Aquarionics

I’m just shutting down the network here at the geekhouse while I move house. Not sure how long it’ll be gone, possibly a week, maybe too. Be aware @gkhs.net mail & servers will be down ‘til then.

Back soon, live from Reading :-)

So, today we are packing. Ccooke arrived yesterday, and has now packed everything and gone, LoneCat’s stuff has half gone with her parents, now I just have to get Things Sorted. Stuff is happening tomorrow, and I’m transfering stuff to a storage place in Reading

(Find Storage Place…. Check)

But have totally failed to find a van for hire over the weekend in Cambridge, despite phoning six companies. What is it, Local Move Your Stuff Day? Bah.

(Find & Hire Van… Uncheck)

Dealt with legal threats from ISP due to unpaid bills due to emails not getting though. Yay.

But the best bit was the most suprising. Early this morning whilst on my normal scan of the job-emails I saw a reply inviting me to take a appitude test on Linux, MySQL, ANSI SQL, Unix & Oracle. Once I got over being unimpressed by the test’s not working in anything but IE, and filled in the preliminaries and stuff, I was asked 60 random questions about those subjects, to be answered within 45 seconds each.

Scary thing, really, since I haven’t taken any kind of exam in a while, I haven’t even installed Oracle, let alone admined it (Though I learnt SQL on it), and am not really Sysadmin level on either Linux or Unix.

Nevertheless, I passed. In fact, I scored within the top 5% of candidates (of which there were about 100). I apologise for this terribly blatent self-pleasedness, but I’m currently only just restraining myself from bouncing off the walls.

On top of this, I made chocolate cake. It is good chocolate cake, it is a tasty chocolate cake. It is _my_ chocolate cake :-P

Yesterday was fun. For fifteen minutes yesterday we didn’t have a flat because the landlord refused our rent offer. This was resolved over a series of phone calls by LoneCat, and we now have a flat again, albeit one without an ISDN line…

(It’s the downstairs flat, the one we had before was the nicer upstairs flat)

Yesterday I received a box. It was about DVD sized, and had a DVD in it. That DVD was Bridget Jones’ Diary, which Cathy sent me because she saw it was on my Wish List and didn’t want it anymore. Did I mention I love the Internet? I love the internet.

So we watched that, and it was funny and far better than we thought it was going to be, and I am currently resisting the urge to go all Cassie Claire on you, which isn’t fair because I really should have said “All Bridget Jones”, but that’s not who I associate the style with.

Still not employed yet.

Also went to see the (Oscar Winning) Chicago, which was very fun indeed. We ran into Nattie and Ben outside, who happened also to be going to see it.

The film is a direct translation of the musical, and rarely has one been done better. The songs were there without looking silly, the costumes were perfect without being out of place, and if they’d done all the songs (They missed out three that I counted) it would have been perfect. Whether the musical fitted into a film is debatable – though the Oscar panel obviously thought so – but as a faithful adaptation of the musical that I like, I’m happy.

Those of you who visited yesterday evening were greeted with the constantly shifting front page as I attempted to restock the writings page with all the content that used to be there. The Fanfic and Cevearn stuff is there (Including the unpublished bits for Worlds Apart, which will now never be finished), though the short stories (ie, the bits that have ever even been close to being published) arn’t yet, but will be.

Aquarionics’ commenting system now has a Spelling Checker, using Simon’s Spellchecker class, which rocks, and bits of the PHP bit of the rest of his version. Mine uses CSS for displaying possibilities, but that’s just sugar.

On top of that, I’ve restructured the filesystem of Epistula so it’s not possible to attempt to load the pingback server as a module by a malformed URL, restructured the Archive system, fixed the Crossreferencing system, and finally written the PHP interface to MusicDB, my perl/php/mysql system for managing FOG trees of MP3 files.

Moving house is apparently the third most stressful thing you can do, so yes, I’m working off nervous energy at the moment…

I have to phone the Letting Agency tomorrow, and I’ve no idea why. I got the message about half an hour after the saga was posted, having forgotten that I missed a phone-call whilst on the tube. This is ever-so-slightly worrying, so displacement activity happens.

First, flick your eyes to your left and you shall notice a new suite of icons for the various meta-datas. The icons are variously by Antipixel, who created them originally; Mark, who created more of them for his Raging Platypus parody thing (In which the icon for ESF is labeled “For the Angry and Embittered” – which I like – though if he is using MT, does that mean it supports Epoch time format now? If so, I’ll start writing the ESF Syndication Template :-)), and I created a couple more (Only one of which – blogtree – is currently there). Eventually we’ll have the full suite of Blogicons there, and it’ll take a month to load…

But ho! There appears to be more! Can I have been creating /new/ stuff? Well, yeah. After several hours work and a series of low-grade headaches, I’ve finally managed to grok XFML to the point where it works. Thus you can grab XFML feeds of the site. Now I just have to finish the system which will allow me to connect categories of mine to those of other people who also have XFML feeds, and it’ll be finished.

And what was all the point of that crap? Well, it’s another acronym to place on my under-reconstruction CV, and you can see what it can do in the worlds only XFML Explorer… and that’s sort of the point. “Worlds Only XFML Explorer”, there is no software out there that reads it right now, and no earthly real use for it apart from being able to connect to Mark’s:http://diveintomark.org/xml/diveintomark.xfml so that when we are talking about the same things, I can automagically link to stuff he writes on it. As if our blogspheres crossed over that much anyway. The only topic we appear to share is Cat Pictures, and his are very differant to Mine. Not to mention the fact his XFML file is not updated any more.

As much fun as it is riding the leading edge of the development curve, it isn’t half pointless at times.

Oh, yeah. Pointlessness.

I’ve been attacked.

Well, not me personally, but the Epistula Syndication Format has been accused of being pointless, in an article that misses the point slightly. It doesn’t save bandwidth just because RSS is bloated with XML tags – which it is, but then again so is XFML, XML, and most of the other XML standards out there right now. If you look at them, you’ll note that without the article itself, the content-to-exposition ratio is worse than your average maths exam. ESF merely has an order in which things appear, requiring no exposition once you’ve read the spec. But that isn’t it, as I said. The point is that when you download an ESF feed, you only download an X+6 line file, where X is the number of headlines. There is no place in the standard for the content itself, and no place where (as was in the original RSS spec) you can bend the standard to put the site. When you get an ESF feed you just get the newest headlines. If you want the rest, go for a more bloated standard. It’s not designed to replace RSS, it’s designed as a scaled-down version for people who will read the content on the site that it was published on (In exactly the same way as 90% of all “Trimmed down content” RSS feeds do).

When I summoned it into existance (ESF, Syndication format level 9, Plus four against bandwidth, minus six against RSS Developers), I said “It’s Just Data”. Partly as a ‘publicity stunt’, I agree, but mostly because it is just data. Knowledge is information in context, Information is processed data, Data is flat alphanumerics. XML is Information, ESF is data, RSS is information, Ampetadesk is knowledge. ESF has, in classic geek style, not got the information at hand, but knows where to get it if you need it. If you don’t need it, you didn’t just download it.

And yeah, I know it’s similer to RSS 3.0, but I dislike polluting namespaces, so I didn’t read it until after someone pointed it out as a similer idea.