It’s very hot today, although not as bad as was originally predicted [yet]. Therefore I am feeling even more lazy than usual, and am even contemplating sitting through National Treasure just for the air-conditioning.

Lately I have been noodling about with PHP and MySQL, and I’m finally starting to understand why databases are neat. Without expending too much mental effort, I’ve extended my WordPress install to gather some post-specific statistics, so I can track which posts are actually being read, since this data is no longer so easy to gather from server logs. If these numbers ever grow past the "small and cute" stage then maybe I will make them publicly viewable as well.

Regular readers will have noticed that the big change-over has kind of interrupted my comic stylings — I’m hoping I can get back into a groove with that once I’m bored with reconfiguring this blog. One small problem is that although I finally got around to sending my dodgy Wacom graphics tablet away for repairs, it was deemed to be working perfectly and sent right back. So until I get to the bottom of that I am still without a convenient drawing solution.

Of course when drawing with a stylus my artwork looks rather different from the neat and constipated style which is produced with the mouse. Here’s something I drew earlier, before my Wacom went awry.

Oh, and relating to the title of this entry, you should go read Structured Procrastination, by John Perry. I think there might be some useful advice for me in there…

I kind of like the idea of it… I think. But not for my own applications. Not right now anyway.

It’s not so much an ideological position as a don’t-quite-get-it position. For me [I admit] there is still a lot of self/ego in the art of programming, so I can’t help but be a bit precious/protective about my code — It’s not that I’m afraid of giving away secrets, more the idea of others stepping in and assuming control over my creation.

It seems to me that open source is best suited to software that is intended to serve everyone. After all if everyone is going to use the software, then why shouldn’t everyone have the opportunity to contribute? Large, modular projects like operating systems and browsers make perfect sense to me as open source candidates.

But ordinary applications? That seems different somehow. Small apps are not necessarily intended for everyone to use, and in this case I think it’s ok to have a single personality driving the code.

Plus in theory I have to make money at some point; and while I haven’t yet made a cent from any of my [closed-source] proprietary software, this is largely for lack of trying — I never properly finish it, I don’t promote it, and I haven’t yet asked anyone to pay for it. But ultimately I think it would be very very nice to be able to make a living writing and maintaining my own software, rather than scraping by on occasional contract work which I have little or no interest in.

[ I am assuming that a lot of people are motivated to work on open source projects by the whuffie factor, but any satisfaction I would gain from working in this way would be far outweighed by the thrill of being paid actual money for my software. ]

So I’ll get that whole business plan organized Real Soon Now…

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NB: This post was inspired by my misunderstanding of a post on John Lyon-Smith’s blog … I assumed he wanted me to post the JujuEdit source code, whereas all he actually said was: "Where’s the download link?" to which I will provide the answer shortly, since I am working on a new version of JujuEdit this very day…

Flo’s Notepad2, the freeware text editor John refers to, does indeed look very good, and goes a long way in demonstrating how lame it is for people like me to try to take a position against Open Source on the basis of quality. The Notepad2 docs point out that the editor is based on the Scintilla source editing component, which is itself free, and so I begin to see how this whole caring-sharing thing can lead to some really good software.

Ta-dah! It’s a slightly new page design! Probably I should have injected a little more color into it, but being red-green color blind means it’s difficult to pick a scheme that I know won’t make others gag.

The layout I was using [based on Kubrick] just wasn’t working for me, because I had to eat up too much of the needed whitespace to fit my content onto the page. So I have gone for a more generic [but I hope clean and practical] layout, with no rounded corners and only 2 images [header and background]. I know the drop shadow thing is probably getting pretty cliche these days, but I have at least made sure that it does not contribute to the minimum page width [ie if you shrink your window down the drop shadow should happily disappear off the sides before the dreaded horizontal scrollbar appears]

That said, there is what appears to be a major glitch with IE running on windows: For some reason you can’t select the text on the main page! I have seen this problem before and always assumed it was due to crapped up CSS, but seriously this page works in every browser except IE on Windows, and even that will work fine if the page is loaded locally instead of from the website.

Whatever is causing it, I will be attempting to rectify the situation…

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UPDATE: I think I have fixed the IE-can’t-select-text problem. It’s happened to a few other people it seems, referenced here and here, and seems to be vaguely related to CSS positioning attributes; getting rid of these has made the problem go away. Weirdly, it also stopped happening if I removed the elelement as well — so if it requires a combination of these factors maybe that’s why it’s not so common…? Anyway, it’s a bug in IE, which has been there for ages, and I doubt they’re gonna fix it anytime soon, so there’s just one more tiny reason to switch to Firefox ;)

BTW, in case you think I’m just passing the blame for my own shitty layout onto MS, here’s a very popular page which will not allow you to select text properly in Windows+IE6, yet works fine in other browsers.

Well that was gruelling! Now finally I can get back to whatever it is I normally spend my time doing…

My final verdict — like it matters what I think — is that HL2 is bloody omazing, and the only things that interfered with my willing suspension of disbelief were a couple of hoary old FPS chestnuts like:

1. Being stuck in a hole because for some reason your heroic character can’t climb onto a ledge above chest height. This limitation seems pretty stupid to me, especially after a game like Prince of Persia.
2. The tendency to accidentally walk off ledges and the clumsiness of climbing ladders… again PoP showed that this kind of stuff could be handled better.
3. Other characters’ feet still seem to skitter about as they walk; This one really irks me because it breaks the illusion of reality, and I’m sure more could be done to rectify it… Ironically, dead characters can often seem more life-like than living ones, because once someone dies they stop following pre-animated sequences and become a "rag-doll", fully integrated into the [mostly] excellent physics engine. *
4. Other "friend" characters have an annoying habit of standing right in front of you, blocking your way, which is really frustrating when you’re in a hurry because someone is shooting at you.

These grievances are minor however, and on the whole I found HL2 an immersive and enjoyable experience.

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* Example: At one point I accidentally sent a squad member into the line of fire [ I was trying to instruct her to run across the road, but she seemed to think I meant: "go stand in the open and engage that hidden sniper" ]. Of course she was shot dead almost instantly, and as the sniper’s round struck she was thrown backwards in a sickeningly convincing way — up until that point she had just been an annoying character spitting out predictable one-liners, but then as she died it all seemed so real for a moment, and I felt really bad.

Having a lovely time in the violent fantasy world of Half-Life 2, which I still haven’t managed to play though yet. In the snapshot you can see my recent visit to the flooded basement of what looks like a nightmarish hospital for the criminally insane.

As a result of I am finding myself in that weird headspace I haven’t experienced for a while, where my perceptions of reality are temporarily affected by the immersive gaming experience. In the real world now I walk into a room and automatically do a visual scan for explosive items… and as I walk close to objects I can’t help noticing how realistically they are rendered.

Back when I was working on 3D realism I used to think like this all the time… when I drove through the country I was constantly staggered by the level of detail in the trees and fields, trying to gauge in my mind the sort of processing power required to generate that sort of imagery in real time. Then I would think: I am such a nerd.

By which I mean: Google should act as a central repository of RSS feeds so that sites don’t have to get hammered by hungry aggregators. Intepid’s bandwidth stats were surprisingly high and growing this last few days, but actual visitor count was pretty much as expected. Puzzled, I checked the server logs, and saw that the culprit was about a gazillion RSS accesses, all from the same few IPs. *

Basically, if you subscribe to a site using a desktop aggregator [like SharpReader or Sauce Reader or a bunch of other programs] you’re probably going to be hitting that site every hour or so, and for the large sites [and the blogosphere in general] these hits are starting to account for a serious percentage of overall traffic. If Google offered an RSS caching service, then each site would only need to be accessed once every hour [or less?], and all the individual aggregators could just hit Google instead.

Web-based aggregators like Bloglines already do cache RSS feeds in the way I describe, and therefore cause no such problems for content providers. But this is not the only reason to use them; I’ve tried a couple of different desktop aggregators, and found them all kind of annoying, since they were usually bulky and felt too much like email clients with too many messages to read. Services like Bloglines make it all seem so much easier, and for some reason I worry less about trying to read every single new entry.

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* I am not actually telling the whole story here, in that the humungous numbers were in part because of an error in my RSS script, causing a feed to reference itself, which in turn caused what looks like an infinite loop in Sauce Reader v1.10. To give an example of what I’m talking about, the log shows 10,354 accesses [each one a full GET downloading the exact same 2609 bytes of data] from a single IP taking place over a period of just four hours. That’s about one visit every 1.4 seconds from just one user! I believe that I have since corrected the problem with the feed, so both myself and that user [yes you, the one using Sauce Reader ;)] may be consuming a lot less bandwidth in the future.

Some of these bricks explode!

I am up to chapter 6 of 15 in Half-Life 2, which I think demonstrates that I’m not much of a gamer since I’ve heard people say that you can play through the whole thing in about 10 hours. I seem to have spent that long just driving the stupid air-boat. Also I seem to get stuck a lot.

One puzzle was actually solved by my frustration with being stuck: I was wandering about clobbering everything with my crowbar, writing dot-matrix swear words on walls and objects, when I absent-mindedly hit something explosive… and when the smoke had cleared [and my hearing returned] the way forward was revealed.

UPDATE - 11:09 AM: Well, that was an exciting hour or so… Stare at a black screen for a while, quit, restart, stare at a blurry title screen with no title and the word "Loading…" at the bottom of it, while loads of network activity and disk accessing goes on, then get very bored with that after 40 minutes [during which I couldn’t even task switch or Ctrl+Alt+Delete to task Manager]…. restart the computer and actually start digging around in Steam to find that while it’s running it’s still eating all of my network bandwidth… Check out ‘Properties’ for Half-life 2 and now it’s telling me it’s only 84% downloaded… which kind-a begs the question: Why [the fuck] does it let me [attempt in vain to] launch a game that hasn’t actually finished downloading?

Actually my current theory is that even when it is 100% complete, it’s still gonna hang, at which point I will become so frustrated that I will probably throw my computer through the window. I forgot the golden rule: never get excited about anything, because reality is sure to kick you in the — Ooooo… 86%!

I’ve just been checking out the trial version of Keyhole, the 3D world map viewer/service recently bought by Google [who immediately halved the price for subscription].

Although of course there’s a lot of variation in the quality of the data, zooming down to certain regions can be quite astounding! Click on the image on the right to see a full screen view of a glacier in northern Pakistan… a region imaged in incredible detail [ for some mysterious reason ]

Unfortunately my home city of Sydney only appears as a blurry smudge by comparison. Not only can you not see our famous Opera House or Harbour Bridge; Sydney Harbour itself is nothing more than a blue pixel or two :(

You know… for Kids!

It’s wonderful to read things like this … and the best kind of encouragement for me to keep working on

I was a-digging through my shoeboxes full of paper files today — looking for the receipt for my severely glitchy Wacom graphics tablet so that I could take it back under warranty — and I came across another bunch of spare passport photos. So I made this new GIF stereogram, this time with vertical parallax…

[ Read previous entry about passport stereograms here ]

BTW This is me in early 2000; 27 years old and in my second year of an undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney. I was majoring in semiotics, but never finished — perhaps in part because I found it too hard to explain to people what semiotics actually is.

Very quickly decided that the new site was looking too clinical/impersonal, so thought I might warm it up a bit with a blurry picture of my wonky eyes… Now it’s just like I’m right here talking to you, isn’t it?

Another lame-ass predictable idea for the header image was going to be formed out of scrabble letters, but that made the whole thing look too much like a sample weblog rather than an actual weblog.

Anyway, I think I’m pretty much done for now with design changes [no really I’m being serious]… so maybe now it will be back to business as usual.

Non Blog News

I’ve been dusting off poor old and fixing a few of the nigglies that have been hanging around for the past *cough* year or so, so there’ll be a new improved release of that sometime real soon now. Better support for multiple windows is one nice feature, where even though it is an SDI [Single Document Interface ] application, it will still let you navigate between multiple JujuEdit windows and do obvious things like "Close All".

Ok so, intepid.com has been running reasonably smoothly so far — as far as I can tell. If anyone has noticed any technical problems could you please let me know in the comments section :)

Various notes/thoughts:

• John mentioned that NewsGator was encountering an HTTP error when trying to subscribe to the RSS feed… I can’t reproduce it it Bloglines, SharpReader or NewsGator online, so if anyone else is having a similar problem, please tell me
• Time zones are a pain! I spent a while pulling my hair out wondering why the latest post wasn’t showing up, and then finally realized that Wordpress was treating it as a future entry, and therefore not displaying it. This is because posts are uploaded as "local" time, and I am GMT+1100 right now, so as far as local time goes, I’m ahead of almost everybody. Fixing this was a very simple matter of telling WP what my timezone actually was [it was defaulting to GMT-0500 because the new server is in California I think].
• I was also having a problem with the RSS feed for comments, which I want to use so I don’t need email notification. Once again the timestamps were from the future, but this time I think it was an oversight, so I just edited the php file to output GMT time like all the other feeds.
• The page design is based on a popular Wordpress template/theme called Kubrick, created by Michael Heilemann. Unfortunately I can’t afford all that lovely whitespace with my 600-pixels of content requirements, so Intepid has become a little more crowded in its layout :(
• I’ve made a few functional changes, like having the archive pages automatically decide whether to use titles, excerpts or full texts depending on the number of posts to be displayed. Also there is a special case where a single post will [should] always be displayed in full with comments, as at its permalink address.
• Something is screwy and comments keep on turning off by default… I added an extra member to force comments to be enabled on in the RPC-XML call, seems to work ok…
• Editing these entries in the online editor seems to bork the formatting of the entire front page… which is a pain

UPDATE: Permalinks should be working now in the desired neat-o format, so the following should serve as the official permalink to this article: https://intepid.com/2004-11-17/11.41

The way that this works really is so cool! You just set up a regex replacement string for pathnames.

For the nerds who’ve never set up a web host but are kind of interested anyway, the string which remaps the permalinks as I prefer them to a WordPress PHP request is:

RewriteRule
^([0-9]{4})?-?([0-9]{1,2})?-?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?\.?([0-9]{2})?/?([0-9]+)?/?$
/index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&hour=$4&minute=$5&page=$6 [QSA]

Most important to me was that the permalinks contain no platform specific stuff, like *.php or *.cgi extensions, and no database specific stuff, like a unique ID. This way if for some reason I need to migrate [which I won’t [but you can’t be too careful] ] to another system it should be a lot easier to manage. It should also mean that I will be [more easily] able to create a mapping from to intepid.com so that incoming links will be correctly remapped [not that there are many, but I can be VERY anal about these things].

I have spent waaaaaaaaay too many hours* on this WordPress conversion, so I think it’s time I stopped arsing about creating header images and tweaking margins and just launch the damn new site.

So, without much further ado, I will ask that you please proceed in an orderly fashion to:

intepid.com

Where you can read this same entry, word-for-word. The name JujuBlog will be phased out, which I still feel a bit strange about, but the bottom line is I have never liked it so much, and after talking to a few friends recently I doubt that anyone else will miss it too much either.

The problem with choosing a new domain name is that it is very hard to just "try" one on, and I don’t want to be changing this again… once is traumatic enough [he says, still mulling over all the other names on his shortlist]

* Here’s a breakdown of the time I’ve spent on this so far: