I would really have liked multiple category support. To be fair, though, I’ll admit that I’m not too certain whether the Movable Type API actually supports that, or not.

Spell checking works as expected, underlining wrongly spelled words with the accustomed red wavy line and allowing correction or adding to the dictionary on a right-click. That is, it works fine if you actually remember to install gtkspell-devel before you compile Drivel…

Drivel unfortunately doesn’t have a Gnome Panel plugin, something I got quite used to having with gnome-blog. Fortunately arbitrarily adding launchers to the panel is an absolute no-brainer which does go quite some way to mitigation.

Another drawback compared to gnome-blog for some people may be the lack of a WYSIWYG option. I must admit to not minding much since I prefer the source-view, but I could easily understand those users’ point.

I have to ask myself the question, however, whether I prefer Drivel’s implementation to gnome-blog’s.

Currently, that is a definite maybe — which could quite easily become an unreserved, if slightly selfish, definitely if the developer/ developers added some of the more advanced features of the “Movable Type” API as used by WordPress, the software driving this blog. Something I consider quite inevitable; the wheels of Open Source seems to turn that way…

In all, currently Drivel gets the thumbs-up; I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how it improves.

The Beeb has the following charming tale of wit and insight:

Apparently two youths of great wisdom decided to film a fan-flick based on Star Wars.

Not all that unusual in this day-and-age, but to add the well-known and quite distinctive light-saber effects, they decided to fill fluorescent tubes with petrol and then light it. Said light-sabers — most obviously — promptly exploded. Something I’m fairly certain a well-designed light-saber should never do.

Must have made a hell of a scene, though. Hope somebody remembered to keep the film going. The show must go on, and all that, old chap.

Damn fools. Apparently never heard of Industrial Light & Magic, the people who create the “Special Effects” (aka. Not petrol in tubes) after the filming of the movies are done.

And then the Yanks say that Darwin’s theories were were bunk?

Hello, people. Wake up: this is Evolution in action…

Which OS are You?

metaWeblog.getCategories

It sure doesn’t sound like much, does it? What it is, however, is the API which allows the discovery of all the categories on compliant ‘blogs.

Which means it should be quite easy to hack into gnome-blog-poster’s MetaWeblog.py protocol library doesn’t it?

Well, yes, it probably does if you’re a real programmer. I, however, am a systems jock; which, traditionally, certainly doesn’t mean I cannot program my way out of a for loop — even we have heard of exits, you know — but it does mean that when I program I do it on my terms.

And my terms never before required me to do pyGTK programming, okay. So stop the whining already… I’ll get to it. That’s the lovely thing about being a *nix systems geek. We get to program stuff on our term to scratch our itches. You want somebody to program off a spec? Go hire a professional.

On a — even more — positive note, I enabled (it was way too easy to be called hacking it in) spell-checking in the applet version of “gnome-blog-poster”. In all, quite elegantly done, Mr Nickell…

I am also considering disabling the HTML-ifying of posts by gnome-blog-poster; at least as a posting-time option. No, I haven’t lost what little is left of my senses; I just really like Markdown…

Sometimes I think I should just leave well enough alone. Not that that’s ever going to happen, of course, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that I should.

While I’m potificating, I think I have found my worst part of Gnome Blog (better known as “My current pet peeve”). Besides the lack of a spell checker, I mean. No categories. Which was initially quite disappointing.

That was until I found that Bryan Clark is busy tinkering on something called Monkey Journal. It looks promising, supporting most of the Blog posting APIs and using the gtkhtml widget. It also supports categories.

I try it out… Time will tell.

I’ve finally got myself into the new Fedora Core cycle. And I’ll admit to having been spoilt being able to “apt-get” just about whatever I wished on my FC3 installation… Time to get back to the basics, I suppose.

FC4 test 2, which I updated to, has managed to impress me quite a bit so far. ‘cepting that I had to compile Galeon, my preferred browser, a couple of times — FC4 is still a moving target, so that’s to be expected — most of my apps are either in extras or installed easily from FC3.

I’ve also installed the Blog GNOME applet, so hopefully that will encourage/ drive/ allow me to update the blog more frequently. It’s supposed to be my journal dammit. Journals mean absolutely squat if you don’t use them…

And while I’m on the topic (”Which one?” I hear you snigger…) Fedora Extras rock! Of course, I’d think they rock even more if they had Galeon in the repository, but I’m supposed to be a geek, so I surmise they thought I had to do something on my own.

I’ve started on a page to detail using an iPod under Linux.

It’s currently very much in an Alpha state and will be expanded upon as I think of more things to add and as I am requested to supply more detail.

I think I’ve managed to cover most of the bear (with a nod in the direction of “The Jungle Book”) necessities and basic requirements.

Anyone finding this: Enjoy!

Curiously, it would seem that I’m a commie. More specifically, It would appear that I’m a “Copyleft Commie”…

Now what is really surprising about it is that I’m one of the least Fascist people I know. I like owning toys, dammit! I’m a geek, I cannot but help liking owning toys.

But then, I suppose the person stating this should know what constitutes communism. After all, it’s the same person who claimed in the same interview that IE is the best browser in the world… I mean, how can one argue with insight like that?

In case you are wondering what in hell I’m all about, this is in reference to Bill Gates’ interview on CNet News.com; as commented on by Dan Gillmor and on Boing Boing

While I’m amused at the gormlessness more than anything else, I also felt like thumbing my nose a bit at Microsoft as well. In honour of this, then, I’ve prepared the little image you see with this entry as wallpaper. It is, of course, in PNG format which means it might look poor on Windows. No, I most certainly don’t care if it does. I wouldn’t be much of a commie if I did, now would I?

MTS is my “Modular Template System” for WordPress.

In spite of its obnoxiously grandiose name — finding new TLA’s for a project can be a bit of a bitch — I actually had some valid reasons for this little project.

The first of which is that after finally getting my grubby mitts on WordPress 1.3 Alpha I resolved to get to grips with both the normal WordPress Template and with the New Extensions. No better way than to actually go implement it, I thought. Much to the dismay of my fiancée, I’ll add, since it meant she got to see me very little over the weekend — basically only when she managed to lure me out of the study with the smell of food…

What added to my woes were the fact that, since I’m an avowed Unix geek, I would not generate HTML or CSS to any standard but W3C. MS and their estimated bezillian percent shareholding be damned. Fortunately, then, I recalled Dean Edwards’ IE7 script set, an attempt to get Microsoft’s IE to do “the sane thing(tm)”. Well, as much as that would be possible, when all is said… Adding that little Java Script resolved quite a couple of CSS concerns, which let me get the look I desired. And it even mostly works on the Monopoly Browser.

Now I have a template which generates near valid XHTML (the sole current exception being the hack to make the header selectable, something I’ll fix soon) and generates valid CSS. Not too shabby, Nige…

Which brings me to the second reason: I needed a Template and CSS combination devoid of all the political wrangling and badmouthing that seems to have been endemic in the WordPress community.

This is the result. Now for a wee bit of tuning, and it might actually become acceptable… :-)

After some time, it seems WordPress and I are slowly coming to a compromise: It will do as it sees fit, and I’ll do my best to hack the living hell out of it to get it to do exactly what I want. So far it is winning. :-/

At least it has been an interesting trip:

1. I’ve gotten to know PHP a lot better,
2. I’ve found the Get Custom Field Values plugin for WordPress and am having a great deal of fun with it,
3. I also, quite by accident as it were, stumbled across Alex Kings’s WP Style Switcher; something you’ll note at the bottom of my Menu section. I had to hack it a bit, though, to get it to not display the colon after the ‘Style’,
4. I’m re-learning why, exactly, I love CSS so much.
5. Quicktags and I are becoming very friendly, especially after I hacked the quicktags.js file to allow <br /> tags…

The cost to it all has, of course, been time. It’s not something I complain too much about — I only ever complain about the view when I go through the Karoo, a semi-arid stretch of South Africa inland of the Mountains in Southern Cape, nothing happens in the Karoo — since it has been fairly diverting.

Yeah, I know. Geeks. We find the damndest things diverting… ;-)