So I’d really like to offer a quick thank you to Jarek Gawor for developing (and releasing) his LDAP Browser/Editor which let me double check that I was connecting to the right server/port and play with the settings enough that I eventually got it sussed. Great wee Java tool.

As appealing as it might be to shift this site from SteveFerson.com to Steve.Ferson, it hardly seems worth the confusion of creating an infinite number of domains for the same company. At present you can usually find a site by typing companyname.com or companyname.co.uk into your address bar. Under these plans, even Googling for a company name could theoretically bring up hundreds of results all pretending to be the ‘real’ site.

That said, it was worth it for this headline from ZD Net.

Good news for existing proposals like .nyc for New York City and .xxx for adult sites. Depending on the costs of setting it up, I could also see a new TLD appearing for Northern Ireland (.nir ?) and am sure some enterprising spirit will attempt to register .blog.  Feel free to leave your suggestion for a new TLD below.

To that end my tiny following just got tinier with the deletion of anyone following more than 10,000 people. That seems more than fair to me.

A quick google has revealed that I’m not alone in being pissed off by this. There is even a blog dedicated to “tracking abuse of the word ‘literally’” (apparently it happens even in works by respected authors, I mean come on!)

“It is bad enough to exaggerate but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.”

Ambrose Bierce, discussing the example sentence “His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet.” in Write it right: A little blacklist of literary faults

I was reminded of this yesterday when one of those shitty “reality” TV shows was on. OK, it was shipwrecked (it was Sunday, my other half was watching it and I was immobile due to recovering from some gentle exercise). The latest bint rejected from the island was being carried off in a boat, supposedly on her way home. When she began to suspect she wasn’t being taken home but to another island she claimed that, if her suspicions were confirmed, she “would literally die”.

As appealing as that prospect sounded my fear that she was just the latest in a long line of people abusing the word literally was confirmed when after a full week she had failed to live up to her promise. Qu’elle surprise!

I love PHP. It’s everywhere. All my sites are written in it. My CMS is written in it. My blog engines, Wordpress and b2evolution, are written in it. It’s free. It runs on any platform. Hosts all support it. With PHP 5 they’ve even done a lot of work on PHP4’s main downfall - lack of OOP support.

One thing really pisses me off though - it’s totally inconsistent.  Consider these two functions:

1. strstr — Find first occurrence of a string
2. in_array — Checks if a value exists in an array

Take a close look. See the signatures?

string strstr ( string $haystack , mixed $needle [, bool $before_needle ] )
bool in_array ( mixed $needle , array $haystack [, bool $strict ] )

In in_array the first parameter is what you’re looking for and the second is what you’re looking in (more or less consistent with preg_match).  In strstr (and its derivatives) this order is reversed. Who on Earth let that slip through? I’m yet to find a free text editor that will tell you which parameters a given function expects (Dreamweaver does a decent job but it’s bloody expensive for a text editor!) the way Visual Studio does for C#, which I use a lot in work.  Given that situation, you’d expect consistency in this sort of thing.  Apparently not so. Instead, every time I want to use one of these functions I have to do a quick Google to bring me to the PHP manual page to tell me which order the parameters come in.

Of course they can’t even fix that without breaking backwards compatibility either, so we’re probably stuck with it.  Bloody marvellous!

Wee Niggles

First the bad. When you view Page Info from the context menu it doesn’t give a link to the CSS file in the Media tab any more. I was sure it was there in 2 and a quick google confirmed this. This really sucks - I can’t see why they’ve taken it out.

Secondly, when I was looking through the options to try and return the aforementioned CSS links, I discovered Firefox had decided it was going to automatically download any future updates when they were discovered (I promptly switched the option to “Ask me…”). Bad Firefox.

Magic Address Bar

The good is good though. It doesn’t seem like it at first, but to my mind the biggest improvement of all is the address bar. Sure they’ve added a “Most Visited” folder to your bookmarks toolbar which (shockingly, given the title) contains a list of the sites you visit most frequently, but the address bar has some great, if not immediately obvious, usability improvements.

Firstly there’s support for Extended Validation certificates. These are new forms of SSL certificates being issued (mostly to big companies due to their expense) and are used by IE7 too. A normal SSL certificate will turn the background of your favicon section (far left of the address bar) a bluey colour. An extended validation certificate turns it green and displays the name and country of the organisation. The aim is to tackle phishing, but that only works if people know what the colours are for - so consider the above publicity my good deed for the day.

The best feature by far though (IMHO) is that you can now search your history just by typing in the address bar. So if you’ve been looking at sites about the Maze stadium just type Maze and it brings up a drop-down list of all the sites you’ve visited with the word Maze in the domain or the title.

Better still it works on multiple words. So to find wikipedia articles you’ve looked at recently containing the word maze, just type “maze wiki” (no quote marks) and voila!

Overall it’s definitely worth upgrading. Aside from the address bar search there’s nothing that’s really, really impressed me (although I’ve been told the bookmarks management dialogue has been improved too) but it’s a step in the right direction and there’s nothing showstoppingly bad.

Oh yes, and they are claiming success for Download Day’s record attempt with figures quoted as 8 million.

Good work Mozilla.

• Wireless Media Streamer Buffalo LinkTheater
  Streams video (most divx/xvid and wmv9) and/or music to my TV from a DLNA compliant server like the Linkstation Live or Windows Media Player’s built-in media sharing service.
• 500GB Home NAS Buffalo LinkStation Live (HS-DH500GL)
  Can store video and music files and stream them over a wireless network to a DLNA certified media streaming device like my LinkTheater.
• Mobile Phone - Nokia N73 smartphone
  5 megapixel camera, Symbian/Series 60 OS, currently on Orange Pay As You Go
  
• Nintendo Wii
• PlayStation 2 (Slimline)
  
• Wireless ADSL Modem/Router - Netgear DG834G
  Old version 1; basic but functional.
  
• Laptop PC - Acer Aspire 5003 wlmi dual-booting Windows XP and Ubuntu
• Desktop PC
  My main computer is one I built up myself and upgraded over the years, specced as follows:
  • Asus A7V333 motherboard
  • 1.5GB DDR RAM
  • Athlon XP 2400+ CPU
  • Windows Vista Business
  • Linksys WMP54G Wireless-G PCI Adapter
  • 19″ LG M198WA widescreen TFT Monitor/TV combination
  • 17″ CRT Monitor

So, if you’ve any questions on any of the above, please let me know. Oh and I also have broadband with Plus.net (who are excellent) where £15 a month gets me 8Mbps and 15GB usage (unlimited from midnight to 8am) and I have web hosting with WebHostingBuzz.com where I have a reseller account for just $5 a month.

Anyway, it turns out to be an amazingly simple mechanism using the edit key (the one on the bottom left with the pencil icon on it - I knew it had to have some purpose!!). Thanks to some person called Walker for his generic guide to Symbian Series 60 functionality.

Copy: To copy text to the clipboard, hold the pencil/edit key until Copy appears on the screen above the right soft-key and scroll using the joystick to select the text. When you’ve selected the text to copy, just hit Copy.

Paste: To paste text from the clipboard, move the cursor to where you want to paste and hold the pencil key until Paste appears on the screen by your right soft key. When it appears and then press the right soft key to paste.

As it turns out, it’s much simpler than that. Apache was sending the file to PHP to be parsed, by PHP was ignoring my code. Why? WAMP Server 2 comes with “short open tags” turned off (this may be a general PHP or PHP 5 thing, though not sure). Click WAMP -> PHP -> php.ini to edit the aforementioned file and find the line:

short_open_tag = Off

Replace Off with On et voila.

The ‘more correct’ though long-winded solution is to replace all your <? opening tags with <?php if you’re really keen (though that’ll also mean replacing <?= with <? echo). Me, I think I like my short tags.