May 2002

May 28, 2002

Bush’s oft-ignored War on Condoms

The Nation’s Doug Ireland writes about Bush’s war on condoms.

Ilya
  • Twisted, a Python-based server thingamajig, looks interesting.

May 25, 2002

Fantasy author interviews

Says George R.R. Martin in Infinty’s interview: “Jack Vance is the greatest living SF writer, in my opinion, and one of the few who is also a master of Fantasy. His The Dying Earth (1950) was one of the seminal books in the history of modern Fantasy, and I would rank him right up there with Tolkien, Dunsany, Leiber, and T.H. White as one of the fathers of the genre.”

Reading this other, better, interview, you can really see how interviews are written. An how similar they always are.

Amazon’s interview with Robert Jordan also has quite a few recommendations. All nicely linked to their own pages.

Ilya

May 24, 2002

In the need of curtains

I need to get curtains. When the evening sun shines through my bedroom window, the light reflects off white wall behind me making the colors of my monitor melt into shades of grey. Plus, I can see all the spots and smears covering the screen.

Ilya

May 23, 2002

MMBase

MMBase is the CMS that Mika said Mediumi is going to use. One nice feature is that it can automatically relate items to each other.

Ilya

May 13, 2002

Freemovie—a PHP-based SWF generator

Wow. Freemovie is a SWF generator written in PHP.

Ilya

May 5, 2002

Jotted links

Top Ten New Copyright Crimes.

From Communitech’s forums: MySQL optimization, WAP/WML.

Dreamriver PHP software.

PHP: Session handling functions.

CNET.com: My blog, my self.

New Suodatin weblog links: Leslie Harpold’s The Historical Present, Cory Doctorow’s Boingboing, Scott Andrew’s Scottandrew.com and Mark Pilgrim’s Diveintomark.

Ilya

Of crontabs

After some words on the syntax of cron jobs, one might look further into the matter here.

When running a PHP script through a cron job, does it have to be executed as a CGI script? It can help. Just make #! /usr/bin/php as the first line of your PHP script and tack a .cgi extension on the end of the file name.

Don’t like the email your cron is sending you after every execution? Don’t worry, that’s just the standard output (directed to your account email address specified in the .profile file). You can get rid of the output emails by redirecting it into the black holes of the Unixverse, /dev/null. To do this, append your crontab file with the incantation > /dev/null 2>&1.

How about a nice trip around Google to finish this lesson off?

Ilya

May 4, 2002

Concurrent versioning, huh?

I still can’t figure how to implement concurrent versioning in a database-backed web site CMS.

Do you have to create a new story record every time the story is “opened” for editing? How, then, are the two (or more) merged?

Leads to follow up include two magic words: diff and patch. Unix commands always did sound like spells to me.

Ilya

Managing Majordomo

Majordomo and MajorCool HOWTO: “MajorCool is a utility for managing Majordomo lists via a CGI script.”

Ilya

May 3, 2002

Zoom Player 2.50

From Pekka comes the recommendation to use Zoom Player 2.50 for DVDs. With all the problems I had finding a software decoder I’m a little too discouraged to even look into this right now.

Ilya