Writing perl unit tests which need to simulate a web browser with cookie support connecting to a server from multiple network interfaces is challenging. Why would I need to do that? Well, when you work for a company whose business is providing controlled internet access to hotels, these sorts of things come up.
I’m not asking for help — I already know how to approach the problem. I’m just stating a fact. You know, in case anybody was curious about what I’m working on these days.
The world’s smallest Peer-to-Peer application, written in 15 lines of Python code: TinyP2P.
TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.
Peer-to-Peer (AKA “P2P”) applications make it easy for people to share files over a network. [...]
Euphoria is one of the Really Slick Screensavers
While on a search for new eye candy, I found Really Slick Screensavers, which really lives up to the name. There are 10 eye-popping OpenGL Windows screen savers available for free, in both senses of word (free-as-in-beer & free-as-in-speech). . [...]
37signals has yet another excellent article out. This one is called An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design. Some of it might seem obvious, or even instinctive, if you’ve been doing programming and/or web design for a while. But it’s a really good breakdown of a design process. (found via sidesh0w)
One of these days, I’ll get around to redesigning this site again. I’ve felt for a while now that my sidebar is too cluttered. [...]
Remember that telephone interview I had, and how I was hoping to get a call back for a second interview? I had just about given up hope of hearing back from them. But I had voicemail earlier today letting me know that they would like to meet with me for a second interview. Woot!
It’s scheduled for the middle of next week. They’ve asked me to provide all sorts of examples of my work (flowcharts, object diagrams, server-side and client-side programming examples, etc.), so I’m going to be pretty busy getting my materials together over the next few days. [...]
Michael Heilemann wrote:
> Hey Dougal.
>
> I get the following error when I try to comment on my site with the
> pirate plugin turned on:
>
> Database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual
> [...]
>
> I’m running 1.2. Any ideas?
>
> - Mike
> http://binarybonsai.com
Doh! I forgot to announce the fix for that! I discovered the problem on Friday, but I didn’t have time to write it up, and then later I forgot about it.
At the end of tfs-pirate.php, change the final if statement. [...]
Since Talk Like a Pirate Day is only three weeks away, I spent some time this weekend revamping my old Fun Filters hack. The result is a new plugin for WordPress 1.2 or higher, which I call the Text Filter Suite. This version basically provides a post and comment filtering framework, which can be controlled on a per-post basis.
Okay, here’s a question for some of you PHP OOP gurus out there: How can you use the preg_replace_callback() function from inside of a class method? I even tried using create_function() to make a self-contained lambda, but it seemed like it couldn’t access class properties via the $this variable.
Mark Pilgrim was in the #wordpress IRC channel earlier, asking if there was some way to add <link> and <meta> tags to the <head> section of a page for specific posts. It seems he wants to control how various search engines and other bots index individual posts. I replied that he could do this using the custom fields feature.
A short while later, I had written my first plugin for WordPress: HeadMeta: .ZIP, .tar.gz, .phps, .txt.
To use this plugin, you add key/value pairs in the Advanced Editing interface. [...]
We finally found time to do some more work on Ping-O-Matic, and have implemented an XML-RPC interface. You can now send a standard weblogs.com compatible ping to http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ and we will ping a subset of our services. Currently, this is a fixed subset of seven services:
In the future, we will have ways for you to customize which services you would like us to ping on your behalf. [...]
