Notes and Jottings

Hixie’s Natural Log: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time using Debian, it’s that attempting to mix use of unstable and stable packages (especially when you start to use unstable versions of important library packages) will increasingly leave you with a schizophrenic machine which refuses to allow anything at all to be installed. +O’course, eight years ago, Debian was a babe in the woods, was that pre-package days?+

What to do? You have only two options. One is to go all the way. Remove the stable lines from your sources.list and only use unstable sources. Everything *mostly* just works. But you lose on stability, security and usability, probably. But it’s fun to see what turns up every day! And it rarely breaks completely—lessee, there was that libgcc change which f——ked everything up nicely. And that time that the PAM libraries were hosed. But hopefully if you’re using Debian unstable, you know enough to downgrade to the last working version from the apt archives…

Your other option: get the source for required packages with _apt-get source_ and compile against your existing (stable) libraries. You may need to download some extra development packages with _apt-get build-dep_. There are some guides for doing this sort of thing, or give me a shout

Red Hat files suit against SCO | CNET News.com

Red Hat have done what we hoped somebody would do—opened a countersuit against SCO for all of the allegations opened by SCO against the Linux community. Considering that the SCO suit against IBM appears to be a dispute between them on contractual grounds, that *should* not involve Linux.

bq. ‘In its role as industry leader, Red Hat has a responsibility to ensure the legal rights of users are protected,’ said Red Hat Chief Executive Matthew Szulik.
Red Hat said that its new fund, called the Open Source Now Fund, would ‘cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies developing software’ under the open-source licensing rules.

SCO’s allegations of their property being in the Linux kernel has seen no proof so far, since any pointers they have given seem to point towards code copywrited and patented by an IBM company!

Ximian : About Us : Press Center : Press Releases

This is about the last thing I would have expected—Novell have just purchased Ximian, which gives them a huge jump into the middle of the Linux/UNIX development and middleware marketplace.

How are Novell going to leverage this? Are they after the tools or the software? It seems like creating a managed Linux environment may be the main direction in which they want to go. And Ximian Desktop is a useful technology to start with.

Where does Mono fit in? Novell aren’t a tools company (are they?). Could they do some kind of partnership with Borland to improve the reach of their .NET applications? Let’s wait and see…

I just got another bugmail from Mozilla there, which I might have felt like commenting on—but obviously I don’t want to spam people, which is what bugmail tends to feel like these days for any of the serious developers! It would be a nice addition to Bugzilla to have TrackBacks, so people could comment (externally) on bugs which they were interested in.

It would add an extra dimension to reading bugs. It’s a pity that 90% of it would be ranting about why “my most important bug” wasn’t fixed, but you can’t fix human nature!

bq. Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else’s vision.

—Penn Jillette, Interview in WIRED magazine, 1993

==

==

This message gets to go into a box on the right, to educate anybody who thinks my site just looks bad for everybody It uses that commenting-out trick so only Internet Explorer users see it.

Okay, I unfortunately got the site looking acceptable enough in IE, that this message doesn’t seem appropriate any more. It *is* a PITA that it probably bulks up my stylesheet by 20-30%…

Okay, “Brad Choate’s MT-Textile plugin”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/001653.php#001653 has now been installed. The theory would be that this will certainly create a valid XHTML structure, not that writing XHTML is a chore
But it’ll be interesting to see if this makes it easier to mark up entries.

Note, for everybody who wants to add HTML to comments, you can now add MT-Textile style comments. This will (hopefully) keep everything in valid XHTML. “This page”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php#001439 contains a reference to all of the basic “commands” which it understands, in addition to the new commands available with version 2.

Enjoy!

The site is now being served with the MIME type application/xhtml+xml for those web clients which claim to accept it (details available here for Apache). Of course, this has caused a lot of breakage. I can at least say that I have fixed all my entries back to the start of 2003. Lots to go though. Problems lie in three main categories: tags without partners which are not closed (img, *br*), raw ampersands, and blockquotes which are not correctly balanced because of the way MovableType inserts *p* tags.

Other things have to be fixed tomorrow as well - such as commenting, which seems just slightly unhappy right now. But that’s more due to my templating changes than the XML modification.

I _am_ impressed at the ease with which a MovableType site can be customised. One thing I just discovered today was that the “Adaptive Path”:http://www.adaptivepath.com/ site uses MT to push news to the front page. It says something about the product when it can be made so invisible to the public. It has often been pointed out that weblog servers are really mini content management systems, and this highlights it more than ever. Some of the bigger CMS players should start watching out… And of course, Microsoft and other parties are sure to want to get in on the act too.

XForms is now a W3C Proposed Recommendation.

XForms allows the data, look and behaviour of forms to be separated. Sounds a bit MVC-ish, eh? As an XML-based technology in its own namespace, it can also be integrated into many different XML languages (a reason why it isn’t just extending the current tags and behaviour in HTML4). One design requirement was that existing common practice in form usage which required scripting should be allowed a non-procedural variant within XForms.

If you haven’t followed the W3C process, this means that there should be at least one (preferably two interoperable) implementations of every feature. It should also be believed to be appropriate for widescale deployment. If there are no major problems found at this stage, the last stage is to publish it as a recommendation.

There currently appears to be little to no advancement towards including this feature set in Mozilla. One of the sticking points is that at least a basic schema validator would need to be included, as the basic version still needs some level of validation.

There is also some debate as to whether XForms is over-engineered. It started as quite a small technology, and has expanded hugely over a number of years. Some people don’t like the W3C XML Schema (RELAX NG weenies). Joking aside, RELAX NG does seem far easier for humans to parse than the standard XML Schema. Vendors (especially database vendors) seem to like XML Schema though, so we’re probably doomed to live with two competing schema systems for quite a while to come.

Well this is my first try at a replacement look for this weblog. The number one problem with it is that I have ignored what works or doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, so it doesn’t look that great there. Not sure how much I care, but I should at least try to make a little effort to cater to the limitations of IE Not to mention my own limitations as a designer. Does it look too busy?