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| Tuesday, 18 June 2013 | Dereel | |
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Goodbye Friends
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Phone call from somebody at a company Wordsworth. He wanted access to the domain fbbg.org.au. I told him there was a web site, but no, it seems Wordsworth (or whatever) is the company doing the transition to a “professional” web site, and what he really wanted was information on how to update the DNS information. He had the registry key, but didn't know what to do with it.
Asked him to send me a mail message, which came from Adel, with whom I had spoken earlier this year, with an email domain address from a different domain. Sent her the information, and the DNS records were quickly updated. Off to look at the site. Nothing. Literally nothing: the web server delivered an empty document. Sent her a message to that effect; it seems that they still hadn't loaded the content. Later I found this page, which stayed there all day long.
Why? It looks as if they first bent the DNS and then started to install the web site. Why couldn't they have done it before switching the DNS? And why did it take so long?
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Death to HTML!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While playing around with my photos a few days ago, I came across a strange problem: in my diary for 16 April 2011, my normal photo resizing stopped working correctly. Spent some considerable time investigating it, finally reducing it to a simple example. Normally I have five potential display sizes for an image: hide (size 0), “thumbnail” (67,500 pixels, size 1), “small” (270,000 pixels, size 2), and two “big”, both the native size of the image. Size 3 scales this image to the width of the window, while size 4 shows it in full resolution.
In this case, though, size 3 was smaller than size 2. Everything else worked. My image display functions are large and have evolved along with my understanding of PHP. All in all they're 2,500 lines long, and I dreaded debugging them. Was this maybe a result of the “lazy loading” of images that I implemented a year ago? In the meantime I've found some other reasons to want to disable it, so I added a request parameter lazy which defaults to 1, but when set to 0 disables the lazy load. That's particularly useful for printing things out, since printing doesn't enable the loading. And in this case it gave me the opportunity to confirm that it wasn't the problem with my web page.
What was it? Hacked around in the image and finally discovered that a <p/> tag was causing it. If I replaced it with a <p></p> pair, the problem didn't occur.
Why? It seems that <p/> is not allowed in all dialects of HTML, and browsers all interpret it in such a way that the implied CSS remains in effect after the tag. But it is in XHTML, which is what I'm using here.
That could change, but at the time of writing it's correct.
And no test tools complain about the usage. However, it seems that I'm sending out headers from the web server indicating that this is text/html. Not deliberately.
And then I hear a claim that the P tag is deprecated in HTML5. According to the W3 schools reference that's not the case, but who knows what might happen? In any case, these things differ from one dialect to another. Why didn't they introduce a completely different markup instead of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear?
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SCO: The pain that never ends
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
In other news, Jürgen Lock pointed me at this report. After only 10 years, a complete lack of evidence, and a bankruptcy, SCO (now spelt “XINUOS”) is still not giving up with their law suit against IBM. Why?
Went back looking and discovered that it was ten years ago today that SCO announced that they had terminated IBM's UNIX license. It's also the tenth anniversary of the publication of a Byte interview with Chris Sontag, unfortunately also no longer accessible. Went looking and found that most of the documents to which I had referred in my documentation of the case have since ceased to exist. Spent some time tidying up my own documents, which are sorely in need of it, notably my rebuttal of the Sontag interview. What a mess it all is, and how few of the web links there are still active!
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Minimal garden work
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
I've done almost nothing in the garden for months, and it shows. But gradually I have to do some things. For reasons that no longer make sense, I moved the Meyer lemon to the north verandah two weeks ago. That's not a bad place for it in the summer, but it's no good at all in the winter, when the greenhouse would be a much better place, so moved it there.
Also dragged out the Cyclamen plants that have been in the shade area since the summer. There are seven pots, and I had to extricate them from the grass that had grown around them. It looks as if three of them haven't survived. I should pay more attention to these things.
| Wednesday, 19 June 2013 | Dereel | |
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Cleaning up the fallen branch
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Topic: gardening, general | Link here |
CJ along today to remove the branch that fell last week, along with another that had fallen in a paddock a little later, and also to finally to remove the locust that I had been leaving until the small birch next to it was big enough. But somehow the birch was losing the battle; it's still only about 1.8 m high, while the locust had reached 3 m, and the trunk was 25 cm in diameter. Clearly not a thing to allow to establish itself.
While I was at it, I asked him to remove another of the trees that had sprung up in what should be the birch grove, which I took to be one of the Pittosporums that once created the Cathedral. But then I saw buds:
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That's clearly not a Pittosporum. What is it? I have a feeling that I should know, but it evades me at the moment. At least it means it will survive until it has flowered.
| This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have a horror of reverse chronological documents, so all my diary entries are chronological. I try to leave the pages here for two days; you'll find them all in the archive, so if I fall behind a day or two, you may find more here. Note that I often update a diary entry a day or two after I write it. | Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so. |
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