stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Another dynamic element to the site

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:55:00 GMT

I got adventurous tonight, and whipped up some javascript which updates the sentence at the end of each post which lists how many comments there are on a post. This means that the site is always up to date, even though all the HTML is static files on disk. It also means I can finally kill that silly hourly regenerate cron job.

Oh, and this is post 3,000 on this site.

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Slight site hickup

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 18:52:00 GMT

I pushed a bunch of photo files to stillhq.com tonight, all of which I thought were previously published. Unfortunately a bunch of them had the wrong dates associated with them, which spammed the front page and RSS feed with old photo posts. The problem has been corrected now, and hopefully not too many people grabbed the bogus RSS feeds. Sorry for any inconvenience.

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Dynamic site comments

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 20:07:00 GMT

Every once in a while someone sends me a nastygram about how I ignored their comment on a post on this site. This has generally been because people don't read the paragraph on the post form about comments not appearing until they have been moderated.

I got all keen this evening, and comments are now returned from a CGI, instead of a static file, which means that unmoderated comments from the last 24 hours now appear immediately on the site. Hopefully this will stop said nastygrams.

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Overall comment spam statistics

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:13:00 GMT

While I sat here at 2am, too jet lagged to sleep, I whipped up some quick comment spam statistics for this site, which you can see on the left hand side of this page. Its really easy now that I've moved all the comments across to being stored in something a little nicer than a bunch of flat text files on disk. At the moment the scoreboard reads:

5 comments today, 5 of them spam. 370996 comments overall, 370085 of them spam.

Dear spammers, you are annoying.

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Hosting changes

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:01:00 GMT

Prompted by Andrew's need to move his machine, with which he has been very generously hosting this site since 2005, I have moved stillhq.com to a new hosting provider. If you're reading this message then it means DNS has updated and you're seeing the new host.

Its quite possible that there is broken stuff. Let me know if you find anything.

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Customisation of visible posts

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 05:42:00 GMT

It occurred to me today that its not too hard to hide categories of posts on the HTML version of my site as well. The site has now been changed to have a link at the top of each post which offers to hide that category in the future. If that category is already hidden, then it offers instead to unhide it. The preference information is stored in a series of cookies, so is of course specific to a browser on a given machine. Because its all done in JavaScript, I have no logging of who is hiding what or anything like that. The cookies will expire after 30 days of non-use.

Posts are never completely hidden however -- you will still see the title. This seemed a reasonable compromise and left me with somewhere to display the link offering to unhide the content. It also gives people a very brief summary of what they are missing.

One wart is that when you change your hiding preferences the page is reloaded. This is because I had trouble finding a way to hide divs which worked on plenty of browsers and didn't require unique div ids for each post, which I would need to them iterate through for all posts in a given category. I'd love it if someone with higher JavaScript foo could tell me how to avoid the page reload, as I am sure it will be annoying for some.

So there you go.

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Site janitorial stuff

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:02:00 GMT

So, this whole kerfuffle about microblogging prompted me to hack the perl I use to generate this site to provide a blather-free version of my RSS feed. As a side effect I fixed a bug which was generating too many versions of the various RSS files I have on the site, thus removing 11,000 unneeded RSS files. That seemed like a lot to me (although not a lot of disk, just a lot of small annoying files).

There is of course the possibility that I removed too many, or broke something else in the process. Let me know if you notice anything.

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Historical revisionism

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:26:00 GMT

Hi. I am dropping the technorati and icerocket tags from all blog posts here. Both sites seem largely irrelevant now, and I'm not so fond of how these forms of tagging give those two sites lots of incoming links. This change will affect all posts both past and future, because of the way this site is generated. You should notice the tags go away over the next hour or so.

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I do delete comments, but only some

Sat, 07 May 2005 17:06:00 GMT

Jeremy says he deletes some blog comments (spam and so forth), while Scoble says he deletes none but has anti spam technology. I delete spam (all comments go to me for approval first), but that is all I remove. I haven't had to deal with hate speech yet, so I don't really know what I'll do about it if it happens.

Technorati tags for this post: site blog comment policy

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Sorry for futzing with the RSS feed so much recently

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 14:04:00 GMT

I want to get my RSS feed just right for some stuff I have lined up for a couple of weeks from now. To do that I needed RSS 2.0, enclosures, commenting, and more posts in my feed. All of that is done now and I think I'm pretty much ready to go... Sorry for any inconvenience.

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Comments turned on!

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 18:40:00 GMT

Well, it's more that I've written code to implement them now. After listening to Robert Scoble's couch, I've finally gotten around to writing the code to implement comments here. I wrote custom code because the site is generated statically to help handle the load, and it was easier this way.

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New site look and feel

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 16:34:00 GMT

So, welcome to the new site look and feel. I've transitioned to generating the entire site via Blosxom as a bit of an experiment. We'll see how we go. There are quite possibly broken links still -- I'm running a link validator as we speak which will help me fix those...

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Panda 0.5.4 released

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 19:04:00 GMT

(Evan has taken over maintaining Panda, although I will be dropping in from time to time to add code still)

Subject: [panda-development] Panda-0.5.4 Released
Date: Monday 12 April 2004 11:28 pm
From: Evan Nemerson 
To: panda-development@lists.sourceforge.net, panda-users@lists.sourceforge.net

Hi everyone,

I've just released Panda-0.5.4 via Savannah and SourceForge. I will make an
announcement via Freshmeat as soon as the files are available via stillhq.com

The release can currently be downloaded from:
	https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/panda
	http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/panda

As you may already be aware, the most important change in 0.5.4 is that the
library is now available under the terms of either the GPL or LGPL (your
choice). In order to accomplish this, the TDB code was removed, and either
Enlightenment DB or Berkeley DB (version 4) must be linked to in its place.

Other changes include the addition of link annotations (internal and
external), pkg-config support, and an RPM. The main point of this release,
however, was the licensing issue.

The time has begun to begin thinking about the next release of Panda, and
though I do not have a time frame, I do have a few features I'd like to
implement:

*	Improved font handling, using FreeType. I would like to be able to embed
 and use arbitrary fonts, supporting line and page wrapping of text boxes.
 *	Support XMP metadata, noteably Creative Commons licensing data.
*	Bindings for different languages, such as PHP, Python, etc.
*	Comprehensive documentation, using DocBook XML
*	Stronger Windows support

If you have any other ideas you would like to see integrated within the
library, please send a message to panda-development@lists.sourceforge.net

The files for this release can be found at:

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Announcing the first version of mcachefs

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 03:03:00 GMT

mcachefs is a simple caching filesystem for Linux using FUSE. It works by copying the file that you asked for when the file is opened, and then using that copy for all subsequent requests for the file. This is really a fairly naive approach to caching, and will be improved in the future. It's good enough for now though.

mcachefs needs two filesystems to operate. The target filesystem is the slow filesystem you want to cache accesses to, and the backing filesystem is where mcachefs can stash stuff which it has copied. The backing filesystem should therefore be on local disc, or the whole point of the exercise is gone.

It is also assumed that the target filesystem is read only for now.

Installing:

You'll need FUSE, so your best bet is to go up a directory level, and then type:

  ./configure
  make
  make install

(That last step needs to be done as root of course).

Using:

mcachefs looks for a config file to determine where the target and backing filesystems are located, as well as a debugging verbosity level. mcachefs looks in the following locations for it's config file (in this order):

/etc/mcachefs
~/.mcachefs
`pwd`/mcachefs.cfg

The format of the config file is something along the lines of:

/cache/backing  /backing
/cache/target   /
/cache/verbose  99

Note that the two columns must be separated by tabs for the config file to parse properly. This config section above says that we have a cached filesystem to mount at /cache. The backing store is /backing, the target store is /, and we want to be _very_ verbose. Lower numbers are less verbose. Please note that being very verbose might help with debugging mcachefs, but _will_ slow down the filesystem.

You can now mount the cached filesystem but doing a:

	mcachefs /cache

This program wont terminate... If you kill it, the filesystem will unmount. Don't do that. Use umount instead. I have making mcachefs daemonise on the todo list, so don't bother reporting it as a bug please.

Known bugs:

The only known bug at the moment is that if the program which is opening a large file terminateds before the cached copy has been generated, then a bus error occurs in mcachefs. I'm looking into that now.

So, I came up with this great patch:

Email me at mikal@stillhq.com

New code?

You can find the latest version of the code at http://www.stillhq.com/extracted/fuse, and http://www.stillhq.com/extracted/fuse.tgz

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aus-dotnet list archives

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 13:03:00 GMT

So, there's an Australian list for dotNet developers, but I couldn't find an archive of it. So I made one. The archive isn't updated in real time at the moment, but it's good enough for searching and stuff like that.

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Read about my Christmas lights

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 04:00:00 GMT

Which this year include a Tux made out of fairy lights.

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Panda is now available under the GPL and the LGPL

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 07:00:00 GMT

The next release of Panda, which is imminent, is released under both the GPL, and the LGPL, which will make it much easier for some users to use the code...

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Mandocs for linux 2.6.0-test3-bk1

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 07:00:00 GMT

I have submitted a patch which changes the man page output for the mandocs target in the kernel. Sample output is here.

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Mandocs included in linux kernel 2.6.0-test3

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 07:00:00 GMT

The mandocs patch from myself has been included in kernel 2.6.0-test3. Sample man pages are here.

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