Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

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Rubenerd Blog October 2008 rambling summary

A Swindon based 63 service
"A Swindon based 63 service" by The Oxford Bus Page

It’s official, October 2008 has been the best month for the Rubenerd Blog since August 2006. In total 63 posts have been submitted compared to 23 posts last month and 37 the month before last. Realistically many of these have been long and involved but many more have been silly posts with less than three lines. Still, that’s 63 random thoughts and ideas which isn’t as high as the ridiculous 110 I made back in August 2006 but it’s close.

In a kind of ironic twist, it seems that the more work and studying I need to do, the more material appears here. I think connecting my mind to a keyboard and letting all the ideas flow is a fantastic coping mechanism. It also allows me to keep my mind alert when I take breaks instead of being a passive consumer like I would be if I just watched TV.

ASIDE: For some reason I think this post will be getting the "pointless milestone" tag. The question is, how can I pull off putting a picture from an anime series on here too so I can use the "pointlessly fun anime reference" tag as well. These are the thoughts that keep me up at night. That and coffee. That made no sense.

Given I’m posting so many entries from my iPhone now as well, I think the next logical step in the evolution of this long winded and overly verbose trail of consciousness is to include some form of location metadata into each post. In this way I could see just how many words I have typed while I was sitting at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes or the huge Starbucks with lots of comfortable lounge chairs in Millennia Walk in Singapore. I have a sneaking suspicion they might be where most of this stuff gets done!

ASIDE: Millennia Walk was just across from where the Singapore Formula 1 night race was held. It’s a really bizzare building with gigantic pyramid like skylights that stretch above the main shopping area by several whole floors. I did work for people around Suntec City and Millennia Walk after I finished high school in 2004.

Millennia Walk, Singapore
Millennia Walk, Singapore by williamcho

The place of the Rubenerd Show I think is also starting to evolve again. Previously I would speak everything I was thinking into that show, now it’s much more of a spur of the moment type of project which I hope will improve the quality. I wish I had the self confidence that Frank Nora has by being able to speak into a voice recorder as I walk down the street with people staring at me the whole time… perhaps at some point I’ll get to that stage.

At some point I would also like… ney LOVE, to be able to finally move all this material onto the content management system I wrote myself in Ruby (without Rails… it bothers me how people assume it must use it if it’s a Ruby web app) earlier this year too. Perhaps after the exams and this latest project I’m doing for a client I’ll take a solid week off to do that.

Yukikiro Matsumoto I’m fed up with all these constant WordPress updates; it is a great blogging system if you want millions of bells and whistles but don’t want to do any programming yourself, but it’s incredibly top heavy for what I want to do here. Not only that, but it’s written in PHP. As a guy who also loves Perl, I have nothing against PHP, it’s just Ruby is so much more Smalltalk like and is so elegant. Ruby code can be syntax-highlighted and printed onto posters it looks so nice. Yukihiro Matsumoto knew what he was doing!

ASIDE: My beautiful late mum thought that Yukihiro Matsumoto was cute.

I’d love to learn though how to better integrate MediaWiki with Ruby applications though, I love MediaWiki and I’d love to start using it again for my own projects. For a while I was a maintainer of an intranet wiki system and I wrote a lot of Ruby scripts that PHP would call using system calls, but it wasn’t very elegant. If I could figure out how to better integrate them, I could write so many scripts for Whole Wheat Radio to do trippy things Jim would have to start blocking my IP address because I’d be using all WWR’s idle CPU power. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

BRAINWAVE: Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use the same user database for my Ruby CMS and MediaWiki? Then I could leave my CMS for the blogging portion, and use MediaWiki for the Wiki side, but the users would be consistant. I’m so smart it’s scary sometimes. Okay, I’m more scary than smart.

Well that post started constructively and quickly deteriorated into rambling quickly… sorry about that. 63 posts though. Like the way I got back on topic again by referencing what I was supposed to be discussing? That’s called "skill" and it’s not something you can learn at any fancy tertiary educational institution.

Can you categorise too much?

Perhaps the biggest handicap this blog has is the amount of categories I’ve created for it. From sites with a particular focus such as Dave’s Photo Gallery Blog to sites that seem to have everything such as J-Walk’s blog, these guys have figured out how to categorise their information without using thousands of categories to do it.

There are several coping mechanisms that most blogging software come with to deal with this problem: nested categories and tags. With nested categories, you can apply very specific topic pointers to posts which are then contained in more general categories, such as my BSD category within Free and Open Source. This potentially allows you to “collapse” the hundreds of sub-categories you accumulate into just a handful of smaller categories, while still keeping your insane desire for the former satisfied. If you really were obsessed you could have sub-sub-categories within sub-categories, heck even sub-sub-sub-categories within… you get the idea.

Tags are an interesting, if overused and abused, Flickr-inspired development. They let you assign even more specific metadata attributes to your posts which make them not only easier to find on your own site, but in specialised blog searching sites such as Technorati. Not only that but you can be as specific as you like without cluttering up your category lists: for example a post on FreeBSD could be tagged FreeBSD, FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE, BSD, Kenny Rogers, operating systems, Unix-like and so forth.

Idolmaster Xenoglossia
idolmaster, xenoglossia, anime, funny, silly, implausible, ridiculous premise, tounge-in-cheek, a-real-stretch, idols-are-generally-not-scientists

ASIDE: For what it’s worth, most of the new unique visitors that make their way to this blog come through via tags. Strange but true!

Then we come to Wikis. I maintain my own locally installed MediaWiki/MySQL system on my laptop (for using as the ultimate note taking application!), as well as my course’s local intranet MediaWiki/PostgreSQL install for collaboration and I’m a proud contributer over on Whole Wheat Radio’s wiki system.

The biggest problem I have with MediaWiki is the ease in which I can assign practically everything to a category, and then categories within categories… within categories within categories! For borderline obsessive compulsive people it’s very tempting to over use them! That said though, MediaWiki generally does a good job with organising them, and allowing you to click through lists of pages within a category you’ve browsed to is very convenient.

Bugs Bunny!
bugs-bunny, hilarious, sarcastic, witty, mel-blanc, evil, merrie-melodies, bugs, warner-brothers, better-than-disney, looney-tunes, tex-avery, fun, cheeky, greatest-cartoons-ever

I guess my very open ended questions would be (for the sake of my university peers!): is it possible to over categorise a system? Do you have any tips on how you cope with the temptation to start more categories? Is it just a matter of setting limits? Or is Ruben just obsessed and all of you fine people have no trouble with this whatsoever?

Setting up MediaWiki for registered user edits only

UPDATE: The Whole Wheat Radio wiki is back online again.

With the Whole Wheat Radio outage in effect I decided to create some mockup pages outlining some ideas over on my university intranet’s [sic] MediaWiki installation, but after some vocal opposition I decided to whip up a temporary WWR wiki testbed over at http://rubenerd.com/projects/wwr. Feel free to mess around there with WWR related whatnot while the mothership is offline and you have a Sunday morning to kill as I do right now!

If you’re using a wiki under similar circumstances and you don’t need or want anonymous edits compared to a bigger, more collaborative effort like Wikipedia, all it takes is appending one line to your ./LocalSettings.php file:

# Block edits by anonymous users
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

I know, I know… that was actually TWO lines, but the point is only the last line actually invokes the functionality described, the first is just a comment… which you should always include. Okay, okay I see your point.

Specify image dimensions and save the world!

Jo Anne Hook painting: Australian Wildflowers

One of the more pleasurable things in life is when you can get on your high horse and let the rest of the world know why they’re wrong, and you’re right. Or maybe that only applies to conversations about music. Sorry Elke, comparing Akon to The Rat Pack is like comparing Barry Manilow to Jo Anne Hook. Wait, Jo Anne Hook is a painter. Never mind.

My gripe today is with people who use images in HTML on websites without defining their dimensions! You’ve probably seen pages at one point that seem to rearrange themselves as material moves around to make way for images that are loading. By defining the sizes of images in advance, browsers know how much visual space to allocate them as it draws the page.

Without declared dimensions
<img src="image.jpg" alt="description" />
Using HTML dimensions
<img src="image.jpg" alt="description"
width="320" height="240" />
Using inline CSS
<img src="image.jpg" alt="desccription"
style="width:320px; height:240px;" />
Using an external style sheet
Same as latter, but using an external style sheet linked with an id statement for individual images, or more pratically using class for many images on a page with the same dimensions.

Autumn anime art using... defined image dimensions!

Without this information, the browser is forced to render the page as it would look without the image until it has reached it; this is especially noticeable on slower internet connections and on mobile phones. It also does nothing to help the sanity of people who are halfway through reading a paragraph and suddenly have the text disappear as it’s pushed away by an image that has started loading!

As far as I know from my own experience, Typo, WordPress and MediaWiki conveniently specify image sizes automagically on images you upload and insert, and I assume most other content management systems do too… save for Blosxom of course! Wow Blosxom, the first weblog publishing system I ever used, that brings back memories!

Save the world: specify image dimensions!

Wikipedia Error

Wikipedia

Is anyone else having trouble accessing articles in the English Wikipedia? Whenever I try accessing pages I get this long list of PHP errors: