People that claim things in blog posts because they think they are right, when even the SIMPLEST visit to the softwares website tells you otherwise... As an example to this... Sionide says that XMMS is a port of WinAmp, you can clearly see from the XMMS Website that this is not the case, the about page clearly states:

It was modeled after winamp from the Windows operating system. XMMS is not a port of Winamp but was written from scratch by Mikael and Peter Alm.

/me slaps Sionide about the face a bit. PLEASE DO AT LEAST A TINY BIT OF RESEARCH, DAMMIT.

sigh

People that don't know that they're wrong, when asking questions of a financial type of your flatmates.

That is all.

17:30 <+quinophex> the pages that really wind me up are the ones which
                   people are saying "we paid 50 grands for these, aren't
                   they great!"
17:30 <+quinophex> and they are more shit than i could do
17:30 < iDunno> hehe
17:30 <+quinophex> ...when i am forced to use a copy of frontpage 97
17:30 < iDunno> and probably aren't accessable ;)
17:30 <+quinophex> on windows 3.1
17:30 < iDunno> quinophex: shudder.
17:30 <+quinophex> with my eyes gouged out with a stick
17:31 <+quinophex> and broken fingers
17:31 < iDunno> quinophex: and an abacus instead of a networked computer?
17:31 <+quinophex> something like that :)
17:31 < iDunno> whilst simultaneously inventing the wheel and deodorant
17:31 < iDunno> and taking a shower.
17:31 <+quinophex> while plugged into the mains :D
17:32 < iDunno> and pro-creating.
17:32 <+quinophex> with a goat
17:32 <+quinophex> and a squid
17:32 < iDunno> at the same time?! crikey.
17:32 < iDunno> that sounds messy ;)
17:33 <+quinophex> with anal bleeding

Conclusion - me and quinophex agree that the web is generally populated by a bunch of broken pages, and most web developers need shooting :)

Firefly++

That is all.

Maybe it's not just me, though... Does anyone else get upset with people that don't put DVDs/CDs back in there cases after use? The usual list of excuses being "I didn't know where the case was", or "Erm, yeah, I was going to do that". I don't mind them being left in players/drives, that's fine, you can generally find them, and they're not in danger of having coffee/tea spilt on them, or randomly getting lost... what really winds me up, though, is them being left on the corner of units, or put back in different boxes.

OK - so having read that, definately I'm weird :)

Right - I've got some clean django packages ready, just waiting on my pbuilders to update then I'll upload them to my repository, it's the first official django release, and they state (quite clearly) on the site that there maybe backwards incompatible changes between now and 1.0, so I'm not sure wether I'll try to get this sponsored in to unstable or not at this point.

My debian repository for django is at:

deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ unstable django

or for sarge (yes, there should be some sarge packages soon!):

deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ stable django

At the moment these contain an older set of django packages built from an svn snapshot, I may make some new svn snapshots in the future, depending on time constraints and if anyone is interested in having them :)

Django has finally got a release! I'll be packaging it very shortly, once I sort out the few problems that I've got in the current packages that I've built. I might even finally get round to getting something useful working in it, I just haven't had time to rewrite my site yet to use django, I'm still using a (rather non-elegant) home grown set of scripts to apply my 'template' to my site, but I think that I can make it all a lot nicer using django, and much easier to update :)

Django is really quite nice, but it does need some tweaks to fit in to the FHS better, which I'll do against this nice shiny new tar ball release shortly.

I'm looking for a wiki -> html style, generic, parser... It's not that difficult to write one, but I wondered if you fine people out there might already know of one before I set about writing one... I could, in theory at least, use the parser from moinmoin, but that does seem very very tied in to moinmoin. It'd be nice to just use something like...

wikiparser = WikiParser(type="somewikistyle")
html = wikiparser.parse("somewikidocumentasastring").getHTML()

And have the WikiParser first generate an internal structure based on the markup (possibly, in effect, creating a dom tree), which is then returned at the .parse stage, then having different calls on that tree to, say, generate simple HTML, or LaTeX, or PDF etc.

Hope that makes sense to people that aren't me....

Went to see Broken Flowers with JD and Laura, was a very deliberate (read: slow) film, that leaves a lot of unanswered questions... but that in itself was really quite interesting. Very odd ending, it really does just end, leaving the running question through the film entirely unanswered, which was fantastic :)

Anyways - only a few more days then it's off to Norwich for a partay! Should be arriving in Norwich sometime Saturday afternoon (depending on when I leave Brighton, and how well I remember how to get round to Liverpool Street and get the Norwich train. I'm planning on getting in to Norwich sometime ~ 1500 or 1600, which gives me enough time to find stuff before wandering off to find the party at 1830 (ish).

Having said that I'd spend the day fixing xmms-scrobbler, I kinda, possibly, got a tinsy bit sidetracked, instead Buffy was watched and Mario Kart was played, I've just completed the All Star Cup in Mirror Mode (YAY!) so we now have the parade car... now that we've got all the stuff, I might not have an excuse to randomly play it quite so much - feel damned accomplished though :)

In other news - JD made toad in the hole today, and he actually made a good job of it! Well done David!

Congratulations to my brother, Casey, on passing his driving test yesterday (his first attempt, too, I believe... OK it took him 2 to do the theory, but hey, no-one's perfect ;).

I've just packaged a newer version of python-django, if anyone is using these beware that the admin section has undergone a non backwards compatible change since the last package, details can be found from the django backwards incompatible changes page on the django wiki.

sources.list lines are:

deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ (sid|sarge) django
deb-src http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ (sid|sarge) django

and are available for i386 and amd64. The package still needs some work (various bits of config really shouldn't be where they are), but I expect to do that sometime before the release (we still haven't got an official django release).

I should be working my way through the xmms-scrobbler bugs at some point this weekend, I hope... the tag reading is still quite bad, and does still segfault on badly formatted tags which is what really needs fixing.

Anyways - back to it.

MJ Ray Will the last ex-UEA-er to leave Norfolk please switch out the light? asks why lots of people are now leaving Norwich... In my case, it was fairly simple, I wanted out of Paston, I hadn't really had time to look around as such, so when JD suggested that there was a job going at Runtime] and would I be interested, I kinda jumped at the chance, threw across my CV (which still badly needs editing), and got an interview. As soon as the results where in, and I knew I had the job, I handed in the magical letter of resignation to Paston and moved my arse down to Brighton. It's a much better job, with more fun things to play with. Asterisk has been rocking my socks recently, and we should now have an almost fully functional set of phones on the asterisk pbx in London (which I'm maintaining from Brighton o/).

Anyways - it's nearly the weekend, and this time I WILL finish off reading the licences and throw Myon a mail (promise!).

Been playing farrrrr too much mario kart double dash recently, I blame it all entirely on JD! Anyways - now on to trying to get the Special Cup in a 150CC Kart... it's not going according to plan, and I think I really hate "Rainbow Road". Yesterday I managed to get the Super Ghost thing by doing "Baby Park" in time trials in less than a minute fourteen seconds (YAY!).

So, tommorows task is set, the gold cup shall be won, dammit!

That is the question... on the one hand, I could spend the evening in and read the graphviz and various other licences and finish my reply to myon... on the other hand I could go out and watch a colleagues band play, and have some beer...

I wonder which one is going to win...

Right - suppose I better eat and contemplate how to get to the gig grin - I think I've just gotta head across towards and past the train station a bit to get there, so hopefully I won't get hopelessly lost.

Joey Hess says in blog responses, window managers, tabs

It wasn't that long ago that window shading was a cutting edge new feature, so it might have made sense to implement it in an app back then, but it's in any self-respecting window manager now (except, arguably, ion ;-), so it's time to let go and let the window manager take care of it. I think the same will happen with tabs. says in

Ion3 does have window shading! Fire up a WFloatWS workspace and watch it in action!

Anyways - to respond to alllll the comments on web browsers that'd been hitting planet recently, here's my current position: all web browsers suck, some suck marginally less than others. Basically, I use firefox on the basis that it, currently, is sucking the least for me, is reasonably fast and reasonably light weight, and does come somewhere near implementing the standards. I have used kazahakase, infact, I did almost decide to use it as my default web browser, but then something put me off, maybe there was some odd key combo that I didn't like, or maybe it was something to do with the tabs... I just remember that there was something that I just didn't get on with. I get fairly bored with most apps fairly quickly, basically, if it can't be done on the command line, or automated in some way, what's the point? Unfortunately, that kinda doesn't work so well for web browsing, although, w3m still gets a fair amount of use on my machine, mainly because sometimes I just want the content, I don't need the stupid roll overs, the inane graphics, some web designers idea of what's a 'good ui'... often I just want a simple navigatable site, with clear and easy to follow sections, and easily accessable text, not this damn flash stuff, not this horrible java applet foo, pure, plain, simple, markup. Headings, subheadings, paragraphs, all marked up as they should be... I want the web to come back to being a place for information, dammit. Maybe I'm just a purist though.

Anyways - just my 2p worth.

Friday before last (23 Sept, 2005) I finally got assigned an AM :) I really need to get back my answers for the first part of P+P RSN, just haven't really had time, still settling in after the move, and we've not sorted the wireless network out yet... Should get it done today or tommorow though, and then it's just a case of sending it off and waiting for the next installment!

Last night we moved Paston's servers from Telehouse to Global switch, so we're now hosting in Mistrals space in Global Switch... Now, Global Switch is a reasonably pretty looking building (compared with Telehouse, at least), and the machine move went quite well, with ~ 30 -> 45 mins downtime, ish. Things that went wrong: given a network cable, plugged in to switch, got nothing, monkey in Global Switch couldn't work out what was wrong, left him to it for ~ 5 to 10 mins before I had a sudden thought of "hmm, I wonder, I wonder if that's a straight or crossover cable", plugged it in to the uplink port, pushed the magic button... Hey presto, we have connection... Confront monkey, Monkey says "Well, they don't tell me these things". NYARGH.

So, anyways, got the 2 machines on to the net, tested everything was running, tested that it worked from remote machines, you know, all the usual crap... Leave Global Switch at 12.45am ish, get back to Norwich for 3am ish, get to bed for ~ 3.20am ish... Get a phone call at 10am saying "erm, it's not working for this bunch of people", the bunch of people in question being our ADSL customers, who were all recently migrated to Mistral's network... the problem? 2 of Mistral's ADSL routers couldn't find our machines... Mistral's suggested solutions to the problem: (1) wait 7 days and we'll fix it or (2) we'll connect you to a different switch port. So, fair enough, not too bad, now apparently connected to a different switch port... but to add insult to it, apparently the servers where "put in the rack the wrong way round for the airflow", we put it in the same way round as the other server in that rack, and the way we were told to put it in by the afore mentioned monkey... so this morning our kit was turned off for 10 mins while they turned it round in the rack, it's all come back cleanly (thank god), but ffs, why do they hire entirely useless fucking staff that apparently get this wrong quite often?

Anyways - end of rant... pub tonight as listed in the other post :)

Woo! It's Thursday! Tonight is my last night in Norwich, Friday I'm driving down to my dads (depending on work, either early afternoon or ~ 5.30pm), Saturday (depending on Friday) I'm rushing round the country (or at least Dad's to Brighton, if not Dad's -> Norwich -> Brighton -> Dad's). So, in light of this, those that didn't already know, or weren't sure... I'm off to the Fat Cat tonight for the last time for a while (till I either come visit people up here, or something), I should be getting there sometime between 6.30pm and 7.30pm, with people turning up whenever they can or want to. Feel free to come and join me!

It's getting progressively closer to time for me to move to Brighton... That Saturday is going to be busy, getting up 7am, leaving dads in the van, getting to Norwich, packing the van, heading to Brighton, unpacking the van then back to dads to sleep.

Of course, we're also getting close to next Thursday, which is my leaving drinks in Norwich day, kicking off "sometime" Thursday evening in the Fat Cat. (I'm currently planning on getting there somewhere around about 6.30/7.00).