Two Second Memory

This article posted on slashdot stating that IE is down to 70% market share in Europe is very encouraging. Microsoft has been playing silly buggers with respect to web browsers for so long it’s nice to finally see some comeuppance. IE has a very poor track record with regards to security, is wantonly non-standards compliant (something that Microsoft has excelled at for years) and is significantly lacking in useful functionality. Here are a few articles to whet your appetite: why you should dump internet explorer, Developers gripe about IE standards inaction, The Web Standards Project and there are plenty more.

So in short if you are using IE change! The most obvious choice is Mozilla but if you are using a Mac then Safari is probably a good choice. Safari is now available under windows but is still in beta. If you use a number of different platforms then again mozilla is probably the best choice.

Do it and the web developers of the world will thank you!

Filed by rgh at 10:20 under Internet
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For the past few months I’ve been writing a new blogging engine for Limes & Lycopene. It is written in Ruby on Rails and is designed to provide the functionality need for a blogging engine but nothing more. Although i’ve tried to make it fairly minimal I’ve put some effort into doing the Right Thing™, for example the search functionality is quite sophisticated. If you want to search for ‘lycopene’ in the title you would enter title:lycopene.

Now I know most people at this stage say why on earth would you write you own blogging engine there are loads of them out there. And that would be a fair question! There are a number of reasons:

• The blog is going to part of a much bigger system and I didn’t want to have to maintain and integrate a third party blog.
• The existing blog (Wordpress) is extremely unreliable. To give you an example of what I mean I have a script that runs every minute and makes a five request to the blog, if the requests time out after five seconds I restart the server. The server is sometimes restarted 20 times a day. Yes I know it is widely used and therefore “must be reliable for me it isn’t.
• Google Analytics would not work on Kathryn’s site but would work on mine. This seems to be a product of the theme.
• The page used to write posts can only be described as evil (yes I know you can change it).
• Wordpress is written using php which is being run using fcgi under lightty and is not a particularly elegant solution and uses a fair amount of memory (see this post for more details). The machine that runs Limes & Lycopene is a small memory constrained Xen VM and the less running on that machine the better.
• I wanted to gain more experience using ruby on rails.

So on Saturday afternoon I released the new engine, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience, mainly due to exporting the existing data from Wordpress, but it is now done (and the export only needs to be done once). There are a number of defects that need to be fixed but are not serious enough to delay the release. I have to say that I’m very pleased with the results and my admiration for rails has increased dramatically. Let me know what you think.

I would also like to thank Styleshout for there fantastic website template and an even bigger thank you for releasing it under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. I had been looking for an open source site design for quite a while before I found pixel green so thank you, thank you, thank you.

As I mentioned above there are still a few defect to fix up and some more functionality that really does need to be added but once I’ve done that I will be releasing it under the GPL license. If anyone has any bright ideas for a name please let me know!

Filed by rgh at 18:27 under Internet
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Not a word that most of you will be familiar with but the concept of disemvowelling is oh so cool. To disemvowel means to remove all vowels from a word. And … you might say. Well it was started by Teresa Nielsen Hayden as a way of reducing the effectiveness of a troll on her blog. The expression was coined by Arthur D. Hlavaty in the comments. You can see the post here.

So if someone is trolling a post on your blog you just remove all the vowels from the post and lo and behold the sting from the comments is gone. As an example the first part of this sentence would be transformed from:

Not a word that most of you will be familiar …

to:

Nt wrd tht mst f y wll b fmlr …

Now as far as I’m concerned this is a stroke of genius. You are not censoring the comment but you are making it very hard for people to read. The troll generally loses interest at this stage and then stops making everyones life a misery.

For the geeks amongst you this is very easy to implement programatically — but I guess you already know this! In ruby, for example, you would do the following:

‘Not a word that most of you will be familiar … ‘.gsub(/[aeiou]/i, ‘’)

For the non-geeks interested in what this means gsub mean global substitute and the /[aeiou]/ is a regex class meaning any of the letters between the []; the i means ignore case. The ‘’ is what you substitute each matched letter, i.e. nothing.

Filed by rgh at 21:26 under Internet
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