Aquarionics

Wiki wiki wild, wiki wiki wild wild web.

About a month ago, I concieved a Project.

Basically, it was when ESR shifted the focus of the Jargon File by changing the “J Random Hacker” entry to more reflect his own beliefs. My plan to combat this was – and is – to file the whole Jargon File into a Wiki and let the world at it. Think an entry is biased? Change it.

All I needed to do was to get it out of the Jargon File format and into something that I could import into a wiki. Then I discovered something really, really fundermental.

All wikis suck.

In fact, the particular way all these Wiki’s sucked was two fold. The first was the most important: No existing wiki that I could install on this server could import data from an external source. All the ones that backed onto plain text files I couldn’t – for various reasons – install. All the ones that backed onto a mysql database had data structures six feet deep that I couldn’t hack my way around.

The second reason all wikis suck is the really, really horribly nasty text formatting that has become standard. ‘’‘’this is italic’‘’’ ‘’‘’‘’‘’this is bold’‘’‘’‘’’ is a little too baroque, verbose, and nasty for my liking.

This weekend, my project was to play around with PEAR (The PHP equivlient of CPAN, crossed with apt-get. It rocks), for which I needed a project. Plus, Dean Allen has just released Textile 2 beta, the best text-formatting library for PHP (and now perl) bar none. Aha, I thought. This will solve several problems.

So, this afternoon about 16:00 I started coding my own Wikilike, and now at 1am, I’ve finished the first cut. It uses textile for formatting, it does Wikilike things, and it backs on to the Aquarionics User System (currently only used for Forever, so if you had an account on Forever at about 8pm this evening – when I copied the database locally – you have an account on the Wiki. I haven’t gotten around to writing an account creation system for the wiki locally yet, so you’ll have to be anonymous if you don’t).

The current Wiki is up on my local server, it inherantly supports mulitple wiki’s per server, but I’ve still got to put in the really cool bits, like the XML-RPC interface, the ability for admins to lock pages, and stuff.

And the name? Well, it was done quickly (A Qwiki), it’s mine (Aq Wiki) and it’s slightly sick (Aqw Iki)

But it’s there, it’s working, and since I’m working in the morning, I’d better head to bed…

WikiWikiWild

Courtasy of my current employment status (A ‘not being paid’, ‘not working’, ‘still employed’ limbo) I finally, and for the first time since about August, got some quality hacking time on a project I was doing for myself. This means that AqWiki has just gained a macro system, had a whole load of annoying bugs fixed (Such as ”((link1)) ((title|link1))” parsing as “link1)) ((title”) and is generally a much more useful thing.

On the down side, I didn’t get to bed until 1am, but hey.

New release coming as soon as I have a) documentation and b) boardband to upload it.

Which should be tomorrow.

Yay Broadband.

Those who resemble spammers from a distance

So, one of my major projects at the moment is to rearrange my online existance away from Aquarionics. Aquarionics remains as it is, mostly, but all the extra things (Like PFd4, ForEver and the forthcoming projects codenamed Touchstone, Threadnaut, and Angelica to move to a whole new domain – and empire – known as .istic.net. .istic.net will have an integrated login system – so if you have an account on one, you have an account everywhere – and with this was going to come logging in for putting comments on Aquarionics.

This was never, and will never, be a requirement to comment here, but registering – which would be beside and an alternative to the “User/Email/Webpage” would give you certian benefits, like an extended triggers interface (Recieve an XML-RPC ping,SMS Message or email whenever this range of things happens) the ability to edit your comments (With revision control) and – if the spam gets too much for me – I can always turn off URL display for non-istic users for a time without losing any actual content.

Typekey, however, I’m against for anything outside Typepad, because it appears – at first glance, so I could be wrong – to be an all or nothing. You have to register to comment. Actually, “You have to register to post comments on anything more than $foo days old” might be better, but we shall see.

AqWiki 0.3b

AqWiki 0.3 is about to be released, if anyone would like to see if they can break it before I do so, there is a test installation here

Dump anything you find that’s interesting into the bugs page

Misc

• AqWiki 0.3 delayed due to an authentication bug, no thanks to the zero people who followed the link on Thursday
• Examine the logo carefully, since that is the last use of the old Aquarionics logo. Two weeks of Other Things, then the new logo debuts.
• All moterists who think that it is appropriate to overtake on the inside, at the approach to a roundabout, at the top of a hill are to report to the bladesman for extremity removal. Even if the person you overtake is a cyclist.
• Starsky & Hutch not a good movie, but is still worth seeing.
• Steve Jackson Games have announced Gurps fourth edition

Productivity

It’s been a productive weekend.

LoneCat has done tidying, and I have assisted. I have made Pie (of all of Easter, Apple, and Chocolate derivations), read books, reformatted and reinstalled my Windows XP install, and even completed a project (The largely ignored Mockingbird’s Wish, below).

I’ve abstracted the data layer from the logic layer in AqWiki, and fixed all the bugs I could find that this caused, I’ve finished the SQL version of the Cantrip (Previously “PFD4-II”) data structure (more on that when I’ve actually used it). I’ve installed a Playstation Emulator, played Final Fantasy 8 for a while, and then dumped both on the grounds that playing a 60 hour game is bad enough, but having to play each second twice because the emulator crashes is beyond the pale. Especially if you have a working PlayStation downstairs.

I’ve archived four years of projects, sites and ideas into a new structure, cleared four entries off my “Long Term Tedium” todo list, fixed a number of logic bugs in my mail setup, written the outline for the second major section of the Novel Known As Final Frontier and named some of the the ships within it.

I’ve even worked out the motive for the protagonist of Toffia, and that’s been bugging me for years.

I’ve half written a LotR parody in which the ringwraiths visit a lost property office.

But mostly this weekend I have been obsessively compulsively worrying about how I did in the interview on Friday, and checking my mail every three to five seconds to see if an offer got lost in the post.

But that was just displacement activity, obviously.

SQL Problem

Okay, I'm working fixing bugs in AqWiki before I release, and one of the major ones is that currently the Search function requires MySQL4's subqueries (Actually, the whole thing requires MySQL at the moment, but that's a post-1.0 issue) and I'm trying to de-subquery the query, but it's not working, so I'm throwing it out in the open to see what happens.

This works, but relies on Subqueries which I want to avoid (Or at least support people not having)

SELECT wikipage.page, wikipage.name, wikipage.created,
	max(revision.created) as revised, revision.revision
 FROM revision
 LEFT JOIN 
	wikipage ON wikipage.page = revision.page 
	and revision.revision = 
	(SELECT max(r2.revision) 
		from revision as r2 
		where r2.page = revision.page)

 WHERE content LIKE "%TODO%"
	AND wiki = "personal"
 GROUP BY wikipage.page;

This doesn't work (the second AND statement isn't valid) but it's basically what I want to do:

SELECT wikipage.page, wikipage.name, wikipage.created, 
revision.created as revised, revision.revision, max(revision.revision) as toprev
 FROM revision
 LEFT JOIN 
	wikipage ON wikipage.page = revision.page
 WHERE content LIKE "%TODO%" AND wiki = "personal"
	AND revision.revision = max(revision.revision)
 GROUP BY wikipage.page
 ORDER BY revision.revision desc;

Any ideas? (Yes, I know I should use fulltext instead of LIKE, that's next on the Big List Of Bugfixen Before We Go Live)

In case it helps, the Table structure is now online

Bootstrapping

So, if you’ve been unemployed for three months, how do you afford to buy the train ticket to get you into work for the first week back?

Once again, I’ve found, applied for, interviewed for and got a job (Okay, they weren’t all the same job this time, but still) in the time it’s taken the Job Centre to process my Dole claim. As a result, I can’t buy the ticket to get to work.

So, we found a solution. Easy. Get a Season Ticket form, get our office to fill it in with all the credit card details and send me trundling off to buy the ticket. This morning…

No, they said. They needed, they said, the card itself to swipe though the machine, which I didn’t have. So I went home and phoned them up, ordered the season ticket, giving them the credit card details over the phone, and they’re now posting the ticket to me.

sigh

AqWiki got another round of updates, including the prep for the first public installs, indexing being unbroken for the new base system (was broken for oneWiki) and such stuff. On target for provisional release date. Scary.

AqWiki release - beta testers wanted

I’ve released the very first version of AqWiki (Version Prerelease Alpha Milestone Zero Beta, not to underline the whole “Not final” thing too heavily. Or anything).

I’m looking for people to download it and run though the install instructions and report any problems to the bug tracker. It requires Linux, PHP, MySQL & Apache, and testers will earn my eternal gratitude and stuff.

Mod Rewrite as a virtual hosting environment

So, I’ve now got control of istic.net. istic.net is going to have a number of subdomains, and I don’t really want to muck around with apache every time I want to add one, or get my Friendly Neighbourhood Sysadmin to do so.

Instead, I want mod_rewrite to do it, which it does. I have a virtualhost that handles *.istic.net, and passes it on to the following .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule     ^.*.istic.net.*$        -       [L]
RewriteRule   (.*) %{HTTP_HOST}/$1

Which redirects “http://ritual.istic.net” to ”~/sites/istic/ritual.istic.net”, which is what I want.

That shouldn’t have taken as many hours as it did, so I’m writing it down.

Secondly, I’ve moved my braindump – hol.istic.net – to a temporary new home whilst the DNS resolves. By the wonders of my new domain name, it’s temporarily housed at supercalifragil.istic.net which is possibly the best subdomain ever :-)

So, my personal “hire me” site could go to “narciss.isitic.net”, I could move all my open source projects to “altru.istic.net”, set up a site about religion at ritual.istic, head of into the futur.istic and be all m.istic about it and whenever I got fed up with the whole blogging thing and needed to move, I can always go ball.istic.

This isn’t actually far from the plan, which is to move the far flung tin-pot empires of AqCom that are getting lost under five years of journal archives & articles, and move them to their own domains – or subdomains, or sub-subdomains – where they can live happily ever after.