The Internet — A global source of practical uses

As Pete Abrams put it on the very first panel of Sluggy Freelance; at least as far as it is a repository of species memory. In these heady days before we regard Google as the new Microsoft, the ability to type in an error message and get a how-to-fix in moments is just amazing.

Like at the weekend, having acquired an old HP workstation with a pre-wiped disk to use as a server, I though I'd be daring and run up Mandrake 10 with a 2.6 kernel. And having installed, got a kernel panic during boot, trying to mount the file system. Yep, known problem, trying to mount a filesystem while the disk drivers are still on the unmounted filesystem. You can fix it with an intermediate RAM-disk stage, but I took the simple route and just backed off to a 2.4 kernel instead.

Smashing!

This is not being a good year for windscreens. Back at the start of June, driving down to Salisbury, just leaving Wing on the way to Aylesbury, there was a loud impact as another car passed, leaving a 2cm or so gouge in the screen, that within 30 seconds had become a 10cm crack; and despite contacting Autoglass straight off, we couldn't get a replacement fitted until after we'd returned home after 3 nights away. Then it happened again on Tuesday, a far less impressive impact that turned into a 25cm crack at once. This time I got an appointment on Thursday, but the guy was off sick, so it wasn't until this morning the repair happened.

In a way, the delay was convenient, as Thursday it rained very hard a lot; today was dry. It's bad enough just leaving a window open a crack or the sunroof ajar when the heavens open. With the whole windscreen missing, it wouldn't have borne thinking about.

Home network

With a bit of sustained wireless use, sitting in the conservatory (roughly diagonally opposite the base-station and through the central chimney stack and rear wall) I did observe a few drop-outs, where I needed to manually force a re-acquisition; and depending how I sat, the bandwidth varied between 1 and 11Mb/s. This is with a Netgear DG834G "everything in a box" as the base station, and a basic Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA wireless card, running 128-bit WEP.

The recent weather has also been affecting the line - the ADSL modem logging at the DG834G showed a number of seamless reconnects of the ADSL circuit.

The logs also show that every few hours there are a couple of handle-rattling incidents on ports 139 (Netbios i.e. file shares) and 3127 (officially, according to the IANA, this is the registered port for CTX Bridge Port, but IRL, part of the port range that the MyDoom virus family accepts on) from different IP addresses in the same Class A block, which the firewall component has dropped. I'm still running ZoneAlarm on all the connected machines as well, so in effect treating the internal network infrastructure as DMZ, which it certainly would be if I do the geeky thing of running an externally visible web-server.

WinXP SP2

Applying the 275Mb monster to a couple of machines yesterday, I noted a few quirks. On one, it failed to detect the virus scanner; on the other, with exactly the same one, it found it OK; but failed to detect ZoneAlarm, and put the XP firewall on as well (leading to potential network issues). So in each case I had to shut the security centre up manually. So it's probably good for folks who don't have any security at all up, but is a nuisance in cases where you do.

Apart from that, the main thing that changed was on a Tablet PC, where the on-screen keyboard has changed from the pearlescent XP-silver look to something in a flat, dark blue-grey (both the password entry keyboard and the in-session one). There's also a new letter-cell input for pen input as well as the previous two choices. And it re-set the "do you want a tour of the tablet features" pop-up on each user account.

Blog on the map - ICBM URL

Following the entry on Clagnut, I've now put up a rough map link, containing home and work locations, but vague enough that you'd need a phonebook to home in on me. That's just the most significant half of the post-code (the full one puts a circle within 30 meters of where I'm sitting now). There's nothing given away here that various postings about my journeys will have given away.

Blog al fresco

Well, now I have ADSL - and with a wireless hub, I'm able to sit at the picnic table halfway down the garden, with hands still grubby from doing some weeding, and sip a beer while updating the blog. How decadent. I thought back in the late 90s that putting in Cat-5 wiring about the house was geeky enough - and now it looks so quaint and old-fashioned.

And thinking about relics of earlier years, back in 90 or 91, we had some work done on the eaves - replacing everything exterior with uPVC, and renewing the end-most structural beams. While removing some of the unwanted greenery from the drive - not helped by having the house sharing the driveway occupied by an old lady who's had a stroke, so the place is getting a bit wild - I just found another two roofing nails left over from the renovations.

[Later] Uh - interrupted in mid flow - rain (and then bad light) stops play... That's novel.

Javascript, Konqueror/Safari and Enkoder

I use the old Windows command-line version of the hivelogic.com Enkoder. As it stands, it generates a bunch of document.write() vomit. This of course doesn't work if you want to serve a page as XHTML. You need to use the DOM.

My first take was to replace each string extraction as

which works in IE and Gecko. But that generates a mess in Konqueror. This works well there as well:

Which is odd, since they should be equivalent.

Alas the current Enkoder version is not only not available as a free-standing .exe except on Mac, its output is not at all amenable to rephrasing as DOM manipulation, being a blob that expands (somehow) in situ.

What a difference a year makes

A year back I was at Conjuration, the latest instance of the RPG convention, and the temperatures were just down from their record-breaking levels. There I got inspired by Heroquest - and I would have expected to have been in Leicester this or one of the last couple of weekends for the alternate year biennial, more Glorantha oriented, con; and I'd expected to have been blogging more about it. But as noted earlier, anime has managed to win out.

It also makes a year since the temperatures finally goaded me into getting a cropped haircut, rather than the non-descript, parting on the left, style I'd maintained at various lengths — up off the ears for the previous decade or so; very shaggy while in the 6^th form and at university— for as far back as I remember (at least back to '63). And it's so much more comfortable and convenient - it's not really a noticeable loss of insulation in the winter, but it is better when it dries quickly after a shower in cold weather.

It did mean adjusting the fit of my cycle helmet :-)

2002 - a work oddessy

The car went over the 2000 mile mark today, reading 2002 as I parked it.

More on signatures on root…

If you have a file that contains the <?xml> processing instruction, IE is in tag soup quirks mode anyway, so for IE5 and up you lose nothing by hiding the extended DOCTYPE within the appropriate conditional comments. And IE3 people will already be seeing the <?xml>. But there's not a one-size fits-all solution for Firefox with the same data being served as application/xhtml+xml and as text/html, let alone other browsers.

Another nice idea, not quite ready for prime time. *sigh*

Styling the body element in XHTML

body {position: absolute; top: 0px; width: 100%} does nothing for pages served as HTML. But this style is useful for Firefox and pages served as XHTML, as it makes the body element in XHTML behave just as it does in HTML and fill the entire viewport - no need to use a html-level id attribute to hang a style from on the base site.

Alas, it doesn't fix the doctype closure problem from the previous post.

Signatures on root i.e. <html id="">

They would be a good idea. You do need a tag at this level to apply different styles to the whole viewport if you're using XHTML served properly as application/xhtml+xml from the one style-sheet, and it's a useful way to identify your site for site-based user defined styles. It just isn't valid in XHTML 1.1 - unless you make the legitimate change as per Anne vanKesteren and extend the DTD thus

at which point a page containing

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" id="www-stevegilham-com-grey">

will validate against (at least) my Java based validator using Xerces, and even against the w3c validator!

Alas, in both Firefox 0.9.2 and IE6 (so probably all browsers) it shows up the characters " ] >" at the start of the page - a premature closing of the DOCTYPE - when presented as text/html. It is clean when presented as application/xhtml+xml to Firefox. This makes it more awkward for static pages served from somewhere you don't control. In Firefox, adding margin-top: -1.2em; to the body element pushes it out of the way, but not in IE - there you need to put a non-semantic div inside the body to hold everything it does, and move and style that instead (but only for IE). And you don't want to do either for proper XHTML. *sigh*

The stray characters are affected by some *-level styles (font-size, line-height, display), but those usually nuke the page - and body level styles don't override that.

I love CSS

Having just spotted that my lower left site-map button was adrift, it was just a matter of editing my separately hosted style-sheet, rather than having to republish the blog - and then adding a few extra styles to tart up the archives list to be rollover buttons. Even with a bit of html>body hacking to hide rules from IE.

Film — Last Life in the Universe

One of the films I didn't manage to see at the festival - a suicidal Japanese librarian working in Thailand, on the run from the yakuza, falls in with a "waitress", tidies her house up, escapes violent death due to a convenient attack of diarrhoea, and then somehow ends up in police custody. An odd little piece, with dialogue in Thai, Japanese, and broken English as the common language between the two.

Not more than "mostly harmless", but more off-beat than much of the other festival stuff.

Slow start

Weekend was busy setting up the new home network - a shiny new router/modem/firewall/802.11g access point now that broadband has finally made it to the village. Not that the service will go live until next week...

Meanwhile it's just too darn hot and humid to do anything much, other than in small bursts. Which includes making the excuse that I can stop in the garden when I've filled up the green wheelie-bin with shredded bits of tree pruning.