Notes and Jottings

“Interesting reading”:http://www.csoonline.com/read/080103/patch.html for the morning. Patching *is* a difficult issue to manage in large interconnected systems. It’s not so hard for a single application as long as fixed problems are documented, and there’s a procedure in place for creating new fixes.

The problem which Microsoft has is that many bugs affect system libraries and shared components. For these, there is usually no central repository to detail all the ways in which these are used. This affects QA testing. Sometimes only one library needs to be updated, sometimes multiple ones. If sufficient analysis is not performed (which is very possible considering the time frames here), a patch can have an unstated dependency on other already released patches. Patches which change common files add an ordering requirement. There are no easy answers.

Five times in Dublin Airport this year, five times in Schiphol (Amsterdam). Seems almost like a home away from home! As much as airports can anyway…

The story being that I’m currently on my way to Oslo, so I’ll be taking photos Maybe I’ll check if I should do some criticism of the architecture
Pity I wasn’t over last Thursday, Juraj informed me that Joel Spolsky was in Oslo then, and was having a “Joel Spolsky dinner”. Would have been really interesting!

I’m going to Kilkenny tomorrow, and staying for a few days, to sample some of the “Kilkenny Arts Week”:http://www.kilkennyarts.ie/ activities.

I was wondering how to prioritise my time, and Bernie Goldbach “gives some pointers”:http://irish.typepad.com/irisheyes/2003/08/best_summer_fes.html. Certainly I’m too late for the opening parade, but I may try to book a ticket for _Soiled_.

And Kilkenny really is a beautiful places. Bernie has some photos which are “viewable here”:http://irish.typepad.com/photos/kilkenny/. This city has some wonderful buildings dating back to the Middle Ages, such as Rothe House (which is now the local tourist information office), Kilkenny Castle itself, the Tholsel, two cathedrals (Mary’s and Canice’s). The whole layout of the town still is indicative of its origins—with narrow streets and even narrower slipways.

And to point further at how nice it is, it always gets more points than Bennettsbridge in the “Tidy Towns Competition”:http://www.oasis.gov.ie/environment/tidy_towns.html

“Pay attention”:http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/archives/000416.html, “Netsoc”:http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/ committee. You want to offer students “blogging facilities”:http://blogs.netsoc.tcd.ie/ next year? It takes more than offering facilities for it to work. They have to start to realise how it works, why it’s good, how to link to each other and other things on the Internet, how to discuss things across weblog boundaries.

Basically, you need people who can lead the way as “spotlight weblogs” which will be of interest to people. Better yet, recruit people who aren’t completely geeky and who talk about semantics and RDF and how RTTI is something icky that really shouldn’t be used in the context of Java (the VM doesn’t know what a type is!), and how LISP doesn’t rule the world, but should.

Get someone who travels extensively, somebody who reports on the weekly doings of the “SVdP Society”:http://www.csc.tcd.ie/~vdepaul/ —after all this, you may be on to something. Promote the works of people who write good stuff. Automate linkrolling and link to the most highly linked people from a prominent place.

Become a place where the life of college weaves form and substance and builds to something glorious. Show that networks link people together. Make it happen.

Jon Udell: An RSS/RDF epiphany

This was one of the most interesting articles I’ve read in a while, about the strong similarity in raison d’être between RDF and XML namespaces.

Both raise spectres of heartache and pain. RDF has already seen enough of both, though I do believe that much of this is due to the arcane syntax. The problems with XML namespaces are just beginning to become apparent, but people are starting to “realise that they do exist”:http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=2038.

+Well, debate that they exist anyway! As people have pointed out, the XML Namespace feature is normative. Tim Bray offers “some clarification”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/08/08/NamespaceOrNot on how namespaces work.+

+Edd Dumbill thinks that “RDF filled an important space”:http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/2003/8/8#13:13 and that we’re very near updates to the specs which will make it easier to digest.+

Again, this is referring to using editor tags within XUL documents. And if you have more than one of them, all the supporting JS seems to assume that you only have one. Functions like *GetCurrentEditorElement()* in _editorUtilities.js_ don’t look like they’d quite work.

So at the moment, I’m playing around with commands like *nsIHTMLEditor.setInlineProperty()*, and wondering is this the right way to do things And I’m using an atom service, whatever that is… (I’m thinking it’s somehow related to singletons?). Possibly some work ahead anyway, but interesting! And here’s “a screenshot”:http://www.lyranthe.org/images/mt-it-2.png, showing its current level of just-starting-ness!

I’ll be off in “Kilkenny”:http://www.kilkenny.ie/ all weekend/start of next week to have a look at this year’s “Arts Week”:http://www.kilkennyarts.ie/, so I think I’ll bring my laptop down with me. Oooh need to get MT installed then…

How to enable the <editor> functionality seems to have changed from what is generally documented. How to do it now is, dare I say it, slightly easier than before!

Once you have a reference to the editor node, you can just call *makeEditable(’html’)*, part of the nsIEditorDocShell interface.

It does seem that you need extra XPConnect privileges though

Ben Goodger [asks](http://www.bengoodger.com/software/mb/movabletype.html) if people could write a Firebird-savvy blog script to dump into the new “page-in-page bar” (which is currently only accessible via bookmark preferences).

I’m tempted, but don’t take that as saying I’ll do it just yet—I have a history of not finishing personal projects! Well the UI mocked up by Ben here is quite easy to do, I have a XUL version of that more-or-less ready to go, in terms of what goes where, except for keywords and HTML editing buttons. (Don’t say things like that, I haven’t done the extended formatting toolbar yet, but that should just be matter of collapsing the toolbar…)

I’m leaving it for the night though, the editor isn’t working. editorElement.editorShell is undefined, which I thought it shouldn’t be. And I’ve tried calling *netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege(”UniversalXPConnect”)* just in case that might be an issue. Nearly midnight here, so time to leave that for another day.

From specific points in Ben’s post:

* the design (white background, image, etc.) should be easy (CSS), but not done yet.
* Flexing is done.
* Cookie saving not yet done.
* Entry body/extended entry/excerpt are mutually exclusive, using the “collapsed” attribute of XUL’s *vbox* tags. I don’t think this should interrupt any undo history, but need to check when I get the editor working.
* How to hide fields not specified by script parameters? On-the-fly editing of the XUL document by Perl? Let’s us set the correct MIME type also. But no script signing is really possible, not sure yet if we need extra XPConnect privileges for anything.
* No formatting toolbar.
* Can MovableType see the Accept header (I assume it can)—a relatively sane way of choosing which type of quick-blog window to send to the client.

Basically, none of this is rocket science, it just has to be implemented. And I’ve only done the easy bits. The question of how to send the information back to the server is still open. To write my own data stream, I’ll probably need access to XPCOM components, requiring extra XPConnect privileges. Time to see if I can mix HTML forms in with this, and submit one of those…

If the one feature which needed extra XPConnect privileges was the cookie handling, due to needing *@mozilla.org/cookie;1*, is it worth the annoyance of a popup dialog asking permission in exchange for this?

I would know a lot of the above questions already if I’d ever actually done a full project in XUL

That’s a quote from a co-worker when I heard that “Krispy Kreme”:http://www.krispykreme.com/ are to “open stores in the UK and Ireland”:http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030805/chtu008_1.html.

Perhaps I may get tired of them in time, but I really loved the lemon- and creme-flavoured filled doughnuts when I was over in Palo Alto for a summer… y’know, the _Krispy Kreme_ outlet near 101? And they often (always?) gave you a free ring doughnut when you call into the shop personally.

@author: Bob the Builder

bq. Code that is not owned encourages poor coding practices that lead to totally un-maintainable code and ultimately utter anarchy. This isn’t anything specific to our industry, whatever craft you do, it is extremely important to take pride in your work. It is important to let people know it is your piece of work. It is not about promoting finger pointing or blame culture. It is about having pride in your work. It is also a mark of responsibility. It is about taking ownership and having the motivation to produce better results.