Dave's Free Press

Negative keywords

Nearly three years ago I added keyword support to this 'ere journal. Well, now it supports negative keyword filtering. So if you want to see posts that are not tagged "geeky", for example, here's the linky.

Broken out of jail

Today I jailbroke my phone, using the stupidly named blackra1n, and following the step-by-step guide here. There were a couple of points during the jailbreak at which iTunes tried to start - presumably something it did made the iPhone appear to have been just plugged in and so iTunes tried to start, and so I killed iTunes each time with extreme prejudice before it had a chance to communicate with the iPhone and potentially brick it. In retrospect, I should have turned that off in iTunes first before doing this.

Everything seems to have worked just fine.

So far I've found and installed the following apps:

• Backgrounder
• Categories
• some five-icon dock thing
• some five-icons-per-line launcher thing
• SBSettings
• OpenSSH

What other apps should I try out?

The quality of non-Appstore apps is definitely lower than that of officially sanctioned ones in the Apple Appstore - a few others that I've tried, in particular Winterboard and Terminal, have been quite buggy and I've removed them. Even so, it's the user's choice to install dodgy software from third parties, and Apple shouldn't make it so hard for people to shoot themselves in the foot if they want to do that. Either they should allow unvetted apps into the Appstore (and have it pop up a gigantic warning every time you try to install one, and segregate them in a ghetto so that you don't accidentally stumble across them) or they should officially support installing apps from third-party sources (again with warnings).

Graphing tool

I made a shiny thing! It can plot arbitrary functions of the form x=f(y) or y=f(x). Under the skin, it just massages its arguments and passes them through to Gnuplot. Here's the source code.

Update: now 48.3% even shinier - see on the right

Ill

I am ill. I've been ill since Thursday, with a cold. You're meant to be able to cure a cold with [insert old wives tale remedy here] in 5 days, or if you don't, it'll clear itself up in just under a week. So hopefully today is the last day.

So what have I done while ill?

On Friday I became old (see previous post), and went to the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was good. You should go.

Saturday was the London Perl Workshop. My talk on closures went down well, and people seemed to understand what I was talking about. Hurrah! I decided that rather than hang around nattering and going to a few talks, I'd rather hide under my duvet for the rest of the day.

I mostly hid on Sunday too, and spent most of the day asleep. In a brief moment of productivity, I got my laptop and my phone to talk to each other using magic interwebnet bluetooth stuff. I'd tried previously without success, but that was with the previous release of OS X. With version X.5 it seems to Just Work, so no Evil Hacks were necessary.

The cold means that I can't taste a damned thing, not even bacon. So now I know what it's like to be Jewish. Being Jewish sucks.

And today, I am still coughing up occasional lumps of lung and making odd bubbling noises in my chest, although my nasal demons seem to be Snotting less than they were, so hopefully I'll be back to normal tomorrow.

Module pre-requisites analyser

As a service to module authors, here is a tool to show a module's pre-requisites and the test results from the CPAN testers. So before you rely on something working as a pre-requisite for your code, have a look to see how reliable it and its dependencies are.

Wikipedia handheld proxy

I got irritated at how hard it was to use Wikipedia on my Treo. There's so much rubbish splattered around their pages that it Just Doesn't Work on such a small screen. Given that no alternatives seemed to be available - at least, Google couldn't find any - I decided to write my own Wikipedia handheld proxy.

It strips away all the useless rubbish that normally surrounds Wikipedia pages, as well as things like the editing functions which are also hard to use on portable devices. Internally, it's implemented using perl, LWP, and mod_perl, and is hosted by Keyweb.de.

New Bryar feature

Another tiny new Bryar feature - the CGI front-end has sprouted an extra method 'is_mobile' which you can call to figger out whether the user is on a mobile device or not. It's available in your templates like this:

and then use is_mobile like any other TT variable.

New Bryar feature

I just added support for specifying keywords (which the cool kids call "tags") in your Bryar postings. Please see if you can break things while I test them on this journal.

Please note that I've not yet added keywords to my old postings. That will take quite a while to do, so please be patient. At the time of writing, keywords 'bryar' and 'whisky' should do vaguely useful things.

You can even subscribe to keyword RSS feeds, like this.

XML::Tiny released

I have released my XML::Tiny module. The parser at its core is less than twenty lines of code. Pretty easy to follow code too, I think, and that also includes error handling. One of my aims in writing it was to keep memory usage and code to the absolute minimum, so it doesn't handle all of XML. The documentation says that it supports "a useful subset of XML". Personally, I think it supports the useful subset. It's certainly enough to parse the data I get back from Amazon when I use their web services, and to parse an RSS feed.

New Bryar release

As I've been promising to do for ages (it's over a year since Simon said I could take over maintenance of it, and several months since I promised Bob that he could have all the shiny new features I had planned) I've finally got round to releasing a new version of Bryar, the software what provides the brains behind this 'ere august journal.

The most important change is that I released the stuff for filtering out comment spam.