One man's struggle with technology and consumer affairs
Had a bitch of a day today in work, with an application I was playing with refusing to play with Active Directory (largely because I’ve never used LDAP before and couldn’t figure out the weird bloody syntax).
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.
Yesterday’s decision by ICANN to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to create their own top-level domain is a bit worrying. With TLDs like .TV, .biz and .info struggling to make much of an impact (except maybe doubling the amount of spam flying around the internet), who really thinks that allowing people to make up their own?
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.
I have a tiny following on Twitter. I’m comfortable with that. In fact I’d much rather have nobody listening than have a list of people following me who are also “following” 162,458 other people! You’d have thought Twitter would take a dim view of such blatant spam, but apparently not.
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.
I’ve decided there’s probably enough material out there to start running “Things that Piss Me Off” as a regular feature. I’m going to retcon Friday’s PHP niggle as “Things that Piss Me Off 1”, so today’s entry is number 2.
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 need a quick bitch.
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:
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!
I haven’t come across anything truly groundbreaking in Firefox 3, possibly because I’ve become accustomed to much of the feature set through the Betas and RCs, but there are one or two improvements that are quite useful (as well as a couple of regressions unfortunately).
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.
Looks like the excitement is a little bit premature. Not just yet, but at 6pm BST the newest version of Mozilla’s FireFox web browser will be released. Mozilla want Firefox 3 to break the record for the most downloads in 24 hours, which begs the question as to why they pissed off Australasia and half of Asia by promoting Download Day as today, 17th June, when they’re not making the new version available until 10am Pacific Time which means the aforementioned regions will not see the download released until it is 18th June there. That’s without even considering yours truly and millions of other Europeans who will be finished their days work.
Good work Mozilla.
A lot of people come to this site searching for help on specific issues with or opinions/info a specific gadget or technology. For that reason, I thought I’d state publicly the gadgets and technologies I use (embarrassing though that may prove).
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.
I’ve had this phone for over a year now and have, to my shame, only just figured out how to copy and paste. I had an inkling it could do it because there’s an option in your call log to “Use Number” where one of the sub-menu options is “Copy”; which just made it more frustrating that I couldn’t figure out how to paste!!
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.
I spent ages trying to figure out why my new installation of WAMP Server 2 wouldn’t parse my PHP and was spitting it out exactly as-is in the source file. I hoked around in the VirtualHost configuration, because the PHPMyAdmin that comes with WAMP Server was working fine so it had to be something wrong in the VirtualHost that I just configured that was stopping .php files being sent to the PHP parser, yes? No.
As it turns out, it’s much simpler than that. Apache was sending the file to PHP to be parsed, but 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.
