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late june

By anders pearson 27 Jun 2004

and maine is still cold and miserable.

<p>the only day of my vacation that the sun came out for any decent amount of time was today as i was travelling back to new york.</p>

indoor fun

By anders pearson 14 Jun 2004

the weather in new york was so beautiful this weekend that i really should be punished for not taking advantage of it.

my excuse is that i had a new toy to play with.

my primary machine at home has been quite flakey for a long time. hardware issues. it’s also big and loud. so a few weeks ago i broke down and ordered a new system. it’s a Shuttle SN41G2 based system. smaller than a breadbox, quiet, reasonably powerful. i ordered it from Los Alamos Computers, who ship it with Debian GNU/Linux pre-installed.

of course, once i’d spent a few hours failing to get mplayer working on Debian, i decided to wipe it and install Gentoo instead, which is the only linux distro that i’ve ever actually managed to get mplayer and all the video codecs properly installed on.

installing gentoo involves a lot of waiting for things to compile though, so i watched a few movies while it chugged away:

now i have a brand new, fast, stable machine running with a fancy 2.6 kernel, every bit of hardware on it working nicely, and mplayer installed.

WaSP Survey

By anders pearson 08 Jun 2004

at the Web Standards Project, we’ve been in the process of reinventing ourselves. originally formed to pressure browser makers into supporting web standards, lately, we’ve been changing our focus to developer education. all the browser support in the world will mean nothing if 99% of the pages on the web use invalid markup. to help shape this new mission, we’ve put up a survey to find out a little more about the web developer community. if you are a web developer, please go fill it out and send us your comments.

another weekend

By anders pearson 07 Jun 2004

lani finally made it up for a visit this weekend. just in time for new york to be cold and wet. coming from texas, it hadn’t even occurred to her to bring anything warmer than a t-shirt, so she had to spend the weekend wearing my sweater, which is practically a dress on her.

met up with jP and tamara for dim sum saturday morning followed by gooey sweets from the chinese bakery and music shopping. on our way back to the subway, we took some side streets to avoid the crazy throngs of tourists clogging canal street. on one of them, we stumbled across what must have been a DJ’s wet dream. there is a music library, which gets two copies of every piece of vinyl that is released plus lots of radio stations donate their extras. twice a year, apparently, they go through their inventory and sell off their thirds. most of what they were selling had probably never even been played but it was all cheap. i think jP could have easily spent the rest of the day there (and all of his money) if we’d let him.

back at my place, we watched Bubba Ho-Tep, and a few hours of VH1’s “100 Most Metal Moments of All Time”, which was remarkably entertaining.

sometime around 10, i was tricked into going out to williamsburg. i could have sworn that lani asked if i wanted to go to brooklyn “tomorrow” and i agreed. next thing i knew, she was dragging me to the subway. it was a fun time though. we met up with jP, tamara, and julia at blair and daphne’s, ate some falafel and zaater, drank some PBR and played Barbie, the board game. then we watched Blood Diner, which was absolutely hilarious.

on sunday, i dutifully followed lani around while she went clothes shopping and unsuccessfully shoe shopping. then we had some pastries with Sky and Masha and finally watched The Dead Zone (Sky and Masha have been attempting to watch every movie Christopher Walken has been in).

dots

By anders pearson 03 Jun 2004

saw the legendary pink dots last night. excellent show. i’ve seen them once before and i’ve also seen edward solo. they’re never disappointing.

go see them. that is all.

memorial day weekend

By anders pearson 01 Jun 2004

fairly uneventful, but satisfying weekend.

  • dinner party at sky and masha‘s.
  • used CD shopping
  • met the inventor of the Shoulder Holder & Trouser Houser, who was once a student of timothy leary
  • watched the re-release of Life of Brian in the theatre (they re-released it to counter the Passion)
  • watched Logan’s Run on TV.
  • got some work done on Thraxil but not much else.

feeds

By anders pearson 26 May 2004

thraxil now has an atom feed in addition to RSS. the urls are http://thraxil.org/feeds/atom.xml and http://thraxil.org/feeds/index.rss respectively. (there are also individual user feeds in thraxil.org/_your username_/feeds/ if you don’t want to read everyone’s posts).

you may have noticed that the RSS feed is at a different location than it used to be. i’ve got a permanent redirect setup, so this should highlight all the aggregators out there that don’t properly support HTTP response codes.

you may also notice the lack of the ugly little orange ‘XML’ buttons”. the feed urls are in the HTML head so they can be autodetected. i will also eventually put up a sitemap that will link to them. i think that RSS/Atom feeds are the kind of thing that should be totally transparent to the user. it should be good enough to just point your aggregator at thraxil.org and let it auto-detect the feeds. if your aggregator doesn’t work that way, you should think about finding a better one, or requesting that functionality from whoever maintains it. news aggregation will have a hard time escaping beyond the hardcore web geeks if end users have to understand the mechanisms.

new beginnings

By anders pearson 24 May 2004

here it is. the new version of the thraxil code. sorry it took so long. i was plagued with cable modem and hardware problems.

it’s not much right now. i have lots of ideas for new stuff, but first i just wanted to duplicate most of the already existing functionality. so this initial release is just with a basic feature set.

there are some major architectural changes here:

  • the backend is now written in python instead of perl. that’s the biggest one.
  • when you post, it publishes everything to static HTML files which apache can serve real quickly. the old version served everything up dynamically (with some caching, but every request would still incur a relatively large amount of processing). so when you post now, expect it to take a minute or two (while it writes out new index files, etc. and i have plans on making this even faster.) but requesting other pages should be very fast.
  • no more reliance on postgresql. i couldn’t get away from databases entirely, so i’m now using SQLite, which is small, light, fast, simple, and doesn’t require a complex installation.
  • comments are now open. ie, you don’t have to create an account before you can post comments.
  • there is no more distinction between diaries and front-page. my intention is really to decrease the emphasis on the front-page; it’s just a listing of what’s going on with a bunch of different users’ individual weblogs. i may even change it so only post titles show up on the front page.
  • you can’t edit your templates anymore. instead, you can edit the CSS files for your weblog. i’ve gone out of my way to make the markup exceptionally semantically rich so it’s easy to style. if you don’t think you can do a lot with just the CSS files, go check out the CSS Zen Garden for inspiration. you might not want to get too crazy with the custom CSS in the next week though since i haven’t really finalized the templates.
  • the new data model for the backend will allow me to add features like versioning and other cool stuff.

other misc. features:

  • formatting is now done with textile
  • you can publish a ‘Draft’ of a post which won’t actually be displayed on the site, but it will let you preview it and edit it later.

i haven’t put any real work into the visual design yet, so it’s ugly for now. deal.

this is still beta code, and i haven’t tested it too much, so expect bugs. report them as comments on this post please.

my short TODO list in roughly the order of importance:

  • –clean up UI / design–
  • -Atom feed-
  • -ensure XHTML compliance on all pages-
  • -search-
  • -metadata fields (you’ll see a box for this in the posting interface. doesn’t really do much yet.)-
  • -performance improvements on publishing-
  • trackbacks
  • versioning / diffs
  • comment preview
  • -comment management (ie, allowing you to delete comments from posts)-
  • user info
  • related entries
  • Atom API
  • monthly indices formatted as calendar
  • multi-image zip upload
  • image gallery / slideshow
  • search results as RSS / Atom
  • PGP signed posts / comments
  • post in future
  • automatic extraction of EXIF data from images
  • email integration (eg, comment notification via email)

basically, lots of stuff planned. we’ll see how slowly i actually get around to doing it.

new version coming soon

By anders pearson 24 Apr 2004

i’ve got the new thraxil codebase working well enough that i’m about ready to release it. the main problem right now is that my cable modem has been down for the last week or so. i’ve been doing the development on my home machine, so without a network connection i can’t really do the upgrade very well. before i can move us to the new code, i have to write a script or two to import the old entries.

anyway, just thought i’d let people know that i haven’t been completely lazy lately and that there may be some big changes around here in the next week or so.