zengun

As seen on Standblog, whose author found about it on Karl’s weblog, the hreflang attribute is now a new resident of this weblog’s links.
That is, for links that aren’t in english, as I consider giving an hreflang attribute to links that are already in the document’s language is redundant. Is there a way to give tags a default attribute ? I might have to look into that possibility, to make the stylesheet give a default hreflang=”en” attribute to links in the #blog layer.

(By the way, if you’re reading this from MSIE and don’t really see any difference between the links to french content and the links to english content, you might want to use a browser that actually understands CSS2. Then you’ll see links to french content are followed by a grey [fr] distinctive sign.)

(2nd By the way, more fun with CSS selectors, this time with CSS3 selectors to indicate external links.)

In an effort to socialise with other webloggers, I registered on MeetUp and BlogTree.
I do not expect much from MeetUp, really, since the site’s author makes it seem like Paris is the only place in France where we could meet up. Duh, foreign people should know there’s more to France than Paris, but oh well, part of the blame could be put on France’s secular Paris-centric nature.
I recognised 2 persons in the fellow frenchies who registered: Christophe whom I conversed with and whom I scheduled to meet with other french ‘jouebeurs/carnetiers’ (the french translation of ‘weblogger’ is still as unstable as can be), and Alvin whose blog I sometimes visit.
And when it comes to BlogTree, I don’t expect to see anyone adding my blog as a parent, nor am I cocky enough to declare ‘big’ blogs as my parents. But at least I’m there !

Perhaps if I started a blog in French, I would actually start meeting french webloggers. But I rarely browse the web in french, and we frenchies are lagging behind on the blogging scene, always making translations of essays by american webloggers instead of providing original essays. So I wouldn’t have much to link to. Enfin bon…

Yay ! I just found out why I couldn’t pingback Hixie‘s dummy blog.
In fact, I could really send them a pingback request. But since b2 converts ampersands into & and Hixie’s pingback server doesn’t convert them back to ampersands, the pingback server couldn’t find a link to a dummy blog’s post.
It’s fixed now, I’ve made b2 convert ampersands into & and everything’s gonna be alright.

One day I stumbled upon a nice DOS command: subst. It maps a drive letter to a directory, so my files in c:\phpdev\www could be accessed just by using w:\ as the path.
But there was one drawback, making a bat file with only ‘subst w: c:\phpdev\www’ would result in an endless loop. For some unknown reason, whenever one clicked on the .bat file or made it run at startup, it would continually call itself in the same DOS window without actually mapping the drive letter. So each time I booted I had to type the command in a prompt because subst mapping is only lasting until the next reboot, and that grew old very quickly.
Tonight I thought ‘how about putting an echo statement just after the subst command’, and that was what fixed the problem.
So if you want to use subst and make it map a drive letter every time you boot windows, here’s what you put in your .bat file:

subst w: c:\some\path
echo ‘subst done !’

Finally winxp’s first service pack took its place on my computer, and finally it’s got its share of deceit with it. First thing, I expected to find WMP 9.0 because I must have misread some article, so I was a bit weary when I saw that WMP’s about box would tell me it was still version 8. Actually, now I’m relieved that it didn’t install WMP 9 with all the DRM garbage it carries. Second thing, I was about to write about the systray that didn’t hide inactive icons, but it just hid them, some 45 minutes after I rebooted though.

In the meanwhile, I prepared b2 0.6pre5′s release by adding pingback and trackback form elements to the interface (as opposed to always do pingback and use trackback only from the bookmarklet). Made the trackback URL field accept several URLs separated by commas, so that you could trackback every single post that is relevant to your own post at the same time. I re-discovered the <label> tag and added it to form elements to give them a magic feeling, too.
And now comes the most dreaded task: updating the readme. Boy how I hate doing this task. I should really re-format that readme in a more easily updatable way (and using logical markup and CSS instead of this terrible mess of <br /> tags all around).

Hixie’s fun with Unicode made me try to see which of these characters actually displayed in a browser.
To check if they’re displayed, all you have to do is convert the hex (20E0) to a decimal value (8416) and then use that decimal value to make an html numeric entity (&#8416;).
Not to my surprise, Mozilla displayed most of these characters while IE and Opera failed. Is there a list of the Unicode characters that Mozilla (or any browser for that matter) can display ?

Chris’s fastnsilver now has trackback (from b2 CVS), so hi Chris this is a test to check that everything works as expected :)

I wish we could do it with blogging, though. Imagine the scene: a room filled with people in colorful tight clothes, an instructor in front of them, and here we go with the instructor screaming “OK GUYS ! I WANT YOU TO SIT AT THAT COMPUTER AND BLOG UNTIL YOU PASS OUT ! ONE TWO ONE TWO”. Yeah, just like this.

I’m starting to think I’m followed by bad luck.
I’m in Corte at the moment, just coming back from my ex-apartment where I cleaned the fitted carpet (the owner made a giant deal out of a little stain).
When I left this apartment, the carpet was still a bit wet after I cleaned it, so I thought the owner was just seeing things. When I arrived to see the stain, I realised with shock and disbelief that the stain was a huge one, seemingly made by the underlying carpet (yes, that’s two carpets on top of each other, and yes, it’s a very stupid way to put fitted carpet) which gave its brownish color to the top carpet.
Nothing could make the stain go away. Carpet-specific products, vinegar, and then dish-washer product, each of them failed to make the stain go away, but managed to waste 2 hours of my time.
So then, I thought I’d just give the key back to the owner, and I went to the apartment rental agency, to see her away. We were supposed to meet either at the agency of at the apartment, so I went back to the apartment thinking that she could have just gone there and we didn’t meet in the middle of the road. Rinse (it’s raining, so the saying fits the situation), and repeat 4 times. All in all, I spent an hour going both ways because I couldn’t stand waiting for her in that empty apartment, with the stain nagging at me with its glorious brown wink. Eventually
I finally gave the key back to the owner, telling her that the stain is halfway gone now (it is, honest !), I hope it won’t make another stain from the bottom carpet in the meanwhile. If it does I can say goodbye to the caution money, just because this apartment is done in a stupid way.

Paul assumes this happened, but as much as I believe Dave Winer is beyond all hopes of ever becoming a person you could constructively discuss with, I’ll assume this is an allegory.

I just finished making template functions for pingback in b2, and I was preparing to post something along the lines of “Bow to me, for I am the first weblogger with trackback and pingback”.
But then, while searching the pingback spec for the right person to email the great news (Stuart ? Hixie (whose dummy blog I couldn’t pingback) ?), I found a link to Stuart Langridge’s as days pass by, the real first TB+PB weblog. And then Paul’s from the orient, which uses Stuart’s PB code.
So yeah, tidak ada is only the third TB+PB weblog. It’s still the first corsican weblog, so yeah.

By the way, I fixed my problems with wincvs, and now the latest b2 code, including trackback, pingback, kickmyback and Michael Jackson remixes is up there.

AdamWalker: i have 2 weeks to go till i get to spend my days with 400 women!!!
Me: 400 women ?
Me: what’s the catch ? :p
AdamWalker: im studying nursing :P
Me: oh
AdamWalker: thats the catch

MT will finally stop spam-pinging weblogs.com everytime a post is edited. All I can say is ‘HURRAY’ because this really was a discourteous behaviour.
Reminder to self: should clean up b2′s code to release 0.6pre5 with trackback, pingback, ping to blo.gs and little Santa elves dressed in red.

Update: by the way, when you start implementing pingback in your blog tool, please for the love of god and pancakes, please don’t make the tool pingback every link every time a post is edited.

All the blogs I see are either by techies, wassup! teenagers or angry Americans who demand an immediate invasion of Iraq and the closure of the New York Times.

There’s one courtesy rule that I hope more news casters would follow: never misquote someone to make them say something they haven’t said.
Seems like MSNBC preferred ignoring that, and antagonize Nelson Mandela by quoting him as saying The United States of America is a Threat to World Peace, complete quote is If you look at those matters, you will come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace.
Anyway, the points that Mandela raise are valid, and it’s sad to see The Little House Of Hatred Against Arabs declare Mandela has lost it when they’re confronted with arguments that they can’t refute, such as the decision to help islamists against Massoud (I’m not talking about the Talibans, but about the other islamists that were there around ’89-94 and destroyed Kabul with mortar). Then again, LGF has lost it ever since 9/11.

This time, pingback to this entry should work.

Update:
It worked ! It worked ! And the pingback server is streamlined in b2′s xmlrpc.php file.
At the moment, pingbacks are stored as comments prefixed by a <pingback /> tag, so if you follow the link to the above pingbacked entry you’ll see two comments that are actually pingbacks. I will just make template tags for pingbacks like I did for trackbacks, and strip the pingback tag on display.
Source code for the modified files will be on b2′s CVS when I finally got CVS to commit again on my computer.

By some arcane magic (and code from Mort), I’m now trying to pingback my previous post about pingback.
Update: of course it didn’t work at first try. Back to the drawing board.

Since Simon W’s Weblog got pingback again, I guess I could start testing Mort’s b2 pingback client there.
Sorry for the dummy pingback, Simon.
<spacefiller>By the way, if you haven’t found it on other blogs yet, here’s the pingback spec.</spacefiller>

It is indeed very funny that seconds after I hit the ‘blog this’ button for my previous entry, Mort’s entry about a b2 pingback client comes up in my browser.
Now, all that’s needed are ways to include that in the interface in a not-too-obvious way for novice users (who would start thinking b2 is crazy hard just to make an entry) but very-obvious way for advanced users (who don’t want to click twenty links to get to the right spot). That was a thought that I kept in a corner of my head for when I’d include pingback in 1.0, but since a pingback client is already there for 0.x I might aswell deal with it at once.

Update: I’m a bit slow, I just realised it was supposed to be called automatically when a post is made. And that is really making it all clearer. Expect my blog to send pingbacks in a few moments (how long is one moment, that is the question).

Simon Willison has a new url, much shorter and easier to remember than bath.something.uk/somethingsomething/blog.
And more pingback goodies.

I decided not to include pingback in b2 0.x, not because it couldn’t be done (I could do it the same way I did for trackbacks), but because I couldn’t be arsed typing in 0.x code anymore now that I’m in 1.x development.
Although anyone who can check b2′s CVS, understand how we handle trackbacks in b2 (see b2trackback.php and b2trackbackpopup.php, a trackback is basically a comment prefixed by a <trackback /> tag that’s stripped on display), and can code the required functions in xmlrpc.php to store the pingbacks as comments (prefixed by <pingback /> for example), anyone is welcome to code that and submit it for inclusion in b2.

Someone teach me how to write shorter sentences with fewer parenthesis.