The quest for perfectionism

Is anyone else suddenly getting spam written in German, which is slipping past their email filters? Both the server-side SpamAssassin and my local Bayesian filter were doing well until these started arriving a couple of days ago.

Aside from that, mapledesign.co.uk is being used as the From/Return-To address by a number of spammers at present. If you’re receiving them my apologies, I can categorically state that (a) we’re not sending them, and (b) I’m not virus infected, so there’s not coming unknown from here.

Now to go and delete another round of bounced emails received…

h3. Update

See “this webpage”:http://www.clearswift.com/support/cs/email.aspx?ID=4404 for details about the origination and subject lines you can filter on to block the spam.

If you’re having problems with the amount of spam you’re getting, you may want to try Cloudmark’s new SafetyBar

OK, I’ve put up “a tarball of the FormProcessor code”:http://peter.mapledesign.co.uk/quests/formprocessor/FormProcessor.tar.gz as it stands on my hard drive.

First some disclaimers: there is no documentation to speak of, and I haven’t the foggiest idea what status this code is. I’ve released it again because people keep on emailing me for it Use at your own risk etc.

When the SVN hosting disappeared I lost the changelog, so what stat this code is in I don’t know. If it doesn’t work let me know, or if you find bugs.

Development’s currently halted due to other interestes and a lack of time. I have plenty of ideas for it and know where I want the code to go, and plan to continue with it at some point. I think a similar idea would also be a great addition to “Rails”:http://www.rubyonrails.com! I envisage changing the rendering pipeline of the script to make it smoother… watch this space (for documents on proposed changes, if not code).

If anyone has SVN hosting they can donate that would be fantastic.

I’ve been an “Opera”:http://www.opera.com/ lover for years. I bought my first license when version 6 came out and have been steadily upgrading ever since. Now, much against my wishes, I think I have to concede: “Firefox”:http://www.firefox.com/ is the better browser.

Why? Here’s the reasons that forced me to this conclusion.

# Opera 8’s support for XMLHttpRequest is incomplete. Duh.
# I’ve got addicted to using “FCKEditor”:http://www.fckeditor.net/ in CMS, which only works in Firefox and IE.
# (This one surprised me) Firefox’s user interface, menu design and dialogue boxes are far less confusing than Opera’s. I know, I was stunned. But I found the default layout in Opera 8 really confusing, and didn’t feel as clean.
# Opera’s lack of extensibility. Not a fault in its own, but I love Firefox’s “ScrapBook”:http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/, which allows you to save web pages. Great for when I find a design I like and want to save it ‘for future reference’ [Note: I know Opera has notes, never worked out why they're useful as they're text-only - surely that defeats the point of the 'net?]
# MathML rendering. Not really a biggie for me yet, but as a physics student it’s nice to have.
# Web standards support. Opera used to sell themselves on this; now… where’s the push gone?

It isn’t all negative though. On the plus side

# Opera has a built-in news reader (I’m not one for “buying extra software”:http://www.feeddemon.com/) and for some reason Thunderbird and myself don’t get along.
# Opera saves open tabs. I know there’s Firefox extensions to do this, but I haven’t found one which (a) doesn’t slow down/crash the browser and (b) doesn’t forget the saved tabs sometimes. Opera’s works perfectly.
# Memory usage with many open tabs appears to be less in Opera.
# Some web pages just won’t load in Firefox. I’ve tried clean reinstalls of the browser, and nothing works. No headers appear in “LiveHTTPHeaders”:http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/;, and the dots just go round and round until I kill the page loading.

Will I keep using Opera? The answer is yes, but alongside Firefox. For pages I find and want to read in the future, Opera’s ability to save open tabs is a godsend, and a feature I can’t live without. But it isn’t the best browser any more (I’d give my parents Firefox any day rather than try to get them to navigate round Opera).

Been thinking more about what the problem is with “MediaWiki”:http://www.mediawiki.org that’s stopping me from using it. To sum it up:

h3. lack of image management

All I want is some way to tag images into galleries, have sub-galleries, provide attributes (captions/titles) for images, and then have an easy way to insert them into a wiki page. Just some way that the images don’t become lost amongst the valuable text - because they’re not just there to illustrate the prose.

Oh, and *Visual editing* of the wiki would also be good, if not downright required, as most of the other people interested in this topic are aged 50 or over.

I really hope there’s something already out there that will do this; I don’t want to be writing code for _another_ project…

Nicola Larosa just mentioned “this little script”:http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/python/python/dist/src/Tools/scripts/crlf.py?view=markup on the “EDU-SIG”:http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig mailing list to convert CRLF line endings to LF. I didn’t know pre-written scripts like these existed in the Python distribution, and hadn’t got far enough learning Python to write one of my own. Very useful

Now I’m back on the scene and have changed some of the priorities in my life (I always say that after every holiday, but maybe it’ll stick this time), I’m wheeling out old projects that I want to do…

First up is to set up an online collaborative documentation site about a large disused slate quarry in North Wales, that I visited again last week. It’s not a common choice to write about, but I find industrial archeology, and the industry to which it belonged fascinating. There are also other people out there who are more knowledgable than me who will be able to contribute as well.

The obvious choice of software is “MediaWiki”:http://www.mediawiki.org/. However… because we construct models of the quarry, and because the quarry is disused and decaying, there’s been a lot of photos taken to record it. As well as overall shots of the quarry there’s shots for each level within the quarry, then for each building on each level… and these photos need to be categorised and displayed in a gallery on the website, with captions and descriptions. This is something that MediaWiki doesn’t appear to support - it’s fine to insert images into pages of text, but not to browse the images.

Soooo, any other solutions I’ve missed? Collaborative writing is growing in popularity, and something must be right for documenting industrial archeology sites like this quarry.

Ben Macintyre has written “a cracking poem”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-168-1560959,00.html in The Times to celebrate the Royal wedding.

Certainly made the wedding for me, and beat Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s poem hands down (cannot find it online to link to)

Well, I was hoping to post a follow up to my first computational physics project and then my second one, but revision has got in the way (why am I writing this when I’m supposed to be revising? Oh, I remember - revision’s boring!). So, what’s been going on?

* My dissertation is finished and handed in
* My second piece of computational physics coursework is in. This time written in C - it made sense as I had existing code, and required 3.8 million calls to the Runge-Kutta algorithm at each position it was run.
* I’m now lining up for two exams next Tuesday and Wednesday. Kind of a shame, as I’ve lost interest in this physics and want to get back on with my CMS I’m developing, but not long to go now…

That’s all computer-wise that I can talk about publicly at present. I’m still dreaming of a new system for this website, combining a blog with easy-to-maintain sections on physics, programming, photography.. let me know if you know of an existing system

Well, Happy Christmas everyone! I wasn’t intending to post today, but (a) things are slack here, and (b) a client contacted me to say his website wasn’t working. He was getting the error message:

bc. Fatal error: session_register(): Failed to initialize storage module: user (path: /tmp) in /path/to/file.php on line XX

As he hosts with either of the two companies I deal with, I told him to contact his hosting company as it looked like a server problem.

Then I checked one of my sites - I had the same problem. Mmm. Thoughts flashed through my mind - was this an evil PHP bug, dedicated to wipe every site off the Internet on Christmas day? Had I done something stupid?

A “search on Google”:http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Fatal+error%3A+session_register()%3A+Failed+to+initialize+storage+module%3A+user+(path%3A+%2Ftmp)+in turned up a few results, most illuminatingly “this PHP bug report”:http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=25876. I don’t remember having set a session.save_path anywhere, so I’m going to live with this as a random happening for the time being.

I’ll keep you informed if more information turns up.

Well, the “spam protection implemented”:http://peter.mapledesign.co.uk/weblog/archives/basic_comment_spam_protection.html on this weblog seemed to fox a lot of people yesterday Sorry guys, didn’t realise that the HTTP-Basic-Auth message wasn’t particularly visible in some browsers. I’ve added the username/password to the comment form; hopefully that should make it easier while still keeping spambots at bay.

I’ll be posting a roundup of weblog entries etc on the topic at some point - although probably not tomorrow! If I don’t post again, have a Happy Christmas, and try to separate yourself from the computer for a few hours…