Aquarionics

Debuging Methods

This is the second approach to problem-solving when developing. The approaches are standard to all developers and run thus: When you're stuck on a piece of code, the first thing to try is to rename all your variables and all your dialog boxes using the filthiest words you can dream up. For some reason if the aim of your code was to pop up a dialog box or message, the minute you re-label that dialog box "yo mamma's flappin' box", the sodding thing will come up without fail. [More]

This is Really True. And the reason why my weblog contain(ed - I deleted it this morning) a variable called "$stupidFuckingCacheDisplayDamnYou"

Link thanks to Ruthi

We'd like to be unhappy, but we never do have the time

Stuff I'm Working On:

Epistula

Well, yeah, it's a sort of constant. Next comes the Attachments system, followed by the Gallery. Most of the smaller hacks (like <Link> et. al.) will wait until I need a quick hacking task to get out of doing the washing up. Life's like that :). In the meantime, I have to import the remainder of the writings, code up the review system (A larger task than Articles, Writings and Journals because they require a different input interface) and also the comments admin interface, the item editing interface, the user system (and events interface) and lots of stuff like that. Funtastic).

Also, I wish textile was open source, so I could steal it. As it is, I might make do with the Scoop text htmlification system, which I'd have to convert to PHP (or a PHP module) from perl. Damnit.

Nomical

I know how it works, I have it adding people, Now it's just a SMOP.

FreeEver

An open source version of Forever that isn't tied to the old Klind user system.

Forever

Restricted section should work, really, and it should support multiple stories. Plus, the moderation system needs implementing.

Afphrid

Needs cliques adding again, probably. I'm still working on this one, Cliques made life complicated for me before because of people moaning that the cliques were being cliquy. Argle. Also, I need an interface to the anti-stalker system.

Aquantancies

A web-based RSS aggregator that works roughly like LiveJournal's Friends List, with the benifit of being free. For this, I'm learning Python (using Dive Into Python), because then I can use Mark's Ultra-Liberal RSS Reader for the back end.

ACDS

Something that isn't code. Not quite sure what it is yet, could be a website, might finally be the novel, could be another deep, dark hole. Involves clowns.

But right now it's snowing. Snowing. Yay :-)

Uncrash

Okay, in case it esacaped your attention, I crashed, and crashed badly, yesterday morning. I wasn't going to post any more depressing stuff to the diary, but I have, and I apologise. Eventually, this ever growing pile of crap would crush me, and crush me it has, and so I can now get on with digging out.

Almost.

Computer will be fixed tomorrow (or had better be, I've replaced every componant it could be now), then comes the fun bit. I update my CV, then start building a new website. A business one where this is personal, a professional one where this isn't. I'm not going to pretend this page doesn't exist - a simple search of Google would make me look like I'm hiding something - but something that I can show employers and recruiters without them having to wade though stuff like this morning's entry and start doubting my mental wellbeing.

And, I'll be designing a new site, which is always fun, and I need some fun.

I'll probably move Forever to the new site, and in doing so give it a much-needed facelift and upgrade.

So, that's the plan, techwise:

• Get computer back before my birthday.
• Play a truely epic games session.
• Update CV
• Epistula User & Events subsystems
• Aquarion's New Website, Basic structure
• Forever Mark II, as an example of my skillset
• Aquarion's New Website, Advanced Stuff
• Nomical
• Become Rich and Famous

And, at some point within the above, put the gallery and writings back into Aquarionics. Aphrid 2.5 will come soon, but for now I'm concentrating on Things I Can Put Onto A CV. On top of this comes a redesign of Aqcom. Burying myself in work appears to be the method of coping atm.

Oh, did I mention I'm 22 on Sunday?

Ketchup

Various things have happened to me, and to Epistula, while I’ve been away. Also to the blogroll. So once more, it’s time for:

While You Were Out

• Epistula got Textiled so I can write all my entries in english and the computer does the hard part. Yay.

• Aqcom got a new Projects section. It’s currently a flat HTML thing mainly as a list (As much for my benifit as yours) as to what I’m working on. Eventually it’ll become fully Epistulated.

• I got a new project, or more accuratly a reactivation of an older idea. It’s a full Geek Thing review system, which I’m building as generic as I can, and exploring all the things I learnt while doing Epistula. Plus the kind of detailed cookie-based login system I haven’t done since StoryVille (Ex fiction project. Died of code-deletion). Interesting thing about it right now is that users select a licence for user-submitted reviews & comments to be released under. This allows – for example – someone to licence all their reviews under a CC(Creative Commons) thing. The two things I would like to happen to this idea would be for reviews to be editable based on licence (So if someone releases a GDL review, someone else can edit it), but that could get too complicated, and also lead to the possibility of someone going though and replacing all GPL‘d reviews with a string of spaces. So, Freedom of Information verses Fuckwittery Of Idiots. Round one, ding ding.

• Funcom have announced a sequel to the game I was raving about last month: The Longest Journey

• I applied for jobs. I got phone calls from recruiters, I still haven’t had a single interview. I wait patiently.

• And then there is the World of Ends stuff. My response is somewhat like Stavros wrote, only less amusing. The internet is* complicated. Not in spite of, but because the idea is so simple. ”[T]he Internet was designed to hold smaller networks together, turning them into one big network” lies up there with “They’re only words written down, how much damage can they do?” in tales of “Points, Missing thereof”. The thing isn’t that the idea of The Internet is complicated, it’s that the consequences are quite so far-reaching. The document appears to be doing the classic thing of arguing about what it originally was, as opposed to what it means now. Because the internet *isn’t the simple network of networks that once it was, not in the public mindset. It’s the far more complicated idea of the people using the network of networks. From granny on AOL though to Luke The L33t Hacksaw burning though a 1024 bit/sec connection. We need a new name either for this new thing, or for the old one. Then we can have this discussion without terminology getting in the way.

• Cam returned with a well formed rant about Americanism. The US Administration still scares me, even more so now it appears to be running England as well. Blessings of any deities listening to anyone caught up in this fucking mess. That’s all of us, by the way.

• Still not king yet.

TV

This is what it will do.

Every day, it will download and process the information for every TV channel I recieve, using XML-TV and store it in a website. It would then display this information and allow you to select items that you want to watch. So far, so normal.

Every five minutes, a cron job runs that checks to see if anything that anyone has registered as wanted to watch is going to start in the next five minutes. If so, it will send an email, or IM, or SMS to the person/s who requested such.

This will stop me missing Jonathan Creek and Walking With Cavemen every bloody time.

Dead Parrot

So today I’ve been learning Python. With a combination of the Official Python Tutorial and Dive into Python the first part of Aquatancies – my web-based personal RSS reader – is working. It has categories! It has ETag support! It sings! It dances! It has gradients rendered by SVG! Or not. Actually, it generates ESF-style article files which will be read by the PHP front end.

All code will be released, natch.

Python is nice. I’ve yet to delve into the more complicated aspects of it’s existance, (How do you reverse an expression anyway? if ! class.method(argument): doesn’t work), and I’m sure that there are far better ways to do what I’m doing, but on the whole it appeals to me :-)

MusicDB

New software release for all y’all, and it’s not even a weblog-related thing. Be afraid.

It says on my About page that I “write things to put things into databases and take them out again.” and MusicDB is no exception. It’s entire purpose in life is to put things (In this case, references to MP3 files) into a MySQL database, and then take them out again according to the criteria you specify via the command-line or web-based client.

It’s in Perl, and SQL, and PHP. It runs my somewhat excessive MP3 playlists, and it’s reached 1.0 and been thrown into the universe with nothing but a GPL to it’ name. Go have fun.

Syndication::ESF

Um. Someone has proposed a Perl Module for ESF.

Golly

Geek & Games

Lack of entries, you may have noticed.

Apologies for that, but I’m a little harrased. Mostly because of the standard First Month Of Job stuff (That I have to pay rent etc. as well as travelling costs from my non-existant cash flow until I get my first pay-check, not at all helped by the Job Centre taking six weeks to process my claim), but also because of general Stuff Happening. Planning stuff for this weekend (where I go camping with AFP), experimenting with anything new in PHP5 that might help me, MySQL4 (Which has just hit this server, so expect an upgrade of the search facility soonish) as well as theorising interfacing stuff like Trackback and PingBack with The Work Project.

On top of this, I’m redesigning. Well, not so much redesigning as designing. I’m making this masterplan to collate my non-aqcom projects to a new server where they can live without cluttering up AqCom’s navigation. This includes Forever and Threadnaut, at least one of which I’ll have to write now that I’ve mentioned it.

Aquaintances has been upgraded to use the latest version of Mark’s feedParser, meaning that if a feed returns a redirection, the config file will be rewritten to the new address. Aquaintances2 is in planning, and will include a simple NNTP server to access it. Epistula’s Gallery module, which has always been the most hackish of everything – mostly because 90% of it was lifted wholesale from the last version with minor tweaks – is suffering an extensive rewrite. If I can do this without breaking URLs I will do, but it looks like some major issues need to be resolved.

I’m also trying to avoid letting my RSI come back. This is so far involving watching Cowboy Bebop and West Wing episodes.

Countering the Anti-RSI activity, I’ve been playing Syberia, a nice return to the traditional adventure format, including actual character development. Sadly, the ending is somewhat annoying, but I expect the forthcoming Syberia 2 to fix that. I’ve also been watching videos of Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest 2 and The Sims 2, all of which look very, very cool.

Goin Underground

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Tube
• Abandoned Tube Stations
• The Tube. Mike Knell’s everyday tale of Underground folk
• Clive’s Underground Guide
• Maps & Diagrams of London Underground Stations
• Clive’s Online Routing Engine
• UKRail
• More of Clive’s Rail Stuff
• London Underground Railway Soc.
• Chicago underground
• MailRail
• Dungeon Underground

What are we doing today?

Years Ago

Exactly one year ago, I was Hacking Winamp and eating Pizza in Cambridge. Exactly two years ago, I discovered I wasn’t the complete and total fuckup I thought I was and passed Uni, Three years ago #eddings suffered another falling apart thing, and four years ago I was mildly looking into the idea of getting one of these “Domain” thingies.

Today, I hacked RSS support into the Great Mysterious Work Project, hacked AqWiki calendar support a bit more (Code reuse in action. The calendar generator in AqWiki is mostly the same as the one that generates the Epistula archives, which was lifted from the NSD archives, which in turn was originally coded for the first draft of Project Nomical) and left work in Kings Cross at 18:00

I got home at twenty to nine. Train was delayed an hour whilst not one, but two trains were broken down in front of it. Gah.

Nomicality Redux

So, with little fanfare and a couple of outstanding bugs, the Nomic Rules Management system for the new Nomic game (Which is still open, btw) has gone live.

Technically, it’s a marval. Well, It has marvelosity. Technically it’s a malted hot drink then. (And with that, we begin the descent into anarchic britiocentric referencing, for which we apologise).

Okay, so this post is split into two parts, Nomic the Game, and Nomic Rule Manager 1.0. With this duet of games and geekness, I forsee that I’ll be able to totally alienate both halves of my readership at once with no unplesant verbal bending.

Nomic, Then.

Nomic is a metagame. It was invented by Peter Suber as an anology of law making. Basically, it’s a game in which there are no – or very few – rules to start with, but the ability to create new rules is in the rules. More information can be found on NomicNet, more specifically in the NomicWiki. My personal set of starting rules is derived from Peter Suber’s set, with a number of differences, mostly involved in playing it online instead of in person (In person, I prefer The Chairman’s Game) and doing away with all of the inital winning conditions so we can define our own.

Nomic Rules Manager is a simple rules manager for Nomic. It’s written in PHP, backends onto a database, and has an RSS (And ESF) feed. Yay. Code is Here

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.

This week in brief

So, since I’m still in a state of employment limbo, I’ve been Expanding My Skills Base in preparation for diving into either unemployment or the new project as soon as it’s confirmed one way or the other.

This means that I’ve spent a week mucking around with mod-python, vmware, X-Servers for Windows (a combination of the last two have given me access to Konquerer from Windows, which is useful), perl and IRC bots.

IRC bots? Well, yes… I was introduced to IdleRPG last week, an IRC-Based RPG system where the idea is – basically – to idle on channel. This is neat, and everything, but I’ve never been particulally good at participating in things without seeing how they could be better, so it was kinda inevitable that I’d end up finding the source and hacking around on it. I tested it on a channel I’m on, and it took off remarkably quickly. A few modifications – to give a bonus instead of penalty for talking, as benefits a live channel rather than a dedicated Idling one – plus a host of decision-by-committee enhancements to the formulas have kept me working.

Plus, the RSI is back, which is… well, yes.

Another five minutes of editing Mockingbird (That’s “Five minutes of story to edit” of the next eight minutes of the file, taking about – oooh, an hour?) and I’ll be ready for the next stage, which is finding samples of bird-song to put into the background.

So, life is ebbing and flowing. It usually is.

Yeah, I know

Yes, I know about the blogroll. It’s a CSS argument I haven’t won yet.

“That which is also” archives are now integrated with the rest of the archives. That day’s blinks are under the posts for that day. It’s a fugly hack, but it’s fixed the fugly hack that was doing the date headers, so it’s only the same number of fugly hacks, rather than more or less. Plus it means I can do cool things later without more fugly hacks.

aqWiki has authentication support (including the ability to add users without mucking around in the SQL) and cookie authentication that actually works. Only collision detection and docs to go before version one…

The Cantrip (The project formally known as PFd4-II) Diary will continue when I’ve finished transcribing the document into SQL. Currently, all my “learning” resource is being spent on devouring the cubic foot of hard-back books (that I’ve never read) on Windows 2k server administration in preparation for the interview on Thursday. (Actually, this is an excuse, since turning the design doc into SQL isn’t learning, it’s just dull, which is why I’m working on aqWiki instead. Besides which since aqWiki is my default brain-dump location I get an instant productivity bonus when it’s actually working properly.

So the “eat your own dog food” theory goes, anyway).

Mockingbird's Wish

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

No, hang on a sec. That’s Star Wars.

It was a dark and stor…

No, that’s not right either.

I made a promise to Shelley ‘Burningbird’ Powers over a year ago that I would read her magical parable The Mockingbird’s Wish and post it.

I recorded it once then deleted it, because it was crap. Then I eventually Recorded it properly
and have been in the process of editing it since then.

Now it’s finished, read the tale and listen to the file.

The Mockingbird’s Wish (MP3, 5mb)

Oh, and it appears Shelley likes it too, which is aways nice

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.

Threadnaught

So, I’ve been considering finishing up and releasing Project Threadnaught.

Threadnaught is a category aggregation system for weblogs, using existing technology to bring weblogs together. Okay, so far, so space age. How does it do it?

I set up a taxonomy of possible categories, probably based on the Library of Congress or DMOZ or something (I was working on basing on the Dewey Decimal System, but having spent a couple of months in corespondance with the company who own the name I don’t really want to risk having any more to do with them. I can, apparently, use the DDC, providing I never use that name. Arseoles to the lot of them).

When someone makes a weblog post about that subject (Say, Cat Pictures) they send a trackback or pingback to http://altru.istic.net/threadnaught/ping/pictures/personal/pet/cats/ky00t and J. Random Blogger, who subscribed to the RSS feed at ttp://altru.istic.net/threadnaught/rss/pictures/personal/pet/cats/ky00t, and who only cares about the really, really ky00t cat pictures sees that it’s happened.

That’s the basic idea. This came about with etcon a while back, where someone set up a place to trackback, and anyone talking about etcon would trackback that, and people who cared could follow it.

And I’ve spent large parts of today (When I’m not installing Linux on the new laptop) considering this again, as I have been for the past few years or so. And I finally decide to write all these ideas up as a weblog posting before I start coding on this…

...and find that Internet Topic Exchange has been doing this exact idea for the last two years.

I need to act faster on these ideas.

Lazyweb - Digital Guardian

I spend a couple of hours every day sitting on trains. Soon, I’ll be spending 4 hours a day sitting on buses. Ideally, I’d like to read a newspaper or something while I’m doing this, but I hate fiddling around with broadsheets on the standing-room-only commuter cattle-pens into London. The solution to this appears to be the Digital Guardian, but it’s useless to me since it requires a web connection to read. You can’t just download a PDF of the entire newspaper (though you can get PDFs of every seperate page & story) and take it away.

So, has anyone heard of any inititives to automatically grab each page PDF of today’s Guardian (With my subscription details, naturally) automatically? Stiching them together isn’t really important.

Projectiles

The Projects Page is back, semi-updated, and using the Epistula design library at last (Only took me two years), also Random acts of Senseless Scripting has also been updated with the new design (It’s been broken since Julyish) and a couple of new early warning scripts.

Lillypads

The world has ended. I’ve stopped updating.

Okay, not exactly, but I’ve Lillypadded slightly. I’ll explain in a second, first, the life update:

I’m now on Christmas holidays. I’m on emergency call for work most of the holidays, but the number of things that would necessitate calling me up from Letchworth (...when everyone else lives in Bedford…) is tiny. I can think of two, offhand.

Of course, I haven’t done any Christmas shopping at all. I’m planing on doing it all tomorrow.

Insane?

Possibly. It’ll be fun, and my feelings for humanity need a blow at this seasonal time…

Tomorrow I have to:

• Go into town to collect pre-ordered turkey from Friendly Local Butcher
• Collect FoodStuff from Places
• Dump it at home
• Go somewhere with shops (probably Cambridge)
• Shop.
• Shop some more.
• Get lunch
• Finish the shopping
• Come home
• Wrap up presents
• Tidy up a bit
• Die from tiredness.

In that order.

So, Lilly padding. The Lilly Pad Syndrome, as it was called when I used it to explain what the Prince was doing with his life during the time when it happened (Ye gods, that’s a convoluted sentence. I don’t use aliases much in this journal, really, but the Prince got one early on.) It basically is the tendency of people (me included) to keep an eye on where they want to jump to, at the extreme negligence of the lillypad they’re currently standing on. This means, to overextend the metaphor slightly, they get wet when it sinks.

In this case, I have a New Thing, which will take a little while to set up (and I’m not sure will be worth the effort). It’s part of my campaign to get back to writing content. Watch this space. Unfortunately it means that instead of thinking of what I’m going to do for this, now, I’m busy working on Pareidol and how it’ll work instead.

Putting your code where your mouth is

Since I’m away from work (Ill, but in a “Don’t go too far from the bathroom” way, rather than a “Don’t get out of bed” way) I’ve ended up coding the “Subscribe Me” thing I was talking about this morning.

Including LiveJournal, Radio Userland and Bloglines support, I bring you SubscribeMe

(Try this link for a working example)

Now, if all those famous people who will never ever read this could see it.

Project Scout

Somewhat to my suprise, I have recieved not one, but two patches to open source projects that I run. That is that gilmae submitted a better install document for AqWiki, and John Meadows has submitted a new version of the viewer file for MusicDB

Flush with this success, I’ve started a new project. Well, two. Threeish, really. First, I’ve gone back to the base system that Cantrip and Escape will be built on, which is actually the Epistula execution model rebuilt in python and mod_python. This is almost finished (yay) and is far neater than the PHP version (double yay) but I’m having trouble with one thing. So, pythonites who are still reading this crap: How do I initalise a class where the name of the class is contained in a variable?

Two, and more importantly, how should I have known this?

The third thing is a collision of a few technologies I’ve been wanting to use for a while: XMLTV, SQLite and AJAX, or DHTML, or whatever we’re calling it today, with a dash of new-media SMS stuff thrown in. Basic premise for project Scout is that it sends you an SMS ten minutes before a TV program that you wanted is due to start. It’s a little more complicated than that, but not much (Until you get to the AJAX bits, really). Enough for me to be able to use it to drink even more of the Python kool-aid, while having something more useful at the end than a random philosophy generator.

Party like it's 2003

I promised, and I deliver on promises occasionally.

PFD4 is back up for all your semi-stable online roleplaying needs.

Cantrip, its replacement, is still under reconstruction

New Year, New Project

So, one of my new years resolutions is to complete at least one project. In this spirit, I’ve done one.

Ever wondered how much you would win on the (UK) lottery if you played every week since it started? Well, now you can find out.

http://lottery.aqxs.net/ – For when you need to check the odds.

Happy New Year, while I’m at it :-)