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.

Journal now with another 30% more shiny!

Nearly three years ago I put some funky shit in the pages for this journal. I've finally got round to adding more funky shit - namely the expanding menus on the left.

There's also a spiffy new section there showing posts that have recently received comments.

Presented without comment

Hello Libdemblogs!

This journal is now "syndicated" at libdemblogs.co.uk. So, as the young cool kids say, "yo my Liberal homies". Welcome to the festering dung-heap that is my brane.

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.

35

Today I am 35, and, having attained half of my allotted three score and ten in this vale of tears, am officially Over The Hill.

While I have noticed that suddenly all the Yoof are "having it large" with their ghetto blasters and hard core pornography (it's amazing how much I just didn't notice yesterday when I was a 34 year old youngster), I am pleased to report that I have not yet shit myself.

Thanks, Yahoo!

[originally posted on Apr 3 2008]

I'd like to express my warm thanks to the lovely people at Yahoo and in particular to their bot-herders. Until quite recently, their web-crawling bots had most irritatingly obeyed robot exclusion rules in the robots.txt file that I have on CPANdeps. But in the last couple of weeks they've got rid of that niggling little exclusion so now they're indexing all of the CPAN's dependencies through my site! And for the benefit of their important customers, they're doing it nice and quickly - a request every few seconds instead of the pedestrian once every few minutes that gentler bots use.

Unfortunately, because generating a dependency tree takes more time than they were allowing between requests, they were filling up my process table, and all my memory, and eating all the CPU, and the only way to get back into the machine was by power-cycling it. So it is with the deepest of regrets that I have had to exclude them.

Cunts.

[update] For fuck's sake, they're doing it again from a different netblock!

Mad comments

I've had some very odd comments in this 'ere journal recently, and they're not even spam! For example, "Kelly" wrote this in response to this post:

couldn't help checking out geelkawyer.

that driving show -

whe getit here in bloody-aus (tralia i.e.)

resta-sured i didn't stay long.

seriously thinKing keegwalyer is your alt-err-e(r)go...

prefer your style...

a-part from geeywalker referring to (him?)self in the 3rd person, -

you dear dave are obviously not writing-like-a-lawyer.

eek blankety -on-you dave for even posting the glayeekwer URL - with its boldedness, plethora or ads. u-tube content 'cause s/he lack same. erk and perk

I recognise all the words, even the egregiously mis-typed ones, but I have very little idea what on earth she's talking about. And then in response to this much older post she wrote the utterly incomprehensible:

thanksANot skynet - who has time to RTFM - nerds. Well fine - who wants to read "novels" anyhow; give me a dictionary any day, a back-page, the www is FullOfReference material. any speech-reader will tell you so. .. HeY /usr or $ sudo/bla/bla - makes my synapses bleed. keep your FM .. thanks for developing the thingie ... U godU-for-knowing-where-to-bloody-well start typing /usr or /root or even for knowing what root the user is pub-blishing and selling their crappy t-shirts and mugs and spanky code. gimme a horse and cart <=;P

Mmmm, spanky code.

These two comments were posted about 50 minutes apart from a Virgin Broadband account in Australia. I can only assume that Kelly has drunk a few too many fermented koalas.

Compact tag clouds

I've decided that using different sized text for the tag cloud works better than using different colours, but it has the drawback of eating a lot of screen space. I need to find an algorithm to pack the text in more efficiently so that it doesn't waste so much vertical space.

Actually, I already have an algorithm to do it in my head. Unfortunately it's, umm, rather inefficient. In fact I think it's O(N!) which would be fine if I only had 10 tags, but I have 52 so far, and am still occasionally adding tags.

52! is roughly 8e69. That's 8 followed by 69 zeroes. 69, dude!

Of course, this is a variant on the rectangular packing problem, which is itself a variant of the knapsack problem, which is NP-complete, so I'm going to have to come up with a heuristic that will return a reasonable (but not optimal) solution quickly.

I've decided that the best heuristic is to ask for pointers to code that other people have written that will do the job for me :-)

My constraints are that I need to fit an arbitrary number of rectangles of arbitrary size into a rectangle of fixed width but whose height can vary as necessary, with minimum wasted space. And I'd prefer a perl or javascript solution.

Use both sides of the paper. No conferring. You may begin now.

To my anonymous benefactor ...

Today I got a copy of "Haskell: the Craft of Functional Programming" in the post, which, while it's been on my wish list for ages, I'd not got round to actually buying. So - many thanks to whoever got it for me, it is most appreciated.

Face Crack

Oops. I eventually gave in and got a Face Crack account. In my defence, I dunnit so I can play Go online. I find the interface much better than KGS, and it's nice to be able to play a few moves and then leave the game for a bit and come back later, which isn't practical on KGS.

I, pornographer (again)

A company called Trend Micro, who provide shoddy internet filtering disservices, have determined that my CPAN dependencies website is pornographic. Obviously, children need to be protected from the horrors of mod_perl code.

That's three times I've been accused incorrectly of being a pornographer now, all of them incorrectly.

update: this 'ere journal is also apparently porn. Yay! I'm special!

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.

Web 2.0^2.0 fallout

Mission Accomplished!

One year on

It's exactly a year since I moved my journal from Livejournal to here. Please to be wearing your party hats and posh frocks. Or else.

Journal now with 30% more shiny!

Look on the right! The list of all my archived posts has been broken down by year. By default you'll see archived posts from the current year, clicky-clicky on the numbers at the top to get previous years.

It's all done with CSS and Javascript, so I only needed to fiddle with the templates and not with the application that drives the journal. And of course it degrades gracefully and everything is still available in non-CSS non-Javascript browsers. I even tested it in lynx. Hooray!

I've also slimmed the page down considerably by using a named style for journal entry links instead of embedding style info in the page for every link, and for archived entries have reduced the length of their links considerably using the <BASE HREF> tag. That gave a weight reduction of something like 40%.

Buh-bye Google

In a month and a half, Google's ads netted me a grand total of US$5.87. Translated into English, that's just £3.20. No matter how amusing I may find some of the ads, it's not worth bothering with. So they're gone.

Stupid spammers

In the last month, there have been well over 400 attempts at spamming this journal. All have failed. And yet the spammers still try. And I get email notifying me each time, because there's always a possibility that a legitimate comment might get classified as spam and need to be manually approved.

Ah well, I have the IP for each of those 400-odd spams, and using routeviews.org I can easily turn them into a considerably shorter list of netblocks. And then auto-create a shitload of Deny from rules. 104 of them, to be precise. It will be interesting to see if the spammers notice their lack of access and keep trying.

When ads go wrong

I've been keeping an eye on things, and most of the time, Google puts pretty good well-targeted ads on these pages. The only real exception was on my page about spam, which kept getting ads for dodgy anti-spam products, which was clearly silly, so I've removed 'em from that page.

However, on occasion it goes amusingly wrong. Not Google's fault, but some idiot has obviously bought an ad for thousands of keywords without thinking about it, and so this 'ere journal is currently advertising ...

So how exactly does one order a burning cross online?

Now with ads

I just added Google ads to the rest of this site, mostly as an experiment to see how it worked. If I make any pennies from it that'll be nice too but I'm not really expecting to, my traffic's too low.

Adding them across the whole site was REALLY easy because everything's templated, and I like the control over colour that Google give. The only reason they're not here in the journal too is cos that's a different template. Anyway, the constantly changing subject matter would only confuse the poor dears.

Comments will be most gratefully received. Am I being horribly evil?

[update: I got rid of the ads because they sucked]

I, pornographer

A company called Sonicwall, who provide dodgy internet filtering disservices, have determined that this site is pornographic. So that's DHA's next job sorted for when the bottom falls out of the programming market.

I have emailed them asking for an explation. I don't expect to get one.

Incidentally, this is the second time I've been incorrectly accused of being a pornographer. A pint for whoever can tell the amusing story of the first time in a comment here!

Breaking things

As promised, I did indeed break something! The RSS feed should now be fixed.

Some implementation notes ...

I've written up some notes on how this site works. It includes a very basic HOWTO on using mod_rewrite to protect data.

Welcome to the new Bryar thing

I'll now be writing my journal here instead of at Livejournal. All my old Livejournal posts are archived here for convenience, but with commenting disabled. You can, of course, still comment at the old site.

No doubt I'm going to break things a bit over the next few days.