zengun

Before I’m off for a few days, last thing I’m doing is check my stats, to my surprise I see metaweblog.com as a referer.
Looks like a toned down version of weblogs.com, with less weblogs shown, and a lot of updates from Sri Chimnoy, about 900.
It’s funny, it must be a script that regularly pings the site with a random subdomain + domain name with ’srichimnoy’ inside, then a random description; when you click on the URL the script will parse the subdomain name and return the subdomain name and its random description, and a random poem. I would almost say it’s clever spamming, if only the site didn’t spam nine hundreds times.

“LIKE, OMG OMG DUUUUDE”
With these words of wisdom, I’m packing this computer with the last things in the apartment, and moving. See you in a few days.

I was looking at some thread in /boardom that had a little code nested between [php] and [/php] tags, and thought about how it would be cool if one could just specify the start of the line numbering.

After a bit of asking around and googling, it turns out <ol> accepts a start= argument.
So, here’s an updated version of my PHP line-numbering highlight functions, that make the functions accept a second argument $start_line.
I’ll just have to hack a start= argument in my phpBB’s [php] tags, and it will be just wonderful.

May: i’ve been on my feet for 6 hours today, constantly, and i’m not tired
Me: heh I’ve been on my ass for pretty much all of august and I’m not tired either, so there

It’s moving time !
I have 3 days to evacuate this apartment and leave it like it was when I entered (actually, to achieve this to the perfection, I’d have to make it dirtier than it is now).
Don’t expect many updates these days, or until I get a phoneline installed at my parents’ place in the worst scenario.

This is on-topic: Stephanie’s guide to taming the dirty dishes.
That’s what we always did at the office’s kitchen, I wonder why I never got around to do it at home.

I’m considering making /top grab weblogs.com’s changes.xml file rather than blo.gs’ one. The latter just seems to return less blogs, or not to grab data from weblogs.com regularly enough.
May is calling me names because of this very /top list.

Off-topic question:
In the movies, why do the bad guys always use wires of different colors when they make bombs ? After all, it only helps the good guys to make a guess about which color is the right wire to cut. IMHO, to make sure your bomb explodes, you should use wires of the same color, and intertwine them in crazy fashion, effectively decreasing usability. Of course, while you are making your bomb, use detachable labels to recognise the wires.
But should we expect bad guys to think about such simple unusability matters, or should I just stop thinking about ways to secure villains’ business ?

Pie menues – Reinventing the Wheel.
Do I see a (spinning) pattern ?

I had a proof-of-concept blogchalking search engine built last month using the Google API, talked about it with Daniel but it never went further and I abandoned that search engine.
Nice to see that Brian St Pierre had a similar idea, this time search chalked weblogs from a little database of certified chalked blogs instead of searching on Google. This is pretty efficient, but seems to return less or different results than Googling: for example, googling for “blogchalk France returns 2 weblogs which are not the 2 weblogs that Brian’s search returned.
Actually, this made me realise the French webloggers (those who blog in French, that is) seem not to be aware of blogchalking. Some evangelisation work’s there to do on this front.

Georgia school district adopts a creation policy, relegating evolution to “a theory, not a fact” in a disclaimer in science books.
As usual, “loud voices of the extremist few have drowned out the voice of the moderate majority”.
Chad Miller wrote them an interesting letter, with this most quotable piece:

Remember your middle-school math that taught you that in a right- triangle, the square of the length of the longest side (hypotenuse) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides? That principle is called the Pythagorean _Theorem._ Would the Board consider altering Math texts if a vocal group of constituents offered a conflicting “theory” based on faith to rival Pythogoras’s triangle theory? I suppose not, but why would the same board treat another threory with prevarication?

Indeed, had the Bible talked about geometry, I’ll let you imagine the state of architecture in today’s Christian States of America.

For all of you who remember Andre Torrez’s Power Blogger page, this will look familiar.
It gathers information from blo.gs, and rebuilds the list every 10 minutes, sorting the blogs from most updated to least updated. Updates counts are resetted at midnight GMT.
Don’t be fooled by the low counts at the moment, I coded that only two hours ago.

Funzine gives the term ‘multilingual weblog’ a whole new meaning: entries in 5 languages !

English: I like this blog.
Italian: Mi piace questo blog.
French: J’aime ce blog(ue).
Swedish: (something something) blog (something)
Spanish: Mi gustas esta bitácora.

My swedish and my spanish need some work…

Sorry Phil.
I’m shamelessly trying to TrackBack ping your entry about TrackBack and XHTML validation. Because it raises good points and because I want TrackBack to work finally.

Edit: it worked !!!

I should really find a better title.
Anyway, this is the first b2 TrackBack ping outside of tidakada.com, and it goes to pb’s TrackBack test post. Let’s see if it really works now :)

OK, it obviously didn’t. Back to the drawing board.

OK, since no one trackbacked my post [insert frown there], I’ll just trackback it myself while testing the new trackback b2 bookmarklet.

A Hacker T-Shirt sporting a program written in… Basic. Old-style Basic, at that. WTF ?

Someone TrackBack this please, I need testing ! :)
URL to TrackBack is http://tidakada.com/b2trackback.php?tb_id=1806

Of course, it’s only when I’m 90% done with implementing TrackBack in b2, and when I have lost a lot of my (very luxuriant) hair, that I find out Matt Kingston wrote an Homebrew TrackBack Tutorial.
Very interesting, since I didn’t implement it that way. Instead, I went pb’s way so that I could fit TrackBack in b2 0.x without changing the database schema.
In 1.x, the db schema will change, so I may switch to the Matt Kingston way.

Now, I still wonder how to do post-to-category and category-to-category TrackBack.

It could be argued
That few spammers would respect
Such a copyright

I’m busy implementing TrackBack in b2. Mena Trott’s introduction to TrackBack is cool but not telling me just what kind of data is passed to the TrackBack URL.
Looks like I’ll have to dive in Perl code to find out, and you know just how PHP folks love to read parse Perl code.

I gave up. AOL came back on my harddrive, reminding me I got an unlimited access account with them. I hope it doesn’t destroy my DSL setup as badly as it did last time. And if only there was Pengaol for Windows, I could avoid losing that much resources just to be connected.
Oh well.

So I was bored offline, and I figured instead of losing hair on the new b2 version code, I could merge this blog’s entries with my old blog’s.
So there they are in the archives, entries from dayzero.org, formerly “In the mood for blog”.
A quick check shows many dead links, and my trademarked terrible english. And then I checked the people I linked way back, out of them Stacy still isn’t weird and Alexis still has her wonderful design up (and by a cool coincidence, she just started blogging again !).