Charl van Niekerk » Blog: August 2007

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GardenRoute.com Portal Upgraded

The GardenRoute.com Portal site has recently been relaunched.

Comment Moderation Back On

I used to have comment moderation turned off, then I turned it on because of an excessive amount of spam, then I turned it back off again after spam seemed to disappear for a while, and now I turned it back on because I'm getting too much spam again. Comment moderation just makes it easier to delete the spam; I don't really want to do this because I don't want to have you wait before your comment appears on the site; discussion should be taking place without me having to accept all the valid comments but at this point in time the spam is exceeding the valid comments. So there you have it. Comment moderation is on. :(

Joomla! JXHTML Demo & Source Code

"JXHTML" is the codename for the Joomla! Semantic Web Integration GSoC project. You can browse the sources online or run an anonymous subversion checkout like so (from the command line naturally, the way I do things, you're on your own if you prefer GUI tools):

svn co http://joomlacode.org/svn/soc2007/JXHTML/trunk

There's actually a branch called "2007-08-20" but this is just a snapshot really of the work at the 20th (the pencils-down cut-off date for the Summer of Code); the latest code you can always find in the trunk so that's probably where you'll want to look.

There is also an online demo of the system available. This demo is running on a reasonably new version of the trunk and unfortunately some of my templates were customised based on older versions. Therefore you'll find quite a few features that does not work, but don't let this deter you; there are bugs I am busy fixing but the idea behind this demo is for you to look at the generated markup since the design is definitely not worth it. Remember, I am a coder, not a designer after all. ;)

The changes I was working on include the following:

No more tables used for layout purposes.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (instead of Transitional).
Better markup semantics and accessibility.
hAtom integration in the content component.
hCard integration in the contact component.

Please note that some of the pages might not validate. This will probably be because of some markup inserted from the database. My templates all validate perfectly unless I stuffed up somewhere. :)

This is only really the beginning of this project. There is lots of work that is still in the pipeline so I am indeed going to be one very busy coder the next couple of months making further improvements and hopefully seeing most of my work into the Joomla! trunk.

Windows Live Mail: Oh, 5 GB now?

This was an interesting surprise. Although Windows Live Mail still advertises 2 GB storage space on its login page, after logging in it appears that I now have 5 GB storage space. I'm not sure for how long this has been going on since I don't really use Windows Live Mail these days (personally I prefer Gmail). This is a rather interesting move though. Are they trying to outdo Google at their own game?

Windows Live Mail has been receiving some attention thanks to its drag and drop capabilities. Although I have to agree that it's a "nice" thing to have, I don't personally regard that as any reason to move over. Gmail still gives me text-only advertisements (unlike those massive ugly old-school banners of Windows Live Mail) as well as many other things. I don't even use a fraction of the 2 GB storage I have anyway.

Quite interesting to see though how things have changed since a post I wrote a year ago.

GSoC Joomla! Podcast

Ok this is actually already quite old but I only listened to it now. There is a podcast in ogg format available of the Joomla! team at Google regarding the Summer of Code. My mentor, Rob Schley, is also on it. There are more podcasts available as well of some of the other mentoring organisations.

Caught inside a table, literally.

You are probably wondering why I was so silent for the last couple of days. Wednesday evening I came down with a terrible fever. I must have caught some bug and was really sick for a while. I am starting to recover now luckily though.

Wednesday night / Thursday morning was the worst. I had (what seemed to be) a 10-hour-long nightmare of me being stuck inside an HTML table. Yes, I dreamt I existed inside of an HTML document and got caught inside a table. I could not wrangle myself out of it either.

There were colspan, rowspan, width, height and border attributes all over the show that kept me from breaking loose. I so wished the person that wrote that page just knew how to use CSS.

Yes, this sounds extremely absurd right now, but for some strange reason not at that time. I was totally confused.

Thursday I was only up for about 2 hours and then went back to bed. I tried computering but felt like falling off my chair.

So, what's the point behind this blog post? I have no idea. Must be an after-effect of that stupid fever.

mirror.ac.za problems

I have always been a really big fan of mirror.ac.za right since they started out; however the last while I am honestly very disappointed with them.

Firstly, they used to have a brilliant OpenBSD mirror at openbsd.mirror.ac.za but now both the HTTP and FTP are empty and that really sucks. What happened, guys?

Secondly, what's up with php.mirror.ac.za? According to mirror.ac.za it was synchronised yesterday but the latest version of PHP on there is still 5.2.2 and we've been at 5.2.3 for a long time already.

Maybe somebody over there needs to check the update scripts? :)

Update: It is indeed a temporary problem and they're aware of it now - please see the comments. Looking forward to seeing it back up and running. :)

There is life after the Summer of Code

Yes, there is life after the Google Summer of Code. First of all, sincere apologies for not blogging about it more. I have been hectically busy the last few months and really have not had a lot of extra time on my hands.

I am going to be hitting this blog over the next week or two regarding my Summer of Code project for Joomla! The deadline was reached yesterday so from here off onwards it's just pushing out a large quantity of text and then fixing bugs so that my work will hopefully make its way into the Joomla! trunk.

Just want to take this opportunity to thank all the cool people from Joomla!, my fellow students and Google (naturally) for this great programme. I am definitely looking forward to participate again next year (if time allows). I already have a lot of new ideas on how to improve my work further and the project definitely does not stop here.

My Joomla! Semantic Web Template

As part of my Summer of Code project for Joomla!, I had to create my own template that's as clean and semantic as possible.

Here are some screenshots. My designs skills are teh suck, I know, so please don't laugh! :)

myXchange Meeting 15 Aug

Many thanks to Jayx, Leroy and Louis for coming to our last meeting. Please take note of teh following details for our next meeting in case you find yourself in or around teh George area in teh middle of next week.

Here's all teh details for teh myXchange 15 August Meeting:

Date: Wednesday 15 August 2007 from 18:30
Location: Conference Room, Builders Exhibit Centre, George, South Africa

Please check out teh event on Google calendar and kindly add yourself to the calendar event, leave a comment or contact me privately if you would like to attend.

If you don't know where this is, please take a look at teh following map:

Some of you might not have received an e-mail through teh normal announcement mailing list. Unfortunately it seems like we are currently experiencing technical issues with that.

Jayx also made some very cool additions to our website, particularly a search feature and a calendar.

Although I didn't blog about this before, about a month or so back I finally created a blog planet for us using Yahoo Pipes. That was indeed a lot of fun, although a bit of a lengthy process. If you would like to see how I did it, please take a look at teh pipe source.

Google Video Resumable Downloads

Using KeepVid, I got the IRIs of both the AVI and MP4 versions of Horizon, Titan, A Place Like Home?? on Google Video.

The MP4 supports resumable HTTP 206 Partial Content perfectly, but the AVI not. How interesting. :)

Downloading videos form YouTube / Google Video

I know Europeans, Americans, Asians (probably anywhere in the world other than Africa) won't understand what I am complaining about right now, but this is a real issue.

Although 99% of the stuff on video sharing sites is a total waste of time, I know, there is some really good content on some of them.

My major frustration when downloading stuff off Google Video is that the download fails before even 50% of it is finished loading. This happens while I'm using the player on the site, and also while I'm using Keepvid.com. The reason for me using Keepvid is so that I don't loose a video I have been waiting for 5 hours to download thanks to Firefox crashing (although now after some upgrades this does not happen nearly as often as it used to).

So, it's a standard HTTP download. When I use wget with the -c option, it should automatically resume the download after it has been broken off (due to Connection reset by peer, timeouts, etc thanks to my crap connectivity) providing that the HTTP server it's downloading from supports it. Google Video never supported resumes since I started using Keepvid; YouTube used to support them but no longer it seems either.

My question: why not? People overseas with good connectivity can download all they want, and here in Africa we are being disadvantaged because we can't. That really sucks. I think we need to start a petition.

Also, does anybody know how to download videos without using the online player from Veoh.com using Linux?

(Please note: I am not copying / sharing any of these videos illegally; I download them for my personal use only. They are put up for public download so that's what I am attempting to do but often unfortunately not succeeding.)

South African Pizzas and Chillies

I am honestly very disappointed with the current state of the art of pizza making in South Africa. Yes, I call it an "art" because it is, like most other things in life really when you think about it. If you don't have passion for whatever you're doing and almost feeling artistic about it, you might as well give up because you're probably going to suck at it.

Anyway, back to pizzas. Why am I so pissed off? Well, I'm not aiming this against every single pizza maker in South Africa. There are some out there that are actually very good. However, I'm mainly disappointed with the larger chain companies such as Panarottis, Debonairs, etc.

So, let me tell you how a really lekker pizza tastes to me.

Firstly, the dough must be soft, sticky and reasonably thin. Then you have lots of cheese and it must be sticky too (although this does depend on the type of pizza you're ordering because there is a great variety out there). You will want to have some tastable quantity of tomato paste (unless you're ordering pizza bianca of course).

Yes, of course you want liberal (but not too liberal) use of herbs and spices (similar to most other foods).

Recently, I got a pizza from Panarottis. They gave some chilli with separately but that really pissed me off.

I don't consider myself to be an authority on chillies or on the way to prepare them in any way, but since I eat a couple of KG of chillies every week, I think I should know what I'm talking about by now.

The best way to eat chillies imho is to buy them fresh and chop them up finely.

I really don't understand what's the point in cooking chillies. All that you do is you loose about 90% of the flavour, and all you have left is the burning sensation. Why don't you just leave your food in the microwave for another couple of seconds and burn your mouth that way, if that's all you care about?

Oh yes, and I don't even want to start mentioning the health benefits. Chillies are extremely healthy but if you cook them they loose a large quantity of their value.

So yeah, I really don't understand how these people are still in business. Come on! I rather make my own pizza at home, thank you very much, and you can keep your shit and eat your own dog food (literally), cause that's all it is in my opinion.

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