I'm trying to do some hard disk maintenance on a machine on the other side of the world, and before I start doing things like reconfiguring its RAID arrays with things still mounted there, I'm giving NFS booting a go. The idea is to configure the system to boot using its usual GRUB boot partition, but then mount its root filesystem off an NFS...

Lots of sites now provide javascript widgets. Typically, they ask you to paste something like this into your blog sidebar: <script src="http://www.flickr.com/fun/zeitgeist/badge.js.gne" type="text/javascript"></script> This bit of code tells browsers to go off to www.flickr.com and fetch the badge.js.gne file. There's a problem with...

One thing you can do in PeopleAggregator is show your friend list (well, part of it) on your blog, using a Javascript include of the type pioneered by blogrolling.com and commonly used for advertising (e.g. AdSense) and all sorts of blogging things. You include some markup on your site that looks like this: <script language="javascript"...

I got an e-mail today asking about the NZ coffee review site, which is often used as a showcase for Structured Blogging technology. Here's the response, because I need to remember to do some of the stuff I talk about. I've been thinking recently that it would be nice if coffee.gen.nz was based around the SB MCD interpreter, as this would let me...

A year or so ago I wrote some code to search the user list for aSmallWorld, and I keep meaning to write a general tool to do that sort of job for other sites. Originally ASW was using a MySQL query like this: SELECT * FROM member_info WHERE firstname LIKE '%$fn%' AND lastname LIKE '%$ln%' Testing this out on a snapshot of their database, this...

Looks like it considers the contents of RSS's <title> element to be text, not HTML. Hmm. Maybe I'm finally going to have to strip those links out of there :-) Comment

One current issue with the Structured Blogging plugins is that they produce HTML that doesn't validate on the W3C validator and feeds that produce warnings on the Feed Validator. This is because of the method used to embed the structured post's XML source in the HTML output. How the output looks The current output looks like this, with the XML...

Here's something I'd like to see: an open source project to produce client and server code to make it easy to upload files to websites. It's not hard to add file/image upload support to a website, but some functions just work so much better on the client. If you can resize a 2MB JPEG down to 100K on the client, for example, you can send 100...

I've been setting up some Debian instances (separate chrooted copies of differen versions of the OS) so I can run different versions of PHP and hopefully debug some of the issues people have been having with the Structured Blogging Wordpress plugin on their systems. The feedback I have from people so far is: PHP pre 4.3.0 doesn't work due to...

Bordering on the ridiculous, PubSub's Hyperbole number exceeds 1.6 TRILLION at times. The number represents the number of "matches" per day, where a "match" is a test to see if an arriving feed entry matches a subscription. Somewhere over 300k subscriptions times ~1.5M feed entries per day gives them an average Hyperbole number of about 500...

A question for the UserTalk hackers: are the following identical? foo.bar.baz foo.bar["baz"] foo.bar.["baz"] Comment

Joe Gregorio wins buzzword bingo with his latest XML.com article: Secure RSS Syndication. Basically it's a Greasemonkey script that decrypts bits of Blowfish-encrypted HTML it sees in your browser. So not just something to use for encrypted feeds - it will work just fine for any content that's been encrypted just for you. But I guess it's an...

Jim Winstead posts the slides from his "embedded MySQL" talk. Ian Bicking: WSGIKit is now "Python Paste". Game Developer Magazine article about the design of Katamari Damacy. Rogers watches other Pope-related domain owners roll in the cash. "I know in a higher sense I did the right thing by donating the domains to Modest Needs, a great charity...

ev talks about how manic-depressive disorder is more common in immigrants. Some good stuff in his quote: America, a nation of immigrants, has higher rates of mania than every other country studied (with the possible exception of New Zealand, which topped the United States in one study)." More evidence of local strangeness (the scariest being...

Very nice: C Data Solutions, in the UK, has produced a compact flash computer -- a Motorola ColdFire-based computer in a CompactFlash card. They also make a couple of interface boards (a backplane and a bus controller module to provide power and translate some signals) and an RS232/BDM header that lets you talk to the system from your PC. It's...