Category Archives: Tech
Drupal.org gets a make-over | drupal.org
Tungsten T5
Palm launches the Tungsten T5 Handheld with 256mb storage and Bluetooth. Neat, can function as USB drive.
OS X Loves Memory
Thanks to the fine people at Buffalo Technology my Powerbook is now equipped with the maximum 1.25 GB of memory. The difference is amazing, like night and day. My efforts to completely switch my everyday tasks to the Mac have been hindered by the lower screen resolution of the 12″ and the sluggish performance. The screen size has pretty much become a non-issue with some monitors I inherited and Synergy, I assumed the performance problems were due to it just having a slower processor, but all my Mac friends assured me that OS X just needed memory to breathe. They were right. I want to open every program on the system just to watch it.
Most Screens
Leonard’s multi-screen setup. What’s really crazy about that (besides the fact he has a panaramic picture across 5 monitors) is he uses an open source project called Synergy to “share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware.” Who says open source doesn’t innovate? That’s almost as cool as News.com accepting pingbacks. 🙂
MX900 on OS X
I could not be happier, I finally got my MX900 bluetooth mouse working correctly on Mac OS X. To clarify, it always worked but I had 5 buttons that were just there for decoration, and I really missed the back and forward buttons. The magic application that made my day? Gamepad Companion. I tried a couple of others, including the awful Logitech software, and nothing even came close to working. For future reference here are the button assignments on the mouse as shown in the interface:
- Left button
- Right button
- Wheel button (press down on wheel)
- Side back arrow button
- Side front arrow button
- Switch window button (below wheel)
- Up scroll (above wheel)
- Down scroll (below wheel)
The only thing that would make it perfect is if I could make the wheel button a double-click.
Image Toolbar Header
I’m doing some code cleanup around here, and I came to a line in my <head> that is soley to work around an Internet Explorer feature I don’t want on my site.
Here is the standard way to remove it:
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />
Since the http-equiv attribute is meant to be simply a document-level replacement for real HTTP headers, and I have the ability to send out real HTTP headers, I decided to try out removing this line and replacing it with this bit of PHP, which according to the spec is functionally equivilent:
<?php header ('imagetoolbar: no'); ?>
Looks funky, but according to the HTTP 1.1 specification user agents should ignore headers they don’t recognize, so there’s no harm. However in my testing I was disappointed (though not terribly surprised) to find that Internet Explorer did not respect the header. I have trimmed other parts of my markup quite a bit though, and I’m willing to sacrifice this one line.
Contact Information
Tantek muses on contact information. One of my coding dreams has always been to sit down for a few months and write the perfect contact manager. I daydream about it sometimes and have a lot of the implementation worked out in my head. Imagine something like Plaxo, but distributed, not annoying, completely automatic, and with an infinitely flexible versioned backend. In fact, not like Plaxo at all.
More Googlebot Flailing
Now I’m seeing the Googlebot request /about/ pages relative to known blogs that don’t have any links to any /about/ URI. The last time the Googlebot flailed around like this it was fun to watch for a little bit and wonder what they had cooking in the labs, but then it got annoying. I don’t know if there are rules of bot etiquette, but requesting imagined unlinked resources while spidering can’t be a best practice.
There is of course one blog vendor who consistently has about pages at Now my question Google is: what should the rest of us do if we want our about pages indexed by this new system? Mine happens to be in the /about/ URIs, and that’s Typepad.about subdirectory of my blog, but what about people who have about.html or about-me.php? Should I set up a permanent redirect for every blog I have redirecting to the real about page?
(Note: That’s faux indignation. I don’t have any juicy conspiracy theories, and I’m not really that peeved, mostly I’m just curious what they’re up to. However juicy conspiracy theories are welcome in the comments. [As long as they don’t make fun of me for noticing these things.] )
UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /contact/ URI.
UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /stats/ URI.
DEVELOPING . . .
Typepad Error
Funky Typepad DNS error I ran into today. And what is up with every Typepad site having the same favicon? Ruins my tabs. ( I was trying to get to http://ditto.typepad.com/ the blog by the creator of RubHub.)
PHP Pear
Rotten PEAR. I’ve noticed a “good ‘ol boy” mentality in most of the PHP “community” efforts. Is PHP succeeding because of its community or in spite of it? Hat tip: Jeff Moore.
Perl’s Special Variables
acking Literature
More Friendster
I just logged into Friendster and it’s really fast. Like Orkut fast. Their markup looks good too. Russell Beattie continues the PHP discussion with Is PHP Really More Scalable Than JSP?
Calculate Pagerank
Calculate Pagerank with PHP, using some funky but cool code. Better than having to fire up IE just to use the toolbar.
Friendster goes PHP
Friendster addresses performance problems by switching from Java to PHP. Note in the comments how language zealots are flailing about pointing to benchmarks saying how much faster JSP is. The comments from the PHP guys are the only decent ones in the thread. I stand by the assertion that PHP is the top web language to use to get stuff done.
Converting CGI
Mike Davidson writes Converting CGI Movable Type Templates to PHP. No comment permalinks, but my response is # 13.
PHP, XML, and Character Encodings
Steve Minutillo writes PHP, XML, and Character Encodings: a tale of sadness, rage, and (data-)loss. Hat tip: Alex.
Aggregator Hotlinking
Image hotlinking protection breaks online aggregators, but bandwidth doesn’t matter anymore so it’s moot.
MMCache
Turck MMCache Vs PHP Accelerator. I used to use PHPA and then migrated to MMcache recently, however I had to turn it off because it kept segfaulting when compiling KSES files. However the caching functions and shared memory stuff is really neat.