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

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Nitpicking open source and free… again

2008.10.02 – 13.44 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Despite really like Ruby and Perl, due to time constraints and other obligations I’m still reluctantly using WordPress and PHP on most of my blog powered sites including this one. Until I make the desperatly wanted switch, WP news still affects me and I take a somewhat interested view of what’s going on. Not exactly a glowing endorsement, but then again it is the middle of the day here in Mawson Lakes so if I started glowing it would be a bit of a waste of energy.

It seems the widely used Revolution Theme for WordPress has gone open source. From the Weblog Tools Collection article:

Brian Gardner’s Revolution Theme for WordPress is going 100% Open Source. All the themes that are currently on Brian’s Revolution site will no longer be available as or October 31st and will be replaced with a set of new themes that will be developed and released under the GPL. The original Revolution themes will continue to be supported for those who have purchased them in the past.

Now I hate to be a nitpicker and certainly I consider myself more practical than ideological when it comes to the great software debate, but isn’t this an example of something becoming Free Software and not just Open Source? Aren’t most applications written in interpreted languages Open Source by their very nature because you can read the files? If Brian Gardner is releasing his themes under the GPL, then wouldn’t that make them Free (as in speech as well as beer) instead of just Open Source?

I guess it boils down to disclosure; if you purchase a theme from someone instead of downloading it gratis, there’s probably a clause limiting your right to redistribute or share the code. Still, isn’t that more of an issue of the software not being Free, rather than it not being Open Source?

In any event I congratulate Brian for going down this path. I suspect he will be getting far more users and interest after doing this, and he deserves all of it.

And now I’m off for a Caeser salad. I’ve been having cravings for Caeser salad. Is that healthy?

Categories: internet, programming, weblog
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Is WordPress news not anymore?

2008.08.22 – 17.55 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

WordPress users, have you noticed how the "WordPress News" section on the Dashboard page seem to contain less news stories, and more sensationalist comparisons and attacks on other blogging software these days?

WordPress News on the Dashboard

You don’t need to advertise or convince us to use your blogging software, we clearly are already if we can see these!

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Can you categorise too much?

2008.05.08 – 11.52 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

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?

Categories: internet, software
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Specify image dimensions and save the world!

2008.04.19 – 18.16 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

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!

Categories: formats, internet
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The super wicked evil 666 post!

2008.02.24 – 01.28 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

It’s come time once again to pay tribute to yet another useless Rubenerd Blog milestone, the posting of the wicked, super evil 666th post!

Of course if you were reading this weblog almost one year ago to this day (how very eerie), you would have seen that I already celebrated what I thought at the time to be the publishing of the 666th post with this very silly graphic from Elfen Lied, one of the scariest anime series’ I’d ever seen. Come to think of it I never finished watching it for that very reason.

Don't look now!

Anyway I realised in another useless Rubenerd Blog milestone post in November last year that WordPress assigns values to all uploaded media not just weblog entries, meaning that the initial 666th post celebration wasn’t actually the 666th post.

So unlike that impostor post, this one is actually the 666th Rubenerd Blog post… even though the internal post ID is 1064. Have I confused you yet?

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Accumulated holiday spam fun

2008.01.09 – 19.02 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

It’s amazing how much work, studies and other assorted whatnot accumulates when you disconnect yourself from the internets [sic].

Case in point: silly, unauthorised, supposed erection assisting or lottery winning, mismatched, bulk emails! When I returned from my family’s trip to Sydney for mummy’s funeral, this was the screen I was welcomed with:

Screenshot of spam! Argh!

The problem is, I used to be able to just hit the Clear button with Akismet, but lately it’s been generating so many false positives I have to comb through the pages to make sure legitimate comments haven’t been filtered out by accident. Of course I usually check comments every day so combing through a few dozen is no problem, but letting it accumulate like this is a real nightmare!

So just to let people know, if you’ve posted a comment and it hasn’t been approved yet, you can understand why it might take a while.

So much spam... so little time...
So much spam… so little time…
I can’t stand dry posts with just text you see!

I used to be under the impression that spambots just posted to everything they could get their hands on, but it seems they’re drawn to certain articles. Some of them clearly don’t make sense, especially the ones which attempt to hijack articles where I’ve talked about spam!

So just for interest’s sake (hope Mr. Interest is okay with me using him in this example) here are a microscopic selection of posts which seem to attract the most spam messages, with the titles copied verbatim.

20 Years Old Tomorrow
kidney disease symptons, manta equador, in karaoke odessa show tx, the villege, hollins univeristy, on line poker 7stud lo… uncertain Edmonton magic Bendix.regime aeronautic …
Credit Spam!
patin couffin, glamis dunes, lenguaje iconico, amalia carrara, joyland amusment park, making mirror telescope, dance robot, atv honda lowest motorcycle price, train calling all angels lyric, auto design nation shield usa, ach florida payment processing, xm satellite radio rating, bank cd mutual rate washington, bank cd mutual rate washington, conferencing phone service, dj hawaii wedding, addiction recovery trauma, adipex diet effects pill side, caroline beil, people doing stupid stuff, people doing stupid stuff, 3d home architect home design deluxe, book exodus moses, battery computer laptop notebook portable, cheap cheapest computer laptop notebook, goodnites pull ups, aol jason whitlock
Review of Cranky Geeks 081
Having a good credit history is crucial for anyone desiring a credit. Your credit history is based on credit reports that are meant to provide information on the borrower’s reliability. I have good credit history and I was approved for a great credit card offer at…


Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…

That’s one thing I guess spam will always be: entertainment delivered right to my comments pages!

Categories: spam, travel
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1000 Rubenerd musings!

2007.11.05 – 17.47 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

I was confused for a long time about how WordPress organises posts and other media, so when I saw that one of my posts had been assigned the number 666 I assumed it meant I had typed up 666 weblog posts. As it turns out WordPress assigns all the media you upload a unique number, so in actual fact I had typed far less than I thought.

With that said, WordPress has assigned this particular entry an ID number of 1000! Yay! Does it mean anything? No! Am I excited? Yes! Why? Because 1000 is a big number!

So here’s to 1000 Rubenerd Blog… items… or whatever the heck they are. 1000 somethings!

Do What Haruhi Says

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WordPress eXtended RSS fun

2007.10.13 – 14.38 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

WXR

I haven’t been having much luck with technology this week, but this seems to be the icing on the cake so to speak. The problem is no matter how hard I try I just can’t get WXR working.

WXR is of course the WordPress eXtended RSS format which allows you to quickly export the entire written contents of your weblog including posts, pages, categories, tags and kitchen sinks. It means you can pick up the guts of your weblog, then do a backup of your wp-content folder which contains all your uploaded media, plugins and themes, then import them somewhere else.

Only problem is, this is the seventh time and I still can’t get it to work on one WordPress installation. I have a local web server running on my MacBook Pro which I’ve set up to test new themes and plugins I’m working on, and on this local installation of WordPress I can import my Rubenerd Show material without any trouble at all, but I’ve had no end of trouble when I try to do the same thing from the Rubenerd Blog.

The curious thing is that there’s no consistency to the errors. On Thursday I tried importing from this weblog and WordPress silently failed; the import page just stopped rendering after it had uploaded the file. Then yesterday I tried again and it was able to import posts but only up to September 2006 when it decided to stop.

The only things I can think of that could be causing this problem is the WXR export php file in WordPress wasn’t uploaded to the server correctly, or the file (2.2MiB) is too big somehow for my local web server to handle, or maybe there’s some malformed HTML in one of my posts which breaks the resulting XML file it’s contained in… maybe it’s just gremlins.

One clue though showed itself when I tried to open the exported WXR file in Smultron:

So perhaps it’s an encoding issue? Or does Wordpress not output UTF-8? Could it be failing because some of my posts have East Asian characters which need UTF-8?

Whatever this blasted problem is, it looks like this is going to be a very, very, very long Saturday.

Categories: formats, programming, weblog
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