One of my favorite science fiction authors has a blog. Gibson is often called the father of the cyberpunk movement. His descriptions of console cowboys cruising cyberspace definitely struck a chord with many a nethead in books like Neuromancer and Count Zero. He’s made the classic mistake, the one he’s sworn he’d never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He … Continue reading
I’ve hacked together support for Pingbacks. There are pros and cons to Trackback and Pingback. Pingback is more automated. Trackback has wider support because it is integrated into the popular Movable Type blogware. To speed implementation, I borrowed some of my code from the b2 blog system. Specifically, the code for sending a Pingback ping. But I coded the XML-RPC server-side pingback.ping method for incoming pings on my own. Currently, it’s still not fully tested. … Continue reading
When I implemented Trackback support here, one snag I ran up against is that I typically post to my website via the MetaWeblog API (using the very cool w.Bloggar client app), and the blog posting APIs don’t provide any inherent way to provide Trackback URLs. Nor should they, as that doesn’t really fall under the API’s core functionality. However, it still seemed wasteful to have to set up a separate web form just for doing … Continue reading
I worked on a couple of new features for this blog over the past couple of weeks. The first is an About Page, with information about the site and its author. It’s still incomplete, but at least it’s a start. The other is that I’ve added Trackback support. I’m also working on support for Pingback. Trackbacks and Pingbacks are methods for weblogs to recognize when another site has referenced them. For example, I’ll ping a … Continue reading
I hope everyone had a good holiday. We had loads of fun at Castle Campbell. The kids got so many presents that they still haven’t opened them all up. We got to take a road trip to visit my mother and grandparents, which meant that we ate lots of good food. Not that we don’t get good food at home, mind you 🙂 I received several nice gifts, including a ZipZaps mini RC car (a … Continue reading
I was starting to think that nobody noticed my JabFoaf announcment. On the one hand, I figured that a lot of people are too busy with holiday travelling/relaxing to worry about FOAF. But on the other hand, I was a little disappointed that I wasn’t getting much feedback. But as it turned out, some people noticed, after all. Danny Ayers Ben Hammersley Paul Hammond Eric Snowdeal I really need to get TrackBack and/or PingBack working … Continue reading
In response to Mark Pilgrim’s “Pushing the envelope” post, Hans Nowak complains that sometimes semantically correct HTML elements don’t “look good”. So, he tends to use <pre> instead of <code> to designate code fragments in web pages. The answer, of course, is to just use CSS to make <code> act more like <pre>. Here’s my CSS: code { white-space: pre; } And here’s how it renders Hans’ code fragment: def f(x, y): if x > … Continue reading
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a couple of different FOAF-related projects wandering around the back of my brain. I’m finally ready to announce the first one: JabFoaf: Jabber/FOAF conversion utilities. Since Jabber and FOAF are both aimed at connecting people (one literally, the other semantically), it just seemed like a natural thing to do.
From Hixie, some info on the case against Jon Johansen, the kid who caused the DVD encryption debacle to make the international news: It’s been reported all over the place, of course, but this week Oslo has seen the opening of the trial of Jon Lech Johansen, who, as far as I can tell, is accused of trying to watch a DVD that he had bought. Yeah, we can’t have that. Whatever next. Someone who … Continue reading
I ran across a great sysadmin story about a problem sending email farther than 500 miles. To a technical person familiar with how SMTP works, that sounds like a user jumping to an incorrect conclusion. But sometimes, life can be stranger than fiction…. “We could send email. Just not more than–” “–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that. But why didn’t you call earlier?” “Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be … Continue reading