Entries by Hagfish

Yet again I have found myself on the wrong side of Debian’s strict packaging policy. There is a piece of software that I want to install which isn’t packaged for Debian, but which fortunately is packaged for the sister distro, Ubuntu. This alternative package source is only useful, though, if Ubuntu uses sufficiently similar package names and version numbers, otherwise the Debian package management tools will treat the package as invalid due to dependency problems. The last time I had to deal with this sort of problem was with an earlier version of the same package, plasma-widget-adjustableclock, but this time the dependency problem is slightly different and I’ve tried fixing the problem in a different way too. Below I detail what the problem is, and my not-entirely-successful efforts at resolving it.

The opportunity to speak with Americans about their federal system is one I rarely turn down, as it helps me understand Europe’s federal system. While talking to a particular American, I found that, despite the stereotypes, they did not believe that the EU was a federal country, and although this meant they agreed with the vast majority of Europeans on the matter, I decided to dismiss their view as uninformed and presented them with a video of the EU president celebrating the EU national day by reading a speech and watching the EU flag being lifted by members of the EU army, followed by a military band performance of the EU national anthem. I feel, though, that to really convince an American (and possibly a European too) that the EU is a country, I must provide a list of the state flowers of each of the EU states, which was, as I explained in an earlier blog post, one of the only things the EU was missing.

I’ve recently made a few changes to my blog and thought that, in the self-referential tradition of bloggers, I should mention some of the decisions I made and how they affect my blog. The most external change, and the one mentioned in the title of this post, is that I do now have a domain to host this blog on. By “external” I don’t just mean it is potentially visible in your address bar when you visit any page of the blog, I also mean that it involved interaction with various third parties. It is a change I had been meaning to make for a while now, and one I should have made long ago, but hopefully it should last a long time.

By a strange coincidence, I’ve recently bumped into another PHP gotcha, well, actually three of them depending on how you’re counting, but I’m sure that these must be the last three unexpected things about PHP and I won’t soon have to write another blog post detailing something else unintuitive that PHP does. The reason these could be seen as one gotcha is that they all involve PHP’s support for floating point numbers, so one workaround would just be to not use that datatype at all in your programs. As I will show though, it is harder than you might think to avoid them, so perhaps the best advice is to avoid using numbers at all. To be on the safe side though, maybe you should just use a different programming language.

Email is an open standard, or several standards, as well as being many other things, such as a means of communication. Something that people might consider from time to time is “Why there is so much unsolicited bulk email?”, although for some people the answer is obvious. Others might not ever ask themselves that question, even if they use email, because they believe the spam problem has been beaten, but it hasn’t, and it is costing email providers and society a lot of money. I have been thinking about this issue myself recently, and on and off for a while, and I have some thoughts about it. While I have neither come up with a means for ending all spam, nor decided that the current email system should be abandoned, I do have a collection of thoughts which help me frame the issue and might help other people in some way.

I haven’t written many blog posts about open standards recently, and that’s possibly because all the old standards are too boring and the new ones are too immature, but I think that OpenID has now matured enough and is seeing enough adoption that it is reasonable to comment on it. It is also receiving a lot of criticism, and, while I don’t like to get caught up in knee-jerk arguments, I do feel that there are some legitimate concerns that people have about this promising standard, which I might be able to address with a coherent defence of it in this blog post. Fortunately the defence I’ve come up with should answer many of the objections to OpenID at the same time, as it puts forward a very different way of looking at the technology, one which may not be obvious to people when they first learn about it. I will first state my idea clearly for the record, then deal with any criticism I can imagine being levelled against it.

People can get in trouble for confusing a continent with a country, but actually neither term is particularly well defined. The continental borders of Europe, for instance, are often debated, and even the idea of Europe being a continent is contested by some. It has come to my attention, though, that I myself have made a mistake regarding the status of Europe, or at least the EU, a concept close to my heart (even if the implementation of the concept can at times fall short). It was six months ago in this very blog that I listed “Ambassadors” as one of the characteristics “that makes the EU different from a country”, but I have since learnt that this is not strictly true. Somehow, the EU has managed to convince its member states that it needed diplomatic relations with at least two (other?) countries. To confuse things slightly, there are also ambassadorial level relations with the similarly structured African Union (although not yet with the Union of South American Nations) as well as with the higher level UN. This has all led me to start thinking about what makes a country, and, perhaps dangerously, whether the Lisbon Treaty turns the EU into one (assuming it isn’t already).

Sadly all good things must come to an end, and if you tried accessing this blog at its old address this year, you would see that “The Esuna Networks project finished on the 31st December, 2008.” It was that project that provided me with my first hosting, and I am greatly indebted to it for granting me a home on the web for so long. With its demise, I have had to migrate to pastures new, and have found myself here at MTV Europe (no, not that MTV Europe) where my blog is free to continue, at least for now. I feel I do have to say, though, how much I will miss the excellent friendly service of Esuna, for which I never had to pay a cent, and that I hope the admin goes on to even greater projects and is duly rewarded. We were given plenty of warning about the closing of the service, and so for a while I had been researching alternatives before selecting this one, and I have been very happy with it for the few months I’ve been using it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (henceforth “1984”) is one of those books that seems to follow you around, like Alice in Wonderland. By that I mean that references to it keep cropping up around you, but more than that, it’s like the references to these works somehow encode some information which underlies some central truth to the universe. Follow the white rabbit, as Morpheus would say. In fact it was at the intersection of these two great threads that I resolved to read 1984. I was visiting a very dear friend, who I saw had started reading this book, which piqued my interest in it again, but at some point in my conversation with her, she mentioned one of her favourite books, Alice in Wonderland of course, and I said something like, “Yes, it’s very important for [imaginative artists] like you to read that book.” (or words to that effect) and then said “I wonder if there is an equivalent that [responsible software engineers] like me should read?” Naturally, her reply was 1984.

The short answer is “no”, in case you are happy to just take my word for it and don’t have time to read my justification for this view. A slightly longer answer would be “Hotwire version 0,710 would be the best piece of software ever (until the next best piece of software ever comes out) if a finite number of bugs were fixed and a finite number of relatively simple features were added.” Many of the bugs and features missing are related to the usability of the user interface, which is to some extent a matter of taste, but there are usability improvements that can be made based on certain widely accepted metrics. Below, then, I give a mixture of a review, an infestation(?) of bug reports, and a design concept.

Just when you start to get surprised at some of the complicated pages that IE7 can render flawlessly, you bump into another almost trivial page which the browser laughably fails on. I think I need to add some more tags for categorising my blog posts, as I don’t want to spend longer than necessary answering the question “Is this IE bug the same as one I’ve already reported?” It appears this one is new, though, so I will write it up. I should say that the bug does not affect Firefox, and I only found it after noticing that IE7 did not have the styling I expected for a piece of popular third party code. Admittedly I can’t state exactly how popular the code is, but it was at least of significant enough size that I did not want to consider maintaining a fork. The good news is I managed to work around the bug in this case with a one line fix, but that is largely to do with the nature of the page, not by finding a universal solution.

Freedom is its own reward, but it shouldn’t be surprising that choosing Freedom leads to many unexpected positive side-effects. For instance, Miro is designed to make online video more democratic, allowing anyone to become a publisher and anyone to subscribe to any publisher, without central control, but by embracing this model, users of Miro, if they are like me, find that they have access to refreshing new creative works, that change how they view media. It’s like the jump from TV to PVR, and the jump from closed source to “open source” (or at least shareware) all in one go. That is why suddenly going without it because of an upgrade to a separate program (especially after paying for a greater download cap from your ISP) can feel jarring. If you have found that Miro crashes at the end of each video (or just errors tens of times at startup) then my findings might be relevant to you.

I can’t really think of a neater title for this, which may mean this post is not easily discoverable on the Web by people who would benefit from it. Worse, I suspect that this is the sort of trick that people don’t even go looking for because it never crosses their mind. Still, I have to document it, not least for my own future reference. For me the problem it solved was trying to avoid the six-legged freak console-based text editors that I found myself using while SSHed to a remote server at work. I could either type vi file.txt (which is quick to type but ultimately counter-productive) or I could find a desktop text editor and navigate to the remote location I was accessing over SSH (which would take longer but save time by about the first drag and drop). Although I had not heard of a system which had the benefits of both these options, I one day realised that there was no technical reason I couldn’t fire up my desktop text editor locally, by running a command on the remote machine.

Blogging time has come round again, and with it the opportunity to make up for the relatively narrow appeal of my previous post. I’m glad to see, though, that my previous post was appreciated by someone who matters, which has inspired me to consider possible enhancements to Hotwire when the latest version hits Debian testing. In the closing hours of this month, my focus is on MySQL and sed, as hinted at last time.

2007-12 for me is “Python appreciation month”. Going a whole month being appreciative of it wasn’t so difficult, and was the least I could do after realising how much I had under-estimated a program written in it, particularly as that program is going a long way towards fixing the very problems with the console that I’ve been was bemoaning. I suppose this post belongs with the last one, and I could be writing about MySQL or a sed joke instead, but it is New Year’s eve, so I’ll have to hope that the blogosphere appreciates the quality if not the quantity of these posts, while I go off to a party.