This blog is 100% standards compliant. If you don’t believe me, check it at http://validator.w3.org/. I know this for a fact since I wrote the whole website from scratch in Django. However, I can confirm for a fact that the browser I am using to write this post, IE7 on XP SP2 on a school computer, does not render it correctly. To be specific, it can’t handle the position: fixed; CSS attribute. This has been part of the CSS specification since at least 1998 (see http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2–19980512/).
Internet Explorer ...
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This is a test post to see if the new tweeting hook I just threw into my blogging application works.
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I decided it was about time to give another distro a spin. I’ve been using Ubuntu for a couple of years with no real issues, but I thought that it was only fair to try out something different. So, yesterday I cleared a bit of room on my laptop hard disk, downloaded and burnt F12 “Constantine” and fired up the live CD.
Everything seemed to go pretty well, so I went on with the install. It all went pretty smoothly, though the location selector is not quite as easy to use as the new(ish) Ubuntu one, so a ...
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I recently moved all the applications I typically run on a local machine to a screen session on my VPS. This includes IRC running on Irssi and the Mutt email client. The other thing I wanted to move in was Twitter and Identica, and this is where the interesting bit comes in.
I had been using a combination of Gwibber and Twirssi to deal with the microblogs, but Twirssi is written in Perl and requires Net::Twitter to run. Which is not packaged for Ubuntu Karmic or Debian stable. (An old version is in testing and unstable, but neither of ...
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After a few teething troubles, mainly the feed URLs having two “http://“s in them and http://textile.thresholdstate.com input not working, my blog site is now officially ported to Django. Hopefully everything is sorted now, but there could still be a few Unicode artefacts in some of the pages. webmaster@joshh.co.uk to report them, please :).
So, why Django? Wordpress had been irritating me in quite a few ways, not least in insisting that a file existed in /etc/wordpress for every domain the server served, not just the ones on which WP was actually running. The ...
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You may have noticed some downtime over the last couple of days. This is due to my moving to a new server OS—Debian Lenny. This is for two main reasons: more up-to-date packages (chiefly Django—more on that later) and a desire to have a go at Debian.
So, you may have noticed that the main website now looks terrible. This is entirely my fault, since I have no web design skills. However, my skills at web application writing should hopefully be evident, as the system you see before you is (almost) all my own work, barring the ready ...
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vrms - 5 months ago
It’s nice to see one of these memes actually promoting freedom, rather than some silly thing which is just pointless. Anyway…
$ vrms
Non-free packages installed on rigel
fglrx-modaliases Identifiers supported by the ATI graphics driver
figlet Frank, Ian & Glenn’s Letters
nvidia-173-modaliases Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-180-modaliases Transitional package for nvidia-185-modaliases
nvidia-185-modaliases Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-71-modaliases Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-96-modaliases Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
tangerine-icon-theme Tangerine Icon theme
unrar Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
Contrib packages installed on rigel
flashplugin-installer ...
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Yesterday, I took receipt of a nice new Dell Mini 10v (review to come after I’ve been using it for a bit). This has a built in webcam and microphone, so of course my first thought was to stream this over the web ;). Luckily, this is pretty easy with a bit of vlc magic.
On the freshly installed UNR Karmic system (Dellbuntu did not even get booted), the camera shows up as /dev/video0, so the command line to stream this on localhost is:
cvlc v4l2:///dev/video0 --sout '#transcode{vcodec=theora}:standard{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=localhost ...
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AS results - 5 months, 3 weeks ago
While most of them were published on Thursday, I got mine just now due to being in the south of France on holiday.
6 As!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D :D
(I am understandably rather pleased)
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me++ - 6 months, 2 weeks ago
17 today!
Look out roads of Worcester!
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Here is some more code that you might find useful.
I don’t know about you, but when I write a script to do something, I normally just put in the shebang line and get coding, but if I then decide to release it (under the GPL), I have to manually add the “This script has no warranty blah blah blah” heading. This is a pain.
So, in order to stop having to do this, and also to practise a bit of Perl, which I have recently discovered and surprised myself at liking, I wrote a little script to do ...
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Remember that little script I wrote to pull the latest comic from xkcd? Well, I actually got around to fixing up the readability and removing the horrible one liner.
Firstly, I moved from xml.dom.minidom to Mark Pilgrim’s (whose book Dive Into Python taught me the language) Universal Feed Parser and broke the parsing of the script up into a few more lines. It now looks much nicer, and will be considerably easier to maintain.
Also, I added an optional command line argument that specifies where to save the picture, defaulting to ./xkcd-today.png.
I won’t bother ...
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A short howto for something I discovered recently.
I use the feed reader Liferea (liferea.sf.net) to keep on top of blogs/planets/RSS feeds etc. Sometimes it’s a pain adding a feed you discover in Firefox, because you have to go to Liferea, open it up and copy the URL into it there. Well, no more!
Liferea comes with a small script to allow web browsers to add feeds directly to Liferea. It’s called, imaginatively enough, liferea-add-feed. To tell FF about it, open up Edit->Preferences and go to the Applications tab. Scroll down to “Web ...
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I wish I actually got this when I download stuff…
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Recently I bought and read Ian Stewart’s “How to Cut a Cake and Other Mathematical Conundrums” (OUP). It is a popular maths book consisting of a selection of Stewart’s columns in Scientific American and comes in nicely sized chunks about various topics such as envy free division, packing milk bottles into a crate and why phone cables get tangled.
One of the chapters is called “Sierpinski’s Ubiquitous Gasket” and surprisingly enough relates various things about the eponymous fractal. At the end, a random walk is mentioned which generates the fractal quite amazingly. The random walk is this ...
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