w.bloggar: Not dead after all.
After more than a year of silence, a new version of ace desktop-blogging tool w.bloggar has been released. This is good - it's an awesome piece of software - but I will confess to a touch of schadenfreude at the thought that it had been abandoned, it being competition for Poster. The much delayed 0.1 release of Poster is waiting on the wings, with just a few wee things to tidy up before I unleash it upon the world. I know I've been talking about it for a long time, but there just aren't enough hours in the day for me, to be quite honest. Not when Princess Zelda's gone and gotten herself kidnapped again. Also: I am extremely lazy.
Naturally w.bloggar 4.01 craps all over Poster 0.1 in terms of functionality, and I am concerned that, at first, my application might seem like a feature-poor cross-platform clone. Future versions, however, will see it evolve in its own direction, and the first release is more about providing a stable platform on which to build.
In other software-related news, there's a new version of the official del.icio.us plugin for Firefox. Well, I say new, I think it's actually been available for months, and I've only just noticed. It's all kinds of excellent, anyway, and lets me do away with foxylicious.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Guy Fawkes' Month
When I was young, I would hear of calls to have fireworks banned, and thought that they came from miserable old killjoys.
Back then, however, I don't remember there being armies of neds firing rockets down the street in the middle of October.
I am an unrepentant, card-carrying killjoy. And what of it?
Labels: diary
link | 1 comment(s)Friday, October 19, 2007
Music Hall Star
Have I ever mentioned the choir that me & the missus are in? I can't remember. Anyway, I won't name names because I don't want to be Googled, but earlier in the year we both joined a non-religious choir that specialises in reinterpreting country and rock songs in a choral stylee. It's good fun and we've played numerous shows, from wee gigs where all 40-odd of us are crammed into a corner of a pub, to big festivals.
Anyway, last night we took part in a fundraising event in aid of the Britannia Panopticon. Opened in 1859 as a music hall on the top floor of a Merchant City warehouse building, it entertained the masses of Glasgow, saw both the young Stan Laurel and Cary Grant tread its boards before they became famous, played host to freak shows and a zoo (!), served as cinema for a short time, and finally closed in 1938. Surprisingly, rather than be repurposed as offices or flats, as most buildings in the city center, it seems that the Panopticon was simply boarded up and forgotten about. The ground floor is currently occupied by a rather tatty amusement arcade, and from the street you would never know it was there. Go up the dusty flight of stairs at the back of the amusements, however, and it's like taking a trip back in time.
The Panopticon was "rediscovered" in the late 90's, and efforts are afoot to restore it to something like its formal glory. Or, at the very least, keep it from falling down. Time has not been kind, naturally. Paint and plaster is flaking from the ceiling, the balconies are very much out of bounds to visitors, and a cold draught blows through it. The dilapitated state of the place does, however, give you a sense of how old it really is, and you can easily imagine how it must have looked in its prime. To think that it lay dormant and unseen for so long.
The Panopticon is not generally open to the public, but if you want to see the inside then various art and fundraising events take place on a regular basis, and there are a couple of videos on the Youtubes. It's well worth visiting in person if possible, but dress warm.
100 Websites You Should Know And Use
Some obvious, others less so. Worth perusing. Link
(From lifehack.org)
Labels: links
link | 0 comment(s)Thursday, October 18, 2007
The Running Man
Or rather, the Running, Walking For A Bit, Running A Little More, Then Returning Home Gasping For Breath And Clutching His Side After Only Fifteen Minutes Man.
For various reasons, all of them financial, I cancelled my gym membership a few months ago. I was never a religious five-times-a-week attendee, but I have been missing it, and a general feeling of unhealthiness has been growing lately. As has my belly, since I've put on about half a stone in the intervening time.
Yesterday we got a card through the door to tell us that the water to the flat would be turned off for a few hours starting at 8am. This, plus the truely awful DiMaggio's pizza I ate for dinner last night, gave me enough motivation to force myself out of bed a bit earlier this morning and do something I'd been talking about for a while, but never managed - to go for a run before work. I got my shorts and trainers on, and slipped out into the cold, dark, and thankfully deserted October morning.
When I left the flat and started to run it felt great. I was young and healthy and free. For about three blocks or so. Then I started to die, and fell into a run-a little, walk-a-little pattern. I was back in the house after about a quarter of an hour, absolutely knackered.
Not a great start, but a start nonetheless, and I'm sure I could build it up if I can get into a routine. Oh, I do love my bed, though.
Labels: diary, exercise, running
link | 1 comment(s)Monday, October 15, 2007
Expensive
That's what yesterday was, after pointless taxi rides to and from the airport, and checking into a hotel so we could have little luxuries like running water. The blackout curtains and lack of nocturnal feline disturbance were also appreciated, however.
Labels: diary
link | 0 comment(s)To cap it all...
... a burst main has left us without running water.
Man, today has sucked boaby!
Labels: diary
link | 0 comment(s)Sunday, October 14, 2007
Stupid, Stupid Day
Right now I'm supposed to be on a 'plane flying to Munich. For dull, worky purposes, yes, but I was looking forward to visiting a new city I had never been to before, and getting a change of scenery for a few days. This day has been, however, not mine. The shower breaking down for the nth time was irritating enough, and the taxi driver deciding that the heavy-but-moving traffic on the motorway was too busy and choosing a heavily-clogged back-road instead made me nervous that I was going to miss my flight. I got there without too much time to spare, paid the man, jammed my passport and ticket into my back pocket, and high-tailed it through the car-park to the terminal entrance, only to find when I got there that my passport was no longer with me. I retraced my steps three or four times, asked around, went to the lost-property office, but to no avail, and had to slink off home, defeated.
I had assumed that someone had lifted it from my back pocket. It seemed to be in there quite securely, when I headed to the terminal, and there were a lot of people around. Surely, if it had just fallen out, someone would have spotted it and caught up with me. But no - I got a phone call this evening from the airport to say that it had been handed in. Where it had been in the intervening hours, I cannot say. But man, do I feel like a tube, and I'm not particularly looking forward going into work tomorrow and telling the whole embaressing story over and over again.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Dear Blogger...
... and Wordpress, Moveable Type, Livejournal, et al. Please can you fix it for me implement a feature whereby the versions of blog posts that are published to rss/atom feeds can have a link at the bottom to said post's comments page? I'm sure I write far fewer comments now that I read most blogs by rss via Google Reader. People are essentially lazy - I know I am - and yes, it's probably only one extra click away, but I'm much more likely to respond to a "comment on this post" link at the bottom of the rss entry than I am to navigate to the actual post on the actual site and then add the comment that way.
Or is it just me?
Radioooo
So, last night we went to see Ian Curtis biopic Control at the GFT. I've written a full review for diskant, but if you want the short version: it was alright, I suppose, but pretty disappointing.
Also disappointing was the discovery that David Lynch is making an appearance at the GFT next month; an appearance that has, of course, entirely sold out. And why did nobody tell me? The GFT website has been down for a redesign for a while, and we haven't been in the cinema itself lately, so we had no idea. Bah.
My writing class starts again tomorrow, and I've been asked to submit something for critique on the first night. I agreed to do so, but the only thing I've finished lately I'm not that happy about. It's very very "told" narration. (Something about "Control" that bugged me - "Show, don't tell." I am a hypocrite, but at least I'm honest about it.) I am, therefore, "bricking it".
I have Zelda:Phantom Hourglass on my DS, but have only played the first few minutes so far. It looks gorgeous, though - like proper 2D Zelda given a lovely cel-shaded 3D makeover. Naturally, the story is the usual complete tosh - Princess Zelda's been kidnapped, you have to rescue her, and you start without a sword or shield and with only three heart points, even though this is a direct sequel to Wind Waker, and presumably Link should still be all tooled up from that earlier adventure. Still, anything else wouldn't be Zelda.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Drunken Blogging is Never a Good Idea
Especially at this ridiculous time of the morning. Suffice to say we have been at Claire and Lee's flatwarming party, sampling foul-tasting spirits, Singstar, and one-too-many sausage rolls. And a good time it was too, though I do not envy their neighbours under the circumstances. Nobody needs to hear me butchering The Power of Love at 2am, no matter how distantly, for which I humbly apologise.
G'night!
Labels: diary, drunk, food, games
link | 0 comment(s)Saturday, October 06, 2007
Linky Meme
(From mar-c.)
What's in your Links Bar?
(i.e where you have a bunch of favourite links under the address bar of your browser)
- A del.icio.us folder generated by the Foxylicious Firefox plugin.
- Work webmail access.
- Online banking.
- Way of the Rodent Forum
- World of Stuart Forum
- eBay
- Java 5 Documentation
Last ten sites you bookmarked and why
- TechInterviews - Example interview questions and answers for jobs in IT.
- KVRX - Student-run radio station in Austin, Texas.
- Guitar Backing Tracks
- A thread on the official Java forum about reading a manifest from a .jar file. Exciting stuff!
- StripGenerator
- Launch4J - Tool for generating native Windows wrappers around Java applications.
- JSmooth - Another tool that does broadly the same thing.
- Mac Buyer's Guide - Site which aims to keep tabs on the Apple release cycle and provide recommendations on when would be a good time to buy a Mac or iPod.
- SocksOff - Free wallpapers.
- Novocode - Custom SWT Controls
Friday, October 05, 2007
"You were right about Mick Hucknell. His music's rubbish, and he's a ginger."
Play-Asia are selling the US-edition of Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for a bargaintastic £21 delivered. DS games are region free, it will likely cost at least ten quid more than that when it's released in the UK, Play-Asia take PayPal, and I happen to have just received 20-odd pounds into my PayPal account from flogging the disappointing Mario Strikers on eBay, so ordering it's a no-brainer, really.
DS Zelda! Yay!
Thing is, I might never actually put the cart into my DS, but since I've have actually bought it, I feel morally ok about downloading it from a ROM site and putting it on my flash-cart for convenience. I won't go into the whole piracy debate again here, but I do reckon that Nintendo and Sony would be smart to include a quantity of flash-memory, or a memory-card slot, in future handhelds that one could copy purchased carts to. These could be encrypted in much the same way as Wii virtual console games are, ensuring that they only run on the DS they were copied with, but would make it much easier to carry around a load of games without having a bunch of carts rattling around in your pocket.
Last night we watched 24 Hour Party People as an appetiser for Control. ("Film of the year" according to Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian.) It opens tonight, but we might wait, since R isn't feeliing too great today.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
WordPressure
My original plan for Poster version 0.1 was that it would support Blogger only, and that I would add extra services in future versions. As the project grew, however, I realised that I needed to test that the plugin mechanism was working before I went any further, and figured that adding support for the MetaWeblog API would be a good way to exercise that. There are various blogging services that expose this API, so adding support for it would basically allow Poster to access all of these in one fell swoop. Among these, WordPress is one of the most popular, and as I know several people who use it, I hoped that providing access to it would increase my pool of potential victims beta-testers.
It's easy to see why WordPress is so popular. It offers many features that are absent elsewhere, including the ability to password-protect posts, and to turn comments on and off on a per-post basis, and Poster will support these options. However, at the moment there's one aspect of it that's giving me a real headache - its date and time handling is utter pish!
Any programmer who has ever written an application that has to deal with times in different timezones knows what a pain it can be and how important it is to treat dates and times in a consistant manner. To avoid confusion between what is 12 noon in Glasgow compared to 12 noon in Dallas, it is common practice for computers to store times as a single, absolute value - usually the number of milliseconds since an agreed time called the Epoch. (Which is going to cause all sorts of Y2K-style problems in 2038 when the number of milliseconds since that time exceeds the maximum value we can store in one 32-bit value, but that's an end-of-the-world story for another time.) When displaying a time to the end user, you can then work out his or her time-zone, and work out what they expect to see accordingly.
Now, WordPress doesn't know what part of the world you live in unless you tell it. There's an option on your account settings page that lets you specify what your timezone offset is, expressed in a number of hours from GMT - if you live in Dallas, you'd enter "-5", indicating that you are five hours behind GMT. At the moment, mine is set to "1", since we are in British Summer Time (BST), which is an hour ahead of GMT.
This seems to work well for new posts. When Poster sends a new post to WordPress, it doesn't specify a date and time for it, and just lets WordPress work it out for itself. When it appears on the blog it has my local date and time on it. Perfect.
Where we have problems is when trying to specify a different time for a post. WordPress allows you to move your posts around, or make new ones that appear as though they were created yesterday, or tomorrow, or 100 years in the future if you so desire. It's a feature that it'd be nice to implement, but they ain't making it easy for me. Their api takes a Java Date object, which wraps the afformentioned count of milliseconds since the epoch. In any sane world, WordPress would understand that this is an absolute time which is irrespective of timezone. Instead, however, it insists on adding the offset that's defined in your user preferences. So if I (in BST, which is GMT+1) specify that my post was created at 10am, it'll appear as if it was 11am, even though Poster is sending an absolute time to the server.
I could try cancelling it out, by getting the locale of the machine you're working on and subtracting the GMT offset from the sent date, but that fails if, say, your blog is set to display BST times, but you're on holiday in the USA with your laptop, and have set your timezone to -5, then I'll be adding 5 hours to the time and sending it up to WordPress which will add another one, leaving it six hours out.
As there doesn't seem to be any way to retrieve your WordPress timezone settings programatically, I'm torn between just leaving it in as a "known issue", prompting the user to manually specify their WordPress timezone in their account settings, or just taking out the time-shifting option altogether.
I am slightly heartened, however, to note that w.bloggar, long my blogging-tool of choice (until the Blogger api changed and it stopped working) and partial inspiration for Poster suffers from the same problem, so at least it's not just me being stupid and missing something obvious.
Labels: development, poster
link | 0 comment(s)Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Moaning Zombie
It was dark when I got up this morning, and it's a cold and rainy grey day. That would be summer 2007 well and truly dead, then, compounding the general feeling of malaise I've had for the past few days, not helped by a low-level cold I've been nursing. All I want to do is go back to bed, and no amount of coffee is making that go away.
Sorry to be an old misery-guts, but, y'know, if I moan on here it keeps me from moaning to, and pissing off, people in the real world.
Oh, my life's not terrible at all, and I don't mean to suggest it is or wallow in self-pity. Just feeling in a bit of a funk, that's all.
One of the many things I should be thankful for is that I have a lifestyle that allows me to waste time sitting about playing video games, and at the moment Resident Evil 4 on the Wii has been the focus of my attention. I've played all the "main" Resident Evil games except for number 2, but I've never been a massive fan of them. I normally start out enjoying them, but inevitably get stuck on some ludicrously powerful boss with only a handful of bullets to my name, or have to get through a swathe of zombies with same, and give up, cursing the useless controls. Resi 4, however, has taken the focus away from careful rationing of ammo and objects, and in the process has turned into something like a cross between traditional Resident Evil and an FPS. In fact, the game that it reminds of most of all is the original Doom, in a way that no game since has done, since there is a similar fearful atmosphere tempered by the gory fun to be had in fighting large swarms of enemies at once.
This is something that Id got very, very wrong in the making of Doom 3. By designing it to be a fancy graphics demo which pushed the host machine as far as it would go, they wound up with a graphics engine that couldn't handle too many enemies on screen at once. Half the joy of the original game, and I apologise if this whole rant is making me sound like a sad adolescent, was the large-scale carnage you lay down. Take that away and you're left with a series of dull waltzes with a couple of baddies at a time. Still, at least they gave us interesting environments to play in. Oh, wait...
Anyway, if the Wiimote can be prised from my fingers, this Friday we are going to see Ian Curtis biopic Control, and I think there's a housewarming party to be going to on Saturday. So, mustn't grumble, really.