Monthly Archives: September 2004

Link Dump

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Checkboxes VS. Radio Buttons: A guide to proper use of checkboxes and radio buttons in HTML forms.

Congressional Power Trips: Find out what trips Senators and Representatives have been taking. Quite interesting.

Writing Lean CSS: Tips on using common CSS short cuts. Combined this with Introduction to CSS shorthand properties and your CSS can shrink down quite a bit.

Solar Backpack: For the man who has everything :-)

rsnapshot: This might be the way to go until FreeBSD fixes their file system snapshot code.

CVSDude: Free CVS and or Subversion hosting (via Keith).

BWS: Bloglines Web Services

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The “Feed Space” just got a little more interesting. Bloglines announced (offical PR, Mark’s blog entry) a new set of web services (using R E S T and R S S 2.0 / O P M L) for accessing some of services.

One of problems they hope to solve (or reduce) with this is feed scaling. I’m not sure that everyone will buy into that though. Although it can cause scaling problems, the nice thing about having decentralized feeds is that if one of them goes down it is no big deal. If everyone used Bloglines to access the feeds they follow and they went down then you loose access to all of your feeds. Perhaps Bloglines will become the Google of the feed space? Hey Mark, looking for a new FreeBSD/Database/PHP/(insert assorted other skills here) employee?    :-)

After I get a chance to read through their API documentation I’ll see what other ideas come up.

Update 10:15 am 28 Sep 04: To go along with Bloglines announcement there is an O’Reilly Network article by Marc Hedlund. In the article Marc describes the available services and an example Java app that makes use of new APIs.

Rebuild IDE Mirror On FreeBSD

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I’ve got a test system at work with a Promise ATA RAID controller in it. When I first put the card and drives in it I used the BIOS on the card to establish a mirror. This mirror took awhile to do (two 250gig IDE drives), but once it was done it worked fine. FreeBSD made use of it without any complaints.

Today I thought it would be nice to see how hard it is to rebuild the mirror, so powered off the system and pulled one of the drives. The BIOS on the card alerted me during boot up that the mirror had an error, but I wanted to be able to still use the system while the mirror was rebuilding (since it takes so long). That led me to atacontrol. Unfortunately the man page wasn’t enough for me to figure how to get the mirror to rebuild.

Some more time on Google and I came across post on the FreeBSD -current email list, Re: atacontrol rebuild, how?. This post gave me the extra bits of info that I needed to getting the rebuild going:

Perhaps something worth trying is the following – It’s what I have to do
to get the promisc card I use to rebuild:

– Identify the channel the drive is on (ie ad6 on ata3)

atacontrol detach ata3
atacontrol attach ata3
atacontrol addspare ar0 ad6
atacontrol rebuild

The command exits straight away but if you run: atacontrol status ar0
I get a ‘REBUILDING 0%’ message

Also checking the ps output shows a rebuild thread.

I’d tried the detach and attach steps before, but hadn’t tried addspare. That was the missing step, after that the rebuild started. It is still going to take a long time, but at least the system is usable while it is rebuilding. I haven’t tried it yet, but this should work fine for boot partitions also. Just remember to properly identify which drive failed :-)

What Cell Phones Can Learn From IM

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This morning I was supposed to meet up with seven other people for a meeting. As I was walking to this appointment I realized I might be a few minutes late. I had my cell phone with me, but which of the other seven people should I call? For some reason this instantly reminded of using instant messaging (IM). One of the interesting features of most IM services is that you get some sort of status for each of the people on your buddy list. I looked at my cell phone and thought, it would be nice to know which of the seven people who are supposed to be at this meeting have their cell phones on right now. Sure I could call and leave a voice mail, but that wouldn’t really help the situation because I was only going to be late by maybe five minutes and they’d likely find a voice mail after I already got there.

Cell phones need grow a buddy list feature, with all of the stupid little things that you can do with it, like setting a status. It would be nice to be able to go to a meeting and set my away message to ‘Do Not Call Unless It Is Important, I Am In A Meeting With The Person Who Signs My Paychecks’ during meetings at work instead of turning my phone off. Of course I’d have to authorize each person who wanted to be on my buddy list, but that would be a small price to pay given the extra features something like this could bring.

Further down the line this gets even stranger, we’d have to come up with a nice (XML?) format for exchanging buddy lists. No reason to have to enter in duplicate lists if I could just sync my phone buddy list with my IM client buddy list. If your IM account info didn’t share your cell phone number then my phone should just skip that buddy during sync.

I better stop now before I come to the conclusion that everyone should get a unique, universal and portable phone number when they are born that they can use their whole life.

New PHP4 and PHP5 Releases

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In the last two days there has been a new release of PHP4 (4.3.9) and PHP5 (5.0.2). When the first non-beta release of PHP5 came out I started trying it out. There are definitely some cool new features that were sorely needed in PHP, especially in the area of OO code. I’m still a bit bitter that they didn’t do multiple inheritance, I would have been happy with something similar to the way Perl does it (left to right depth first).

After trying out a couple of different applications that we run at work I decided to stick with PHP4 for production work for the time being. As much as I’d like to make use of PHP5 features, I just don’t see a major move to PHP4 for at least another 12 to 18 months. I must admit one surprise here, seeing apps that are already being written exclusively for PHP5. That must make for a relatively small target audience compared to the entire PHP community.

Another use for a blog, making predictions about the future so that the whole world can look back and see how wrong you were.

Lawn As A Relationship Gauge

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This is one of those odd things that suddenly jumped into my mind. You can tell how well I know someone (or how comfortable I am around them) based on whether or not I walk across their lawn or use the sidewalk to and from their front door. For some reason I associate not walking on the lawn as more formal and polite, making it the “more” correct thing to do for someone that I don’t know very well. This makes me wonder what other relationship status traits I have that I haven’t noticed yet.