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It has been a stupidly long time since I disabled comments due to the evil spammers.

I've finally done something about it! Comments are now enabled in a more convoluted fashion. At present you must pass a text-recognition captcha, and the comment must also be approved by me. If things go well I will shortly remove the approval stage. Since I got about 50 comment spam between enabling comments with moderation and implementing the captcha (thanks CPAN), that seems here to stay.

Please leave a comment on this post so I can see it is working. Ten points for the first to break it!

Okay, so I don't spend all my time watching films and reading books, despite the preponderance of such in this weblog. I just spend most of my time doing things I can't talk about here. Top secret! Well, no, just generally incomprehensible or boring.

Research-wise, I'm alternating between getting not much done and being productive and excited about my ideas, in quanta of about a week. And everything else seems to go along with this; when I'm doing good research, I'm reading lots of books and watching movies, and when I'm not I'm... not. Of course this correlation says nothing about the direction of the causality. Perhaps it's something else, I don't know.

Anyway, just now I'm on a research upswing, and I'd like to be able to write about it here, but it wouldn't really mean anything. Well, at the moment I'm in a state of knowing how much I don't know, but even before this current foray into the unknown I could barely describe what I'm doing to the people in my department, never mind a general computer science community or the world.

In other news. Particularly enjoying climbing wall recently. On Sunday I was having fun with overhangs. I finally have enough strength to make some progress there...

Apparently my comment system is broken, and I can't edit my last entry. Bah. Perhaps I shouldn't write code. Okay, until I fix that, note that Kontroll featured a bear girl, it was not a bunny suit.

People around watching films last night, scary films on account of Halloween.

Watched Gremlins (with Adam), Dark City (interesting), Prince of Darkness (bit dull and generic, maybe I was tired), Dog Soldiers (seen before, good).

Been thinking of writing technical/research related things in another log. We'll see.

Bring on the new. I'm posting this entry from XEmacs, via the wonders of XML-RPC and the magic of the following snippet of lisp:

(defun post-buffer (title categories)
  "Post current buffer to weblog with given title/categories."
  (interactive "sTitle: \nsCategories: ")
  (post-text title (buffer-substring) categories))

(defun post-text (title body categories)
  "Post given text to weblog"
  (let ((id (post-entry title body categories)))
    (message (concat "Entry posted: " id))))

(defun post-entry (title body categories)
  (xml-rpc-method-call
   "http://beaneater.org.uk/XMLRPC" 'beanlog.newPost
   title body categories))

If I ever get around to learning more elisp, I guess I might make it into a proper mode (I don't care if such a thing already exists). At least there's a few things I'd like to automate.

It is interesting writing these kind of little thingies in Perl, elisp, and Haskell, as I am at the minute, different takes on typing give a completely different feel. I guess some C and Java could round it off...

I'm quite confused. Surely I must have something urgent to be doing?

So my presentation looks like being next Friday. I'll have to do some preperation for that, slides and work out a demo, but that should be fine. I might find time to integrate my project work with the current compiler, which would not only be useful but would be something nice to say during the presentation. Shouldn't take too long, as the major changes are at a higher level. Hopefully I'll find what changes I clobbered from my CVS too.

May find some time to hack on the back-end for here, maybe even create a preliminary thing to distribute. Major issues at least include moving to templating. Then I might get to play with it elsewhere.

Hmm. Considering what it would take to do a non-db back-end. Oh and the fried/half-baked/baked continuum.

Updates...

I really should make a point of writing something every day. Writing something for here, writing a short summary of something, whatever. Maybe dissertation counts, maybe it doesn't; I can't really tell yet. I think some less hard-core writing could actually warm me up for that.

I've been reading writers on why blogging might stop them writing. Well I don't write in the first place, and I think writing here may lead on to other writing.

What do you think?

I haven't given enough thought to (or read about) what to do with respect to HTML and my RSS feed. Just now I seem to be doing the wrong thing by formatting things nicely as text, as would be rendered by a text-based browser such as lynx, because all the nice paragraph breaks disappear when displayed by something which interprets the <description> as HTML. Anyway, to the point, this means that the RSS feed has this:

I always thought telephones (the old fashioned kind, not mobiles) were
indestructible, but only rumour backed this up.

broken phone

I don't know what to think any more. On the one hand, they seem quite
destructible, and yet on the other, it still works.

weird brown plastic-wrapped block

Which is rather surreal. Of course, this entry quoting that will now also be in the feed... I could grow to fnord like the insertion of random phrases.

Notice that I use the usual weak meaning of the word "zen" when it is not entirely clear that something is zen-like.

When exams and so on are over, I plan to rehaul this site, both back and front-end. Things which I want to do are listed at the meta node (http://beaneater.org.uk/nodes/meta). Are there any other desireable features? Is there anything which would "enhance the viewing experience"? What things are actually useful or nice (and likewise, annoying) in a diary/comment/link propogation log?

Whether technical or presentational, nitpicking or overarching back-end ideas, all suggestions welcome, preferably as a comment to this entry. Silence interpreted as support of my every action, with implicit worship.

To end on another meta-meta-note, I promise I will eventually move back to free-standing content.

Grr. This site is syndicated in livejournal, but more often than not livejournal chokes on my validating RSS 0.91 feed for no apparent reason. I don't even embed HTML in it (which is no doubt annoying for posts that are mainly links) because I'm convinced that would break even more often. So why is it breaking, with meaningless error messages?

(I consider anything referring to byte -1 as meaningless.

Seem to be having lots of discussions about character sets recently. Which is good, as it's an oft-misunderstood issue. Personally, I have not succeeded in setting irssi up to do UTF-8 IRC (at least through screen and PuTTY, if that makes a difference), and hence I believe that it is right and proper that everybody use ISO-8859-1.

A digression on character sets

As a review for those who know, and a view for those who don't, the traditional character set is ASCII. This takes up 7 bits in each byte, and there have been many extensions (in DOS, Windows, other things, and standerdised) to use the last bit. ISO-8859-1 uses this for characters useful to western europeans, and isn't so different from the standard windows character set (though windows actually generally works with Unicode I believe). So Unicode; this is an encoding encompassing a huge range of languages and scripts, including ideographic scripts like used for Chinese, and UTF-8 is an encoding which represents characters with varying numbers of bytes. In particular, it coincides with ASCII, but must use the 8th bit to indicate more bytes are being used for other characters, and hence conflicts with ISO-8859-1.

So, on IRC I see the benefits of 8859-1 and UTF-8, but have managed to persuade people that other weird charsets shouldn't abound. And I think I now know the areas in which ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, and Windows' codepage 1252 differ enough to avoid them in the appropriate circumstances. I have in the past thought I should move to ISO-8859-1 to ISO-8859-15, for the Euro sign, but then I lose ¬.

The web, XML, and managed content

I have been writing, as is natural, in ISO-8859-1 on this website. This works fine and dandy. Except that when CGI.pm generates XHTML, it always specifies UTF-8 as the charset in the XML declaration. But that's fine because my HTTP header gives ISO-8859-1, which overrides the XML declaration. Also, as I send XHTML under the text/html MIME type, I'm not even sure if mozilla is rendering it as XHTML (references appreciated). I plan to go back and link to the relevant discussions and controversy on that last point.

So that works fine, but then I generate RSS. And again I'm pretending its UTF-8 in the XML declaration, but sending out ISO-8859-1. Recently I've used the character ö, that is o umlaut. Which breaks things, as it isn't valid UTF-8. Oops. So eventually I shall write a script to go through the database converting to UTF-8, but for now I'll give RSS in ISO-8859-1. This should hopefully work, please poke me if my RSS is broken for you (email/comment/IRC).

Also todo: validate entries with an XHTML validator before posting, rejig comments, take over the world.

Plea

Anybody know just how text input works in browsers with respect to character sets and HTML entities?

Grump. Last night it was pointed out to me that my picture gallery is suboptimal, as the thumbnails are tiny and the actual pictures are huge. So what I want is a page of thumbnails which links to medium sized pictures (with prev/next links) which link to the full size beasts.

I found one tool which would generate such a gallery, but the images it generates are broken. Hence the original pages are regenerated with the dodgy tool which works, and I'll try again later.

In other news, I had a nice day yesterday. Somehow I spent all day being mildy productive and not wasting time, and yet I don't have terribly much to show for it. Oh well, at least I have something and ideas on where to go from there.

It's much nicer now that I'm thinking of stuff I write as contributing towards my project report. I think if I finalise the structure I can get on with writing the expositionary sections, such as an initial chapter setting my work in the context of the MRG projcet, outlining the shape of Camelot compilation, and discussing the possibilities for and usefullness of potential optimisations. Actually that sounds like three chapters, which is fine.

I think I will have to watch the length, it has to be 40-60 pages, and that is really not much. I'll need to edit the introductory parts to be comprehensive without waffling too much, but I'm better off waffling initially, because otherwise I'll never get started.

Exams are going to start looming. I'll have to work out details, and plan my revision. And so another year comes around.

This entry will tip the gargantuan tests entry off the front page. In my CFT I should modify my diary system to have a limit on how much of a post is displayed on the front page or archives, perhaps with interaction. This would be much easier if I had got round to interpreting posts as XML (I write in XHTML anyway), in which case I could enclose either the displayed or undisplayed part in some tag.

Food for thought. I wonder if I will ever refactor my code into nice usable modules with actual features that work.

Site provider changes version of Perl. Website stops working. Oh, the embarrassment.

Should be working with a temporary fix just now. I must re-write this damned thing.

These colours are probably aesthetically unpleasing, and yet easier on the eye. There must be a colour scheme which is simple, "soft" on the eye, and visually pleasing and coherent. I have no design skill.

Comments/suggestions?

No, I'm not using this as a distraction. Just like I was tidying solely because it needed doing.

Lots of implementation details running through my head. So far, I've managed to avoid running with any of my ideas and spending too much time on it. These involve things like clean (robust) design, XML, and extra features.

Back home right now - got back on Wednesday, late. Not really doing much, just catching up on geek + some other stuff, getting some things in order. Wow, it's nice to type with the right kind of keyboard again.

Thinking of playing with the website, maybe fix it a little. At least some cross-browser compatibility, maybe some style (pity I have no sense of it), technical back-end stuff.