crazed monkey » internet

I’m taking The Pascal String Challenge

Ian Stevens — Wed, 05 May 2004 22:09:00 +0000

This sounds fun. Joe Gregorio of Bitworking has issued a Pascal String Challenge which requests weblog entries of precisely 255 characters. Those who programmed in Borland Pascal will remember that strings could be no larger than 255 characters in size.

Globe And Mail online poll: Do you vote in online polls?

Ian Stevens — Sat, 15 Nov 2003 03:52:00 +0000

An online poll recently appeared on The Globe And Mail website asking the question “Do you vote in on-line polls?”. The best part is that some people chose the “no” option.

RSS for some

Ian Stevens — Tue, 04 Nov 2003 04:57:00 +0000

I grow weary of constantly reloading sites which lack RSS feeds to determine whether they contain new content. If I was still using Syndirella as my news reader I would be able configure those sites as web feeds. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I switched to SharpReader as it allows for grouping of feeds and contains a number of other neat features which Syndirella does not have. To solve my problems, I am now hosting RSS feeds for a few external sites until they are able to get their own.

I have chosen to start with two weblogs which are focussing on the Toronto election. They are:

The feeds are updated every three hours, are not guaranteed to validate (they almost certainly do not) and are created by a script based on one written by Sam Ruby. These feeds are only temporary, available until the content authors create their own. They may disappear at any time, so if you use them be sure to nag the content authors into creating their own feeds.

More feeds to come.

Another robot to ban: NaverRobot

Ian Stevens — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 22:07:00 +0000

Here’s another annoying robot to add to Mark’s list of robots which should be told to go to hell: NaverRobot. This robot ignores the Robot Exclusion Standard and rudely downloaded 200 pages in five minutes. It’s banned.

RewriteCond … Read more

Feedster does not practice what it preaches

Ian Stevens — Tue, 27 May 2003 20:38:08 +0000

Feedster:

If you’d like to use an image you find with Feedster Images, you should remember that it is considered bad blogging form to embed images from other sites in your own blog, thus using their bandwidth for your blog. Check with the author of the blog to see if its [sic] ok and then copy the image to your server if that’s ok.

I wholeheartedly agree. However, Feedster does not seem to follow its own advice, particularly on its page of images included in current weblog posts. (I found this out after I started to receive hits for the image contained in my Becel Ride for Heart post.) The obvious and easy thing to do would be to cache resized copies of the images being displayed. Instead, your browser is forced to download the original image from each weblog, which is then resized to fit the thumbnails. As a result of this disgusting display of hypocrisy, I am blocking all images which have Feedster as their referrer.

Move-to in CSS3

Ian Stevens — Tue, 20 May 2003 17:48:12 +0000

One of my biggest beefs with working with HTML and CSS was that the separation of content and style had not gone far enough. One still had to consider the structure of the document in terms of element ordering. For instance, when writing a white-paper one would have to decide whether to place the table of contents before the summary within the HTML and not within the associated CSS. To change the ordering after the fact, one would have to change the content, not the associated style.

This styling issue is fixed somewhat with CSS3 and the introduction of the move-to property within the Generated and Replaced Content Module (via Sjoerd Visscher’s weblog). This is what I envisioned as a solution to the above problem except that one cannot move elements to anywhere in the document. One is instead restricted to moving elements to later within the document. I’d like to know why this restriction exists. I suppose the ability to move elements to anywhere within a document would degrade rendering performance, but surely that is an implementation detail. A browser could either choose to render the image and move elements on the fly or wait until all content is received before moving elements around. Still, it’s a step in the right direction towards the nirvana of complete separation of content and style.

The Globe And Mail redesigns; breaks its links

Ian Stevens — Fri, 14 Feb 2003 21:05:00 +0000

The Globe And Mail has redesigned its site. I dislike it, mostly because it makes me feel as if I am viewing the site while squashed into a tiny box. A fixed width for content is never cool. The site redesign frustrates the whole online news experience, which is not to say that the previous design was any better. However, this new design leaves me feeling even more confined.

As if reading The Globe And Mail wasn’t frustrating enough, the redesign has introduced yet another URL format and has broken all old links. Each URL is still preceded by “servlet”, but now “/story” is appended to that instead of “/ArticleNews”. Why not just eliminate the “servlet” part as nobody but their server cares? A simple Apache rewrite rule could handle that and make the links that much easier to handle. Even though they’ve changed the format of their URLs, they are still not very human readable. At least it’s a far cry from their original parameter-separated nonsense. Now that was horrid.

Now the question is, should I try and update my links to The Globe And Mail? Even links found in entries posted this past Wednesday are broken.

The return of Electronic Frontier Canada

Ian Stevens — Thu, 06 Feb 2003 18:16:00 +0000

Electronic Frontier Canada has returned after a two-year hiatus. EFC’s purpose is to ensure that the principles embodied in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms remain protected as new computing, communications, and information technologies are introduced into Canadian society.

Jeffrey Shallit, EFC vice-president, cites lack of time as the main reason for EFC’s absence. The EFC web page is currently being updated, with a weblog format to be introduced shortly. The mailing lists, however, are not currently back online and are in need of an experienced maintainer. If you would like to offer assistance to the EFC, please contact them by email or by mail.

Send a photo junkie to camp

Ian Stevens — Tue, 28 Jan 2003 18:52:00 +0000

Photojunkie: Send a kid to camp. If you live in Toronto, New York City or are going to SXSW in Austin, and want some quality shots of yourself, look no further. To fund his trip to SXSW, Rannie is offering some affordable portrait packages. Get pictures for your website, your Christmas cards, your portfolio, or your CD covers if you’re a musician. Where else are you going to find a deal like this? Visit Rannie’s photo gallery for sample shots.

Syndirella

Ian Stevens — Tue, 21 Jan 2003 17:03:00 +0000

Dive Into Mark: New news aggregator for Windows. Following Mark’s lead, I started using Syndirella for my news feeds. I was using AmphetaDesk before, which was OK once I installed the outliner plugin but it still wasn’t up to scratch.

Among other things, AmphetaDesk lacked a liberal RSS parser, RSS auto-discovery and support for item-level dates, all of which can be found within Syndirella. Syndirella’s best feature, however, has to be the built-in scraper which allows you to syndicate sites which refuse to provide an RSS feed. I have successfully configured several HTML-only feeds for syndication in this manner.

These features come at a price, however, as Syndirella requires the Microsoft .NET framework, a 20MB download. Still, even with its bugs it’s probably the best Windows-based news aggregator out there.

Update: Morbus Iff, AmphetaDesk’s author, has gracefully addressed the above three feature points. It seems as though many of my gripes are related to the outliner plugin and not necessarily AmphetaDesk itself, which is ironic since the outliner plugin made AmphetaDesk a much more enjoyable experience overall. Although AmphetaDesk supports auto-discovery, it does so through a bookmarklet (essentially a “Subscribe” toolbar button) and not when entering a URL in the “Add a Channel” page. Syndirella makes no such distinction, and even invisibly searches Syndic8.com for a feed when it cannot find one linked in the HTML, as per Mark Pilgrim’s RSS locator wishlist.

Even with Morbus’ helpful information, I’m still sticking with Syndirella for now. Having an aggregator application in which I can easily navigate to new items (by pressing the spacebar) is so much faster than any browser-based alternative. This doesn’t apply solely to AmphetaDesk as I used Radio Userland’s aggregator for a month, and it was the same way. However, as I mentioned to Morbus over ICQ, AmphetaDesk was quite nice in combination with tabs and gestures in Mozilla.