Aquarionics

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The Vanishing Buffometer

It's been noticed, so I should really explain. The Buffometer, like the webcam and the "listening to" bit, is part of the Wonderful Dynamic Aquarionics Bit. Basically, the Buffometer only appears if it's been updated in two weeks. Likewise the webcam will vanish if it dies for five days, and the listening to is current to two.

Because I dislike outdated things being on the front page :-)

Epistula

More stuff in Epistula as of today. First, the weblog access system now generates proper titles for the pages of archives (Previously every page got the title "[Aquarionics] Journal - Front Page", which wasn't true, and made every sitemap look silly. Also, I've edited robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing the "add comment" page, I hope, and cleared up the code slightly. Next up will be to transfer the page generation to Smarty and then release 0.1 of Epistula will be tarballed and released...

Oh, after I fix the commenting system. Bugger.

Safe Sections

Seeming as I have now got a browser that supports the tag, I thought I'd make Epistula use them properly. People not using Mozilla 1.1, or any Mozilla prior to 0.9, won't be able to see them, but soon the metadata will become clear. Oh yes.

So now, in addition to all the various sections of Aqcom being filed under "Sections", the filters are now registered as "Subsections" (I've been looking for an elegant way do an interface to the filtering, this seems to be the nicest) and the secondary bar (About/Contact/Credits) becomes appendices. That's not the clever bit.

The diary archives (Including the pre-blogger archives have been given relative links, so you can click "First" "Previous" "Next" and "Last" to navigate the archives. Navigation like this via Entry ID isn't there yet, but from entry viewed by ID you can go "up" to the monthly archive that entry is in, and from there the Next, Previous and everything still work.

As I was doing this, I remembered a cool thing that Sarabian noted that Avocadia did in Mozilla, which was to put his bookmarks into the links too. So I'm now parsing by blogroll (reading the blo.gs list into an array along with all the others, and displaying it.

Basically, it all means that you can now navigate though most of the journal using the Document Bar in Mozilla. Next up, Referral Logs, then Document Bar for Nodes, then... oh yeah, the great comment system rewrite. Then one day it might all get released. Before then, you can browse the (beta, beware the dragons within) code at /src/. All the documents there are symlinks to the current in-use code.

Oh, and the ?date=yyyy-mm-dd access code now works. Yay.

Pingback

Aquarionics now - almost - supports the new PingBack idea by Simon and Stuart'. Well, it will do, just as soon as I discover why Kryogenix is refusing my pings. In true spirit of something or other, it was built purely on a few clues Stuart mentioned on the brand new Blogite mailing list (now up for public subscription) and on top of Simon's PHP Library.

Pong

One: My first day at work was great, thanks. Although I could have done without the hour and a half waiting for the bus.

Two:My pingback server is broken. Using my local version of Simon's Library, slightly hacked to give more debug messages, I found out that the server is responding with error 400 (Very much like This, in fact, and I have no idea why. Simon's library parses this responce, but doesn't see any XML, and so fails silently. Um, Simon? You might want to make the responce code check to make sure that the code responded from the web server is sucessful. Right. On to work then, TTFN.

Finally

Simon has released a new version of his XML-RPC library for PHP, IXR.

Aquarius, meanwhile, has released the first draft of the pingback specification.

And, with all this, Epistula now has a working pingback client *and* server. Woot.

Redesign

For once, the redesign is not because I got bored. Amazing, isn't it?

Yeah, it's a regression to a previous design, or rather a previous design idea reimplimented. Why? aha, there the cunningness lies. The previous design was extremly limited for navigation around the more outlying reaches of the design, stuff like the new mailing list, the Forever system, and the music all got mentioned in the blog, then ignored. Tucked away, as they are, in the depths of the "Misc" section, where they still are, but I a space to point people in the right direction.

How complicated was the redesign? scarily easy. Design as a flat HTML file, search and replace quotes with escaped quotes, place in header file. Upload new stylesheet, and minor modification to the various sections to use the new Submenu element (that's currently displaying the archive navigation for the journal). To make it easier, I could use something like smarty, but I'm not convinced yet. Maybe later. Anyway, nine months between major redesigns, that must be some kind of record for me...

Banners & Bombs

If you haven't worked out, the feature I was so enigmatically referring to earlier this week was the new dynamic banner bits, which during the week change depending on what time it is in Cambridge, and during the weekends will be whatever my imagination has come up with, or possibly remain the day-images. Think of it as like the Google Holiday Logos idea, except they've been part of Aqcom, off and on, for three years now. Parallel development is good.

So this week then. This week I continued to enjoy my job, I worked towards making Aqcom validate as HTML4 strict (Nearly there), lost an argument on Blogite by the simple method of nobody else giving a flying fuck, and failed to do very much weblogging. This isn't really good. Instead I will point you at the link I got from Simon, a montage of the last years news footage under the title S-11 Redux: (Channel) Surfing the Apocalypse

Trackin'

The Epistula blog entry system now supports Trackback. After everything I said about them (was it really only two weeks ago?) this may come as a bit of a shock, but reread. The entry system supports TB, the blog display doesn't. This means I can ping other blogs that support it (It isn't really complicated to ping, that's one of the good bits) but they can't ping me. Note, I'm supporting this before I implement X-Pingback: support. Because I'm still not sure I'm going to.

B-link'n you'll miss it.

New fad, new danger, and so Epistula supports it all the way. Mark mentioned it a little while ago, it's B-Linking. Basically, it consists of a minor link to somewhere else, not a major thing, but something that might be interesting. My responce to this was to sign up with Blogsnob, a sort of text-ad service for weblogs. Soon I'll redo the links area of Aquarionics, which will be fun. And I may just be completely redoing the entire way Epistula works. I've had an Idea.

Be Afraid.

ESF

Are you also fed up with the continuing war between RSS 0.9* and 1.0 and 2.0 and whatever else they invent today?

Me too.

So today I invented the Epistula Syndication Format. ESF. It isn't XML. It isn't RDF. It's just data. Quick, reliable, and I'm never going to change the spec in such a way as to break the previous version. Ever. Promise. The spec is in nodes. It's staying that way. Even Shelly could use it :-)

New!

New stuff this week:
Quick Windows Tips: Quick launch (nodes)
A review of Mil Millington's "Things Me And My Girlfriend Argue About..."

And if that wasn't enough, All this week (and most of next week) It's Different Header Every Day week on Aquarionics!

Backup

I thought it might be a good idea for Aquarionics to be backed up on occasion. All the PHP is saved on my local machine before it's uploaded here, so the code is fine, but the database hadn't been backed up since I recreated my local copy of the site, about a month ago, and then about six months before that. This is because I had an automatic backup system on hive.beehost.net before I moved the site to pol's server.

So now, I have a cronjob and a couple of scripts that do a mysqldump on Afphrid and Aquarionics' databases every month, compress them and save them, whilst every day I do another mysqldump, diff that against the monthly one, and save that. The entire directory of backups will get downloaded every week by a server on the other side the world. I am not a paranoid person.

Backup.sh

#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
WHERE=/home/sites/site3/users/aquarion/backups
mysqldump --password=(PASSWORD) -u aquarion klind | bzip2 -c  > $WHERE/aqcom/$DATE.bz2
if [ -e $WHERE/aqcom/backup.bz2 ]
then
        rm $WHERE/aqcom/backup.bz2
fi
ln -s $WHERE/aqcom/$DATE.bz2 $WHERE/aqcom/backup.bz2

mysqldump --password=(PASSWORD) -u aquarion afphrid | bzip2 -c  > $WHERE/afphrid/$DATE.bz2
if [ -e $WHERE/afphrid/backup.bz2 ]
then
        rm $WHERE/afphrid/backup.bz2
fi
ln -s $WHERE/afphrid/$DATE.bz2 $WHERE/afphrid/backup.bz2

Increment.sh

#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
WHERE=/home/sites/site3/users/aquarion/backups

mysqldump --password=(PASSWORD) -u aquarion klind > /tmp/today.txt
bunzip2 -c $WHERE/aqcom/backup.bz2 > /tmp/backup.txt
diff /tmp/backup.txt /tmp/today.txt | bzip2 -c > $WHERE/aqcom/diff.bz2
rm /tmp/backup.txt /tmp/today.txt

mysqldump --password=(PASSWORD) -u aquarion afphrid > /tmp/today.txt
bunzip2 -c $WHERE/afphrid/backup.bz2 > /tmp/backup.txt
diff /tmp/backup.txt /tmp/today.txt | bzip2 -c > $WHERE/afphrid/diff.bz2
rm /tmp/backup.txt /tmp/today.txt

Galleria

Since people mentioned the idea, I've put a gallery of the Aquarionics Banners up, it's in the Gallery section. It's suffering slightly from the lack of auto-resize in the gallery, and I need to generate thumbnails for them, but for something that took a single symlink to create it's not bad.

Spot the difference

This page has changed. Who can guess what the change is? (Those who already know arn't allowed to answer, natch).

Correct answer tomorrow afternoon

Searching...

Yup, Aquarionics now has a working search engine. Blogger API support on it's way...

Pingback to normal

Aquarionics' Pingback server now grabs titles of pages, and this has been applied retroactivly. Coolness, in a jar.

Validation

My RSS feed Validates. Mark & Sam have announced an RSS Validator, and according to them, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. Really Simple, So I spent a while making my Remote Site Syndication feed, validate. Apparently HTML isn't valid in RSS, so you have to entity encode it.

Googlin

Aquarionics is the top match for "Aquarionics". Third for "Aquarion" (Second is my CV), and not in the top 1000 for "Nicholas". And, over the last year, I've gone from having NeilGaiman.com in my "Similer Pages" lists to having Userfriendly.

I need to write more.

Word

1. The new banner is the artwork from the first Lemon Jelly CD
2. Epistula now pings blo.gs is a nicer way
3. Diablo 2, Grim Fandango, and Battlefield 1942 rock most nicely
4. Our washing machine still doesn't work

Kewl

Hmm. If I'm going to keep linking to single places in single posts, I really should do one of those links things like Sarabian has.

Ironically, I used to have one, but the interface never got rewritten when I recoded the entire site last year

New Feature

Normally, Epistula shows the latest 5 entries. This is no longer true. Instead, if there are more than 5 entries in the last day (Like today) it will show all that day's entries, OR the last five, if were less than five.
Neat :-)

All Hallow's Eve

Happy Halloween, world. As well as this temporary new theme, there was supposed to be a new story up today, but last night I spent three hours trying to fix our server, so it didn't happen. Gah

Ye Olde World

New day, New section, Old content. Ain't recycling fun? Now you to can see how Aquarionics looked at the end of January 1999, Febuary 2000, and May 2000

Arn't you lucky?

E1.0

So, what is Epistula? Currently, it's a fraud masquerading as a weblogging system. The mistake I keep making is to try to make it something else. All Epistula is is a format, a structure in a database and the tools to put things in and take things out, it doesn't do anything *special*, it just takes in data (via the SuperPowerPageOfPower (where entries go) the SuperCommentPageOfDoom (where the comments go) the DangerousXMLRPCPageOfHorror (where pingbacks go) and processes it into the HTML equivilant of spam (the processed food, rather than the evil). This is Epistula 0.4, it doesn't do anything special.

Well, not very. The cleverest thing in there - if I say so myself - is the dynamic sql query generator which enables quite detailed selections of diary entries based on a URL (Up until a couple of months ago it was badly coded, and had a security hole that could cause an Evil Person to delete my entire diary by a malformed URL. This was Bad, so I Stopped It.

As appears to have been lost in the shuffle, I've started the new version of [E], which is going to be almost Nomical-like in it's intertwinglyness (Allowing me to do the cross referencing properly, Pingbacks, Trackbacks and last-few-referers become just another cross reference, links get linked to more things, and the entire system becomes a whole great mass of data where everything is cross referenced, then we actually get the original point of the system over two years ago now, which is that Klind Links In Nodes Dynamically, automatically cross referencing entries. That'll be fun. On top of this is the content caching and my general desire to make every link work forever, something harder than it sounds. On top of all that we have the new design (You didn't think I'd regress to an old design for long, did you?).

Multi-user, Multi-project, Intrareferenced, Networked, Standards based website management system. Low targets are for the unambitious.

Update

All claims that he is not a geek are truely heartfelt and generally sent though his personally-coded, high-featured, CSS, HTML4, P3P, RSS, XML-RPC and WAI-AA supporting website at Aquarionics.com.

Bugzilla off

Epistula, Nomical, Forever and Afphrid bug tracking have moved from my inbox into the wonderful world of Bugzilla. The installation requires prettification, but go play and report stuff :-)

The Grand Return

For it is written that decisions made at 1am will haunt you forever. I mean, how long would a weblog system take to write?

There isn't anything fancy in the new system yet (Well, except for the category system. And the fried caching - done in the simplist way possible - but I stopped putting in the more complex stuff in favour of getting myself back online.

That was a week ago. Then Warcraft III arrived... and Unreal... and the FotR Extended DVD... and... well... Sorry :-)

Not all the content (Read, hardly any of the content) is back yet, Notably RSS feeds are broken, writings is down, and Forever is missing in action, as is my current blogs list. All will be coming back soon. Don't touch that dial.

Blogger API V2

Interestingly, the new version of the Blogger API fixes every complaint I had about the old version, and turns it from being a very much centralised bespoke format to being a generic thing I can impliment here without too much hackery, and the promised extensions look even better. Yay, another thing to add to the list of Things To Impliment :-)

Telecomuniculture

Okay, so in the course of work (developing games for mobile phones for the next week and a bit) I've been playing with GPRS and watching the news in the mobile world. The ideal is somewhere near Paul's vision, in that Microsoft currently want to design a box that syncs with your alarm clock so it can, for example, tell you that the traffic is murder and you're going to have to leave early. This is an idea I like. Stuart's, however, is an idea I'm scared of, because the future is now.

Bluewater is a FOG shopping centre hiding in the Kent countryside just south of London. It was slightly lacking in mobile coverage, so they employed NTL to help it along. The results are that each customer with a mobile phone can be tracked though the centre, the central system can tell which shops they go in, how long they stay in the centre, and where they go. They can even send text messages to the phone, with special offers they might have missed.

I'm not really paranoid about user tracking. I don't block cookies, and I'm not exactly a difficult person to track down. (Really. According to Google this site is 12 for "Avenell", #1 for Nicholas-Avenell, Aquarion and Aquarionics, and Nine of the top 10 results for Nick Avenell are me, even if I don't go by that name very often any more), And I activly like the idea of a CMS that follows me around a site and recommends other things I might like. I do, however, object to being told it isn't happening, and that it's being done for my privacy and security.

In other fun and exciting news, Category based browsing has been written and enabled, although I still have to do the index for it. Oh, and writings is back, although none of the old content has been put in yet.

Past Life

Sing Hey for the sun, and Ho for the moon, for the archives have returned, And done before June :-)

Really Complicated Syndication

Okay, In a move that will no doubt please all those livejournal users who have failed to see the last weeks articles because they read it via LJ's RSS feeds thing, Aquarionics is now serving RSS - and, of course, ESF feeds.

Update: Okay, it seems that LJ doesn't do RSS 2.0 feeds. all.rss will become 1.0 tonight, with an RSS2 feed later...

Of course, it *should* use ESF :-)

Ever Reach Me

So, Blitzed out of my skull on a caffine high after drinking black coffee, trying to finish this commenting system (Ever had one of those days when even your switch(){} statements don't parse?) I wandered though my blogroll to calm down a little bit. Via Electrolite via Blong Boing I discovered Real Live Preacher.

Now, there is a comic series called Preacher, to which I bought the fifth book yesterday (Look at that URL a second. This is the Nine Hundred and first entry to the Aquarionics Journal. Okay, so there are only 691 differant entries in here now after taking out Lonecat's diary and various test and broken entries, but still, nine hundred!) in which a young texan preacher loses his faith and goes off in search of God. Now, because this is a comic he is infested with a supernatrual heavenly/hellish being as well, but the rhythem and flow of the text is scarily similer. Another thing for my blogroll, then.

Things To Be Done Before Commenting Returns:

• Form Display
• Post Preview
• Post Validation
• Post Submit

Discussion Matrix

Whilst other people may be listening to the queens speech, watching Bond Films, playing with presents or stuffing turkeys, I was being industrious. Abnormal for me, I realise. Anyway, I have finally written the Comments interface for [E]2, and thus is the empire forged on a solid block of truth, justice, and people making comments in little blue boxes.

The main new thing about the new comments system is something I haven't done yet, which is tied in with the new user system. Basically, registered users will be able to attach events to comments, such as an event to send an email when you get a reply, or an XML-RPC ping, or a Pingback ping, or something. Also, comments will trigger pingback pings as well as diary entries. Well, they will when I do the crossreferencing stuff properly...

Also back is the various RSS, RSS2 and ESF feeds, including an RSS feed for comments. These are now sitting in the Meta section for your gaze to fall on. The code for the new commenting system is sitting in src, and in it you can see that I've abandoned the generic output templates for forms until I write or find a library to do them as I want to. Comments on obvious holes in the system, or anything else for that matter, are welcome :-)

Pong!

Okay, so my Pingback server is now working again. Yay Pingback. With any luck, I've got a client too, and thus can say how necessary it is to remind flash developers not to be really dumb :-)

Blog Moss

And the first feature for Epistula in the new year is the return of my Blogroll :-)

Techie bits would be to say that it's now sorted by author rather than by last update (because combining last update with [E]2's fried outlook to life would put it almost permenantly out of date) and that Adrian, Corinne, LoneCat and all the other weblogs I read that blo.gs doesn't carry are now folded in, rather than hanging at the bottom

Sounds Interesting

So, Epistula now supports attachments in the form of sounds, and they are even in the RSS feed using the enclosure tag, which means that audioblogs will happen, and happen soon. I have also sent my sysadmin a little message asking him to put the addtype for the application/ogg mimetype in so these will download as ogg files rather than - as they currently are - as text/plain which is... suboptimal.

make world

A sort of offical note of the things you may have noticed already :)

I decided to get rid of the "Not Implimented Here" box, purely because it was both out of date, and almost finished. I replaced it with the "Recent Comments" box, as stolen without mercy from Burningbird, Not her code, but a similer idea. It reads the comments.rss feed and parses it into the form you see to the left. Since the front page is regenerated whenever anyone posts a comment anyway, it stays up to date. The index is exactly what it looks like, a list of posts on this page. It's autogenerated too, and doesn't suffer from the bug that the old Klind version did of providing an index of all one item on the permalink pages. Category indexing is on it's way, seperate section archives is coded, but not interfaced yet until I work out a nice way of doing it. My foaf profile is online, but I still haven't worked out how I'm going to make sure content type is set when it's cached. Hmm.

But the reason for this collection is the big feature that I've been promising forever, as you may see at the end of this box, Epistula now supports Trackback. It wasn't easy, and I've had to make a special case scenario for it - which I'm not really happy about, but is the only way around the problem - but you can now trackback to posts by using the URL at the end of each one. Isn't it cool? :-)

Since the autodiscovery for tB stucks goats though chainlink fencing, I'm pretending it doesn't exist, so sending tracks is - and will remain - a manual process, which doesn't really matter to you since you don't use it :-)

As ever, the code is already and automatically online. The relivant pages are Prackback - the library of functions for adding an external crossreference - and Trackback module. Also, I've finally gotten around to taking the plaintext passwords out of sysadmin.inc, so I can release the source to my admin section too. All my stuff under BSD licence unless it states otherwise. Utilizes Simon's IXR PHP XML-RPC library. Contents invalid where void. May contain traces of nuts. Use at own risk. Buyer Beware. etc.

Update: Said implimentation is now modifed to accept GET trackbacks as well as POST. Thanks once again to Sarabian for finding the bug :-)

Retreaded tracks

Paul said, on my trackback implimentation:

What would happen if I trackbacked and pingbacked at the same time? Which I won’t do. Just trackback today.

Good point. The Prackback stuff now checks for an existing reference before putting it in. And I can now even send trackbacks, w00t and verily yay.

So, I have coded my way into trackbackery. Again, w00t and verily yay. I'd trackback to Paul, but it wouldn't work because of his version of MT. Next comes the great acronym replacer thingy, which will become part of the tests suite (Which will do such things as check for valid X/HTML, Spelling, Acronyms, and some sort of autoformating magical thing. This will rely on my writing the edit - as apposed to creation - code as currently I'm editing entries using raw SQL. I should fix this, really.

I'm not - I should point out - a programmer. Throw me into anything more complicated than a medium perl script and I'll scream. Epistula isn't really a complicated piece of software, and I'm truely aware the code isn't well written, but it does the job, and I'm learning, which was the point of the exercise.

Anyway. Archives are now back in the land of the living (Thanking Adrian Ogden for the bug report), Trackback is working (I think) and life continues apace.

Oh, and I got paid. Oh, and also, Work have confirmed my re-contracting at the end of the month. Watch the Aquarion dance....