If you’re not heavily involved in the development or use of free and open source software, I imagine it can be very hard to understand the subtleties and the importance of free (as in liberty and speech) software versus open software that you can use for free (as in gratis and beer). For most software… Read More »
After much gnashing of teeth, I got CVS running as a service on my laptop and am able to access it using the CVS client Eclipse plug-in. The key was finding this page posted, at least in part, by Glenn Robitaille. Without it, I suspect I would still be poring over the CVS and xinetd… Read More »
Lately, I’ve been experiencing more and more app crashes when accessing web sites running on IIS. Not that this necessarily means there is a problem with IIS, but nearly every time I’ve seen a web app on the Internet go belly up lately, the stack traces have revealed the app to be running on IIS.… Read More »
Sam Ruby has already posted a simple patch to MoinMoin that implements Google’s proposal for a new link type for the rel attribute for the HTML anchor tag. The HTML specification supports the definition of new link types, as long as the author implements a profile. Google has proposed a “nofollow” link type, which will… Read More »
Here’s your challenge for the day. Read this Seattle Times Magazine article from start to finish without trying to multitask. Even though the article puts forth cogent arguments for why multitasking (especially with intellectual tasks like reading) by humans is usually inefficient, I couldn’t stop myself. First, I had to check on the progress of… Read More »
My favorite “top ten predictions for 2005” list so far is Bill de hÓra’s list. If you’re an open source, Java, XML, Python, web service, Mozilla loving geek, you’ll like it, too.
I was hoping that Python 2.4 would make MoinMoin a little quicker, and a completely unscientific survey (surveys conducted after midnight are rarely scientific) confirms this. With Python 2.3, opening pages for editing and saving them almost always took at least five seconds per action. While it’s still sometimes slow, the actions will often take… Read More »
Note to Self for Future The following steps are for installing Python 2.4 on a shared server. After ssh’ing to the server: $ wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.4/Python-2.4.tgz $ cd Python-2.4 $ ./configure –prefix=$HOME/lib $ make && make install $ ln -s $HOME/lib/bin/python $HOME/bin/python/bin/python Credits: Thanks to Uche Ogbuji for publishing IRC transcript excerpts that reminded of the… Read More »
I just noticed that Python 2.4 was released at the end of November. Fedora Core 3 RPMs are already available from the Python.org site. It’s supposed to have better performance than 2.3, so I may have to try it on my website to see if it will speed up my MoinMoin wiki, which is frustratingly… Read More »
My main experience with XML-based programming languages has been with VoiceXML. One nice advantage of an XML-based language is that the syntax checker is essentially free, assuming the language provides a DTD, or preferably a Schema. Of course, most language compilers and interpreters also come with a syntax checker, so the DTD/Schema advantage is primarily… Read More »