Trypticon

Your authorization has been removed!

Trejkaz — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:43:00 +1000

Someone just removed me from their IM client’s roster.

Normally this would be “meh”, but Psi has this feature where you will be told, “Your authorization has been removed!” It’s quite the kick in the balls. It’s just like the old “You are so off my friends list” line which was over-parodied a while back, you start to wonder, did the other person know it would feel like that when they simply deleted you from a list?

I wonder if there is some kind of etiquette guide for how IM clients should inform you when things happen.

At the very least, it would be nice to have a “retaliate” button to click to remove them from yours as well. Otherwise you end up with a roster full of contacts whose presence you can’t see, and they can possibly still see you (depends on how they removed you, and whether your client supports authorization removal without deleting the contact from the roster.)

Oh no.

Trejkaz — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 22:05:00 +1000

Moving to Gmail

Trejkaz — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:02:00 +1000

I was experiencing quite a bit of chaos with my email accounts. The two domains I hosted myself were experiencing huge problems with spam which SpamAssassin was no longer able to solve – I would teach it some email and then an identical one would come through the next day. Then I had a couple of other ones hosted on Gmail already, but with different logins, and Gmail has that annoying feature that you can’t log into two different accounts at the same time on the same browser.

Google Apps is free for your own domain, which seemed to be a good idea, so I set it up.

Warning: Disable the Chat service instantly if you already have an XMPP server hosted elsewhere. If you leave it on, then even if you don’t update your DNS records, you will lose the ability to chat with anyone on gmail.com and other hosted domains due to a “server optimisation.” I will move my own server to Gmail only if their server starts supporting offline messages properly, instead of faking it via email.

I picked one of my existing Gmail accounts to be the master and set up every other account to forward-and-delete. Additionally I set the other accounts up with POP and used that to transfer all older emails to the main one so that I can search them.

Gmail’s POP is ridiculously slow though; it takes around half a minute per message for some reason. So it took the better part of a day to wait for all the mails to converge on the one account.

Now I’m at the point where I have to start training the spam filter, and setting up filters and labels to keep everything organised.

There are already a few annoying limitations with Gmail, such as the inability to manually order the labels on the left hand side (obvious hack is to put something like @ at the front of the labels you want to sort to the top.) And I’d really like to be able to declare some labels as special in various ways, e.g. for the unread count to be the total count for some labels.

Anyway the good thing is that this will give me a clear idea of how close Gmail comes to my own needs for a mail client. It might be that I end up bashing something together myself, and finding somewhere to host it (that’s the real issue… if only Google would start doing real hosting.)

Whoops

Trejkaz — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 21:54:00 +1000

I just switched ISPs (Internode now suck, $200/month is just unacceptable for only 90GB/month downloads.)

That would have gone smoothly, but FreeDNS have added this annoying feature where they require confirmation by email in order to detect inactive accounts. And where do they send this email? Guess where… the domain managed by their DNS server. So that mail is currently going into the void until they let me login.

The really funny thing is that by the time anyone reads this, the problem must have already been fixed. :-)

Furniture Purge

Trejkaz — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:12:00 +1000

Turns out we don’t have to move house which is good, but I’m still going to go ahead with getting rid of excess furniture and whitegoods, just to make the place seem a little more tidy again.

The thought of putting it all on eBay seems like too much trouble so I figured I might as well put something up here in case anyone wants to steal some of it before it goes to a second hand store and/or the dump.

Obviously it will have to be pickup so anyone not living in the Sydney area can disregard this message. :-)

Outdoor sofa. Not designed for outdoor use as I’m sure you can tell, and in slightly shit condition but it was shit when we acquired it. It was at least under shelter for its entire life so it’s mostly free of water damage on the top, at least. (trashed)
Average-sized fridge. Left by ex-housemate years back, still works fine, have been using occasionally for drinks storage.
Top-loading washing machine. Left by ex-housemate a few months back, never been turned on, never came to pick it up.
Three swiveling office chairs:
- blue one with a tall back;
- ~~black/grey one with a medium back;~~ (claimed)
- ~~black one with a tall back which reclines perhaps a little far back.~~ (trashed)
Two bookcases: (actually three but one has already been claimed)
- ~~Black one just over 1m high, two shelves, entire thing is in good condition, it’s just going to become redundant in a week or two;~~ (claimed, I think)
- ~~Grey one about the same size, only one shelf present but fine otherwise.~~ (trashed)

I imagine the more expensive, useful things like the fridge and washing machine are going to get the most attention. Either way the way I will play this game is that whoever comments first, gets the item(s) they choose in the comment.

Just Another Monday Morning

Trejkaz — Mon, 14 May 2007 10:13:00 +1000

Monday morning came with a request to change the company web site to American “English”.

My first thought was that we’re not a US company, so we shouldn’t need to conform to US spelling. The reasoning I got back was that US companies got scared off by British spelling.

This reasoning sounds pretty ludicrous to me, and besides, if we switch to American spelling, won’t that “scare off” the entire rest of the English speaking world?

So I thought, OK… maybe we can do this and yet not do this.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
#
# Breaks proper English spelling for the benefit of yanks.
# Word list is incomplete, but covers enough to be useful for now.

ARGF.each_line do |line|
    line.sub!(/\b(amort|apolog|author|capital|critic|emphas|general|harmon|initial|maxim|minim|optim|real|recogn|visual)is(e|ed|es|er|or|ation)\b/, '\1iz\2')
    line.sub!(/\b(anal|catal|paral)ys(e|ed|es|er|or)\b/, '\1yz\2')
    line.sub!(/\b(arm|behavi|col|flav|harb|hon|hum|neighb|sav|savi)our(s?)\b/, '\1or\2')
    line.sub!(/\b(defen|licen|offen|preten)ce(s?)\b/, '\1se\2')
    line.sub!(/\b(calib|cent|fib|kilomet|lit|meag|met|theat)re(s?)\b/, '\1er\2')
    line.sub!(/\bpractis(e|ed|ing)\b/, 'practic\1')
    puts line;
end

My only concern is that it might match an ID somewhere in the HTML which will mess the CSS up, but otherwise, it’s looking like a damn good idea.

Semantic Scrapbook

Trejkaz — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:27:00 +1000

Over the past week or so I’ve started to pull together ideas for a new web application to write. There are a number of things I’ve fussed over and so I thought I would do a bit of a mind dump here so that people can comment on my ideas.

I started wanting a tumblelog, the reason being that I frequently decide not to post something because there isn’t enough content to post with it. So I investigated a couple of options for that, one hosted and one I could run myself.

But very quickly, a tumblelog becomes inadequate for what I want to do…

Semantics

Aside from posts being short, the only truly unique feature of tumblelogs is that there are different kinds of post, and each kind of post is formatted differently.

This starts to suggest that posts have semantics, but it doesn’t look like tumblelog developers see it that way. Which is a shame, because if it were simple enough to attach semantics to a link post, you could use the webapp as a bookmarks manager as well, either by using some kind of microformat, or by offering an alternative view of the site as XBEL.

Privacy

Real bookmark managers (e.g. Scuttle) allow bookmarks to be marked as private as well as public, so I started to branch my idea. Perhaps I can make something which is a superset of bookmark management and tumblelogging, where certain posts can be marked as private, or in a multiuser scenario, semi-private. The new idea is no longer as trivial as a tumblelog so I’m equating it with being more of a web-based scrapbook. You can still make questionable posts or personal reminders on your scrapbook, just mark them private so that the whole world doesn’t see it.

Tagging

I’ve already been told that as soon as you add tagging to a tumblelog, that it isn’t a tumblelog anymore, and that’s another reason why I’ll have to call this a scrapbook instead.

For finding historical information, tagging is very convenient. There’s no point dropping an interesting link into your scrapbook if a year later, you don’t know how to find it again.

In a way this would make the application similar to systems like TiddlyWiki, in that you could use it to dump all your personal notes and as long as things are tagged sensibly, you could always perform a query which returns all relevant comments in a single page (forming a kind of virtual write-only page.)

Going a step further, you might decide that if you add a new post to a page which was generated by a tag-based search, that the new post inherits those tags by default.

No user management

User management is a bitch, and really I only want to make this a single-user system, but I still want partial privacy eventually.

A simple password-based system might allow for partial privacy without actually implementing user management. Though I suppose you could say that in my system, the password represents a username.

No commenting

Lack of comments is already very much in the style of a tumblelog, but I thought I’d drop a note here because lately I’ve been thinking that no webapp needs commenting.

“That’s ludicrous,” you say.

But there are already a bunch of ways where an arbitrary web page can be commented on, without the site itself needing to implement it. Annotea is the obvious one, it even has a Firefox extension already. Other variations on the theme exist.

There are also systems like Weblin for real-time chatting on arbitrary web pages. If/when this system ever gets standardised and lets you use your own existing IM account, it would become the perfect way to implement live feedback systems.

And so because of this, I’m inclined to never implement commenting ever again. I just need to make sure that each post has a page you can visit to see only that post.

Plugins?

I did originally want plugins…

But it looks like implementing them might be a royal pain, at least if I want to use Rails as-is. I want posts to have semantics, and I want post types to be able to derive from other post types, and Active Record really sucks for storing objects whose classes inherit from other classes.

So I don’t know what I will do here. I could use an OODBMS, or I could ditch the plugin idea and every post type gets coded into the application itself (an admin screen could have checkboxes so that you never see the post types you don’t need.)

Language

Finally I’ve also been considering whether to actually use Ruby or not.

On one hand, Ruby is great, largely because of Rails.

On the other hand if I were to use Java I would get access to db4o, which is a really good OODBMS, supporting all sorts of nice things like syncing (so I could make an app where you can post while offline, which is priceless.)

I wonder if there is any merit in a fusion of the two, running Rails under JRuby (which is very possible) and having it access the db4o objects instead of using Active Record. Then I should theoretically get my sync functionality via some code running outside of Rails.

Action Messenger 0.2.0

Trejkaz — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:04:00 +1100

Today’s new version of Action Messenger makes things slightly easier to read when sending messages:

def prod(user)
  recipient user.jid
  subject   'Prod'
  body      'You told me to give you a prod when I updated...'
end

You can send to multiple recipients too, just add them like this:

def spam
  recipients User.find_all.map { |u| u.jid }
  subject    'Buy chunky bacon'
  body       'Do I have a deal for you!'
end

These changes have been in trunk for some time, however someone recently made me aware that the documentation doesn’t describe basic things like where the config file should be. This has been properly documented now, and hence the new version being pushed out.

Mii

Trejkaz — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:45:00 +1100

I guess I haven’t posted since the Wii post back in December. That’s because the Wii is so good that I’ve been too busy playing games on it to make any weblog posts.

…

That was a lie.

What really happened was a certain kind of earth-shattering event after which I wasn’t in the mood to post anything on any sites for a month or so. I swore to myself I wouldn’t post anything about it (as I really dislike drama) and it felt wrong to post anything else in that time.

Anyway after one month straight, non-posting became a kind of anti-habit.

In a way it’s a shame to break that streak with such a content-less post as this, but I really have nothing else to say except that I might be posting again when I can think of something coherent.

Wii!

Trejkaz — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 23:19:00 +1100

Finally. I got my Wii at the midnight launch last night and just tonight I’ve finally found time to play with it. Am completely owning at Wii Play. I expect to actually get time to play Zelda some time soon. :-)

In case anyone else here owns one, my number is:

0208 8312 8922 8884