Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

Does this appear on the menu?

If you need to say anything, here’s the way to do it. I can’t promise to reply to all emails but I do try.

My name’s Peter (as you’ve no doubt already guessed) and I live in the UK.  I run a web development company, specialising in online ticketing solutions.  We also build most kinds of web applications such as content and information management systems.

This site is fairly temporary, a transitional state between MovableType and something I find which fits my needs.  Unfortunately the move to Wordpress lost much of my Technorati ranking…

Wordpress appears to have some of the features of a content management system, and as what I’m looking for is a structured wiki with the ability to view content date-sensitively or as if browsing wikipedia, I need to see if Wordpress will work for me.  Judging by my rate of posting since moving from MovableType the answer is a resounding ‘No’.  I dislike the code (WP  2.1 may be better) and the whole information architecture doesn’t fit my way of working.

# They would give free upgrades for the life of this version. I have no problem with paying for a new major version, but I don’t see why I should be expected to pay for bug fixes after my years’ worth of free upgrades has expired.
# There were screenshots showing new features (such as the “tabbed container feature”) or a demo. I like to try before I buy.

“David Coursey”:http://blog.ziffdavis.com/coursey/ has a column on eWeek entitled Needed: A Relational Database for ‘Normal’ People. Glad to see I’m not the only one struggling with n:m relationships
I think he’s right. Software should abstract the details that we, the users, don’t care about. As described in “this comment”:http://www.eweek.com/talkback_details/0,2278,s=26004&a=130433,00.asp?m=1413, we know the result we want, and whether the database duplicates the data between tables and keeps it in sync, or stores it in separate tables with a linking table for the relationship - it doesn’t matter! Sure, it will for high end applications, but then you employ a database architect and make it all nice and speedy
We need the technology to come after RDBMs. What’s happened to evolution - or revolution? It seems to have gone towards object databases so far, but not in the main stream. I’m thinking of something that replaces SQL as well - yes, really revolutionary, not limited by any existing technology.

[Supposed to be revising at the moment...]

I found “Colin Viebrock’s weblog”:http://viebrock.ca/ the other day, and it’s well worth reading as he has some very interesting code/ideas[1] on it. One that caught my eye was a discussion of “email protection”:http://viebrock.ca/code/11/email-protection by using a HTTP redirect to show the email address. With the amount of spam I receive increasing continually (currently 40% of my email, or ~45/day), I thought it was worth a try.

And being lazy and having a large number of existing pages on the “sendcard”:http://www.sendcard.org site, I didn’t want to edit each by hand (even if the alternative would increase server loading - well that’s what I pay “these guys”:http://www.fluidhosting.com for isn’t it?), so I wrote some code to convert mailto links automatically. Here it is:

ob_start('rewrite_mailto_links');
function rewrite_mailto_links($buffer)
{
    return preg_replace_callback('!mailto:([^@]*)@([^'">&?]*)(\?subject=([^'">&]+))?!', 'rewrite_mailto_links_callback', $buffer);
}

function rewrite_mailto_links_callback($m)
{
    $str = "/mailto.php/$m[1]/$m[2]";
    if (isset($m[4]) && trim($m[4]) != '') {
        $str .= "/$m[3]";
    }
    return $str;
}

You’ll need Colin’s “script”:http://viebrock.ca/downloads/send.phps as well. Writing that didn’t take long, but then I spent 40 min trying to get the prepended file to run. Memo to self: the syntax is

bc. php_var auto_prepend_file /path/to/file.php

NOT

bc. php_var auto_prepend /path/to/file.php

Uugh. Something so small wasted so much time. Still, it’s working now
fn1. While I faff around trying to decide how best to design the code, Colin just gets on and creates it, producing some very interesting stuff. Moral of the story: it’s better to do it than think about it.

This was spotted just by the memorial for the Middleham cottages which were destroyed in the 1952 “Lynmouth Flood Disaster”:http://www.exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk/About_Exmoor/ExmoorLynmouthFloods1952.htm, and it intrigues me!

That’s right: it’s a cot frame *through* a tree. This photo shows one of the ends; the base of the cot is also present in/near the tree, but I don’t think the other end is (it was nearly dark when I took the photo, so I couldn’t see much).

My question: what on Earth do you have to do to make this happen? Why would the tree not push it out of the way while growing? My guess is that the branch split all those years ago, and somehow the 3rd bar on the frame got stuck in the split. And then the tree went on growing around it.

Is this related to the flood disaster? It would make a lovely story if it was…

I guess “Clever Cactus!”:http://www.clevercactus.com/ is a cross between Outlook and an information management tool, maybe very similar to Outlook (a tool I’ve used very little). It’s hard to describe really. Here’s a few points off the front page of their site:

bq. _[clevercactus lets you]_ Keep your relevant data together, across all data types (mails, calendar, files, news feeds, etc.) so that information is readily available

bq. _[clevercactus lets you]_ Integrate data from multiple incoming and outgoing sources (email, calendar, weblogs, RSS feeds…)

It’s written in Java, which is a bit of a pain (Java apps on Windows just don’t feel right…), and there’s no threading of the email as far as I could tell, but it’s only a beta, and I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on it.

Two interesting posts in Chuq Von Rospach’s weblog:

* “RSS replacing email? email dead?”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/000761.html
* “RSS and E-mail: deconstructing modes of communication”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/000773.html