That’s so wrong:

Which Programming Language are You?

I’ve just released Wiki Widgets 0.2. You can find the download link on this page.

The main new things in this release are:

• GraphViz Widget (alpha, not ready for production use)
• Allow arbitrarily named arguments via the xargs attribute

Thanks to Juan Zubeldia for pointing out the need to pass arguments with non-alphanumeric names to Google Gadgets.

Just received a spam with this in the body:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

That’s the so-called “Processing Key” that unlocks the heart of the Bride, enabling her to see herself through the eyes of the King. During this season, the industry would have seen a growth of about 10 per cent slide in net profit for 2008, underscoring why its board has recommended issue of bonus shares in the ratio of 1 equity share for every 2 equity shares held. Further, the company plans to add local channels in an unspecified number of metro DMAs throughout 2007 and 2008, but would not say where.

No comment :)

I’ve been having trouble focussing my eyes for the past week. Turns out I have some kind of macular dystrophy. My right eye has a blurred and displaced area (about the size of my thumbnail at a range of 30cm) which makes bits of text bend and blur when I try to look directly at them. My left eye is fine but seems unwilling to help my right eye out - presumably after years of laziness.

Apparently I’m too young for it to be conventional macular degeneration. I think that’s supposed to be a consolation of some sort. It’s all a bit freaky given that I spend about 80% of my waking time staring at a screen. Can’t do that right now for more than about half an hour without getting a headache.

The good news is that it happened once before about five years ago and either went away or my brain got used to processing the distorted image. This in spite of having been told it was both incurable and degenerative. Of course right now I’m using the eye-power I have reading whatever I can find about the condition.

So I guess I might be a little less always-on than usual. The effect is much less pronounced when I focus near infinity. That’s an excuse to get out more if ever I heard one.

From the wikipedia-l archive:

List:       wikipedia-l
Subject:    [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia rocks!
From:       "Larry Sanger"
Date:       2001-01-22 0:02:42

Welcome, o ye five initial members of wikipedia-l, to wikipedia-l!

Actually, the point of this post is to put something in the archives.

On the assumption that all wikipedia articles have the letter "e" in
them, there are now 184 Wikipedia articles.  I added a "best of" page
you might be interested in:

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?BrilliantProse

Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far, and that's great.

Larry

For some reason I had the idea Wikipedia was older than that; I suppose it just seems like a lot more than six years’ work. Thanks to the Wayback Machine we can see what it looked like in March 2001:

Welcome to Wikipedia! We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch, collaboratively. We started work in January 2001. We’ve got over 3,000 pages already. We want to make over 100,000. So, let’s get to work! Write a little (or a lot) about what you know! Read our welcome message here: Welcome, newcomers!

I wonder how many people read We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch and thought that maybe they were being a little optimistic. I’m pretty sure I would have.

OK, apropos of Things I Hate About the Internet here’s something a really do hate:

I hate it when someone working email support is really helpful but you don’t want to thank them because you know that by doing so you’ll raise another ticket in their support system. It must happen all the time - more so if they’re good at their job. How perverse is a system that makes “thank you” into an irritation?

A classic case of yak shaving: too much work on anyway, decided to take a break by turning our local community site into a wiki. Then I thought it’d be nice to embed a Google map showing a few local landmarks. Must be possible, right? Well it probably has been done already but it seemed pretty simple (and an interesting diversion) to write a MediaWiki extension to allow maps to be embedded.

So then you need to let users add points to the map - so the map needs button that spits out a chunk of markup that can be used to add a point. So I wrote some Javascript to do that.

Of course one extension is never enough (just say no kids). I was writing a load of code that’d be useful in other extensions anyway. What about a framework for extensions? Yup, the dreaded ‘f’ word. Oh well.

Anyway, to cut a long story short: Wiki Widgets.

One of the things I wanted to do (you know, once it became a project rather than a displacement activity) was to make widgets that, from the user’s point of view, are discoverable. It’s all very well installing an extension but if users can’t find out about it they won’t use it. Wiki Widgets has a pretty simple take on discoverability: make a blank page and add the markup:

<widget />

to it. When you save or preview the page you’ll get a list of all the installed Wiki Widgets. For each Widget there’s a link that takes you directly to a (wiki) page that explains how to use it. From there you should be able to select the widget you want. Wherever possible I plan to make the individual Widgets support additional discoverability. For example if you add an empty Google Gadget Widget like this:

<widget type="googlegadget" />

you should get a user interface that makes it easy to add the gadget you want and set up its parameters.

Anyway, back to the day job now.

I hate it when people are away and set up an autoresponder that doesn’t understand mailing lists. It’s just so rude to have your moronic robot punctuating our conversation with “I’m sorry but I’m away right now somewhere staggeringly exotic having a far better time than you are” every time someone speaks.

So I was quite embarrassed to find this mailing list post:

(This is an automatically generated message)

After five happy years I've left Tagish so I can spend more time
programming. If you are trying to reach me on Tagish business
please mail

  sarahc AT tagish DOT co DOT uk

If you're actually trying to reach me please mail me at

  andy AT hexten DOT net

If you have received this message without having emailed me that's
probably because your address has been forged and used to spam me.

Please don't be offended. This mail box gets around 2,500 spams a
day and most of them are from forged addresses so you're not being
picked on.

--
Andy Armstrong, Hexten

Oops. I’m really sorry. My error was extra egregious because I obviously knew about backscatter; I knew that my autoresponder was going to end up spamming itself:

If you have received this message without having emailed me that’s
probably because your address has been forged and used to spam me.

To find out just how shitty autoresponders (including mine) are go here.

If this turns out to be true:

But word ’round the campfire is that EMI, along with his Steveness, is going to announce at 8 AM EST that most of their catalog is going to be offered DRM-free on iTunes. There may be no Beatles, but who needs them when you have DRM-free music? On iTunes.

I’ll go and buy at least $50 worth of EMI DRM free music on iTunes as soon as it’s available.

I’m posting this here just to give it a little more Googlability in the hope that people might find it more easily than I did.

If you install Ubuntu on a HP 510 or HP 500 laptop you’ll find that the touchpad doesn’t work. Then you’ll find this page which details a fairly crufty kernel hack to get the touchpad working. It also explains how to select the native 1280×800 screen resolution.

Having done that you’ll reboot and find that the WiFi isn’t working. If you’re really lucky you’ll then find this thread that explains how to fix the WLAN.

Or you could just follow those links. Now if I could just get DHCP working on the WLAN I’d be happy…