I love doing what I do for a living, but I hate doing it for a living. The basic problem is that all the control is taken out of my hands. Somebody else decides what will go on a site, somebody else decides how it will link together, designers lay out graphics of the final look. I take those graphics and make pages. That’s it.

From time somebody promises something to a client that is a bit more than Product #23789 Detail Page. In these situations I get a bit more leeway to think. Then it’s good to have everything pre-decided, I just fill the brief and writing software to fill briefs is much easier than just stabbing in the dark.

The clients are pretty bad as well, they demand stuff you can’t build, make changes that require that a site be completely rebuilt in order to satisfy some stupid minor cosmetic change and they seem to only be able to submit amends in super rude speak. Sometimes they even dare to claim knowledge of the web, we’re generally very rude to those kind of clients. It’s a horrible sight, them trying to drop their web keyword into conversation, “so will that be Haytch-Tee-Em-El?” Yes, but that’s my problem.

Also frustrating is the situation we have here where there are enough people around to form a hierarchy but that hierarchy is so skewed as to be ridiculous. Our system admin doesn’t know a wizard from an MMC plugin. The head developer can barely build a nicely scaling table without Dreamweaver. Yet here I am, way down the list, with less CPU power than everyone (bar Mat, who has the same G3 350). The worse thing is that at least once a week I get to watch the other developers cock something up and they only rarely ask my advice on how to fix it. That, to me, is a slap in the face, but I think it is a side effect of the fact that I very clearly can not be arsed most of the time. Beggars can’t be choosers, eh.

It would be OK, if I didn’t end up having a rant like this most every Friday. Studio Managers making technology decisions, the Systems Administrator telling everyone off for running Gnutella for security reasons when he himself runs ICQ. When I do complain to a director, it’s Shaun because he’s the most approachable, but he never ever does anything about it. Mat got told that he will not be building a site that he recommended be built in PHP a few weeks back, he got told this by the Studio Manager, who for all the world sounded like he was making a tech decision. Mat is complaining to Shaun about this. Nothing will happen and it’s terrible, not only are our views ignored when it suits people, but we don’t seem to have any way of getting round that. I find it hard because I have to have a bond with someone before I start complaining to them. Shaun just treats my comments like jokes sometimes.

I want to leave, it’s gonna happen. I’m thinking big faceless software corporation developing tax return printing applications. As long as I can program in a professional environment, I don’t care. My goal is to learn from more experienced programmers, rather than anything else.

The comment system is up. It has a nasty bug that reposts if you refresh. I’ll have to see if I get defeat that with header cleverness.

The last few bits I’ve changed have added a degree of me-less-ness. Basically I’ve begun the process of abstracting the code to support generalisation and packaging. We’re going to use a config file in the protected folder to store user data. Functions read and write the parameters in the file. It will also contain sensitive data. The file will have a page to configure it completely, allowing configuration of the database also. This page will be in the protected folder also, so the product will ship with a default password for the folder and allow it to be changed from the setup page. Essentially this page should attempt to work in all situations and allow the product to be configured head to toe in a wizard kind of way.

Gotta think of a name, comments on a weblog to…

In order to cut down on the load on those poor 56k modems long lists of shit need to be serialised into multiple pages. This can be acheived by limiting the SQL query return to a given number (i.e. 25). On the first page that’s all that is needed, the front page then passes the id of the last item to the suceeding page. This is used in the query in the form < id and with limit 25, that’s the recordset. Next page and previous page links can be provided. The front page only has next and any page that displays less than 25 records doesn’t display the next page link. This is a kludge, but getting 26 records and dropping the last one would be a workaround.

Combine this with a simple one page search system and the a comments setup and you have ” X ” the weblog product…

Page containers don’t have to be anything more than another HTML template. PHP variables can be used that write in groups of portlets and the main page content. A theme would consist of a page template and a portlet template. That way they could be powerful enough to allow people complete control of the site image, tidily destroying the whole ultra-grid structure.

Another handy thing would be to have a default theme, probably kurish, with lots more PHP in. The PHP would allow the theme to access a user record dictating cell colours and such. These fields can be set from a simple theme wizard, accessible from the profile page. An expert theme page could just consist of two textarea’s. Expert themes can go on the list… but that might need censoring.

Technically it should be All Your Homepage Are Belong to Us v0.2 notes, AYHABTU being the code for Hype.

Anyway, the key to success is persistance, luckily the key to persistance is not success. Other wise I be stuck. ANYWAY, the key to Hype2 is one of those nice page tree diagrams that Soup get through so many of. Draw one of those, with every single page on it, soon everything will become clear…

Also for Hype2, containers. Containers are pages that can include portlets (portlets being actual bits of functionality). These containers are the next level of configurability, allowing Hype to break free from the 3-col little boxes format. Hype2 needs a good way to allow custom containers but without letting the whole thing get completely out of hand (i.e. having to get a themer to replace every single page on the site).

Export portlets to pt files. That way portlets can be:

• More advanced: They can have PHP in them and make better use of the supplied data.
• More accessible: All nastiness is kept inside the portlet() function.
• Fast(ish): More file reads, but these are fast as fuck anyway (wrong attitood I know). This can be tweaked to do less reads by fgetting all the pt files into the portlet function file once only. Mix ‘n’ blen of trad hypo and forum approaches.
• Vastly extensible: a label hook would be good, when a portlets function is known a label is passed, this can be used by theme designers to draw different portlets (using an if statement).
• Secure: pt files can be checked by me before being added. This will make testing trickier, but I can give a little on various submissions.

That the world’s most famous Italian Plumber is Japanese.

I’m going to add comments, to this site and maybe Hypothetical. Hypothetical definitely needs more linky back-and-forthy structure. At the moment we have an information pile, albeit a rapidly growing one, what we need is and infogram.

How people love the shroud of anonimity that the internet affords them so much. It gives them the opportunity to step outside themselves and try something new. Like being a pervert. It definitely gives people a chance to live as the pervert inside. This mainly shows itself in email as far as I can see, although there is a shitload of nasty sites out there, it’s just that email is much more infectious, viral.

But the same media that gets used to hide your real face is so public. I got reading some weblogs today. Most people use them exactly as you would assume they use their diary. Got up early, had a bath. Mom was buggin’ about me not cleaning the dog. That kind of thing. In the past these micro-memoirs would have been guarded with such secrecy, but now anyone in the world can read that Joyce from Berkeley’s boyfriend has gone off to join the Navy (she’s taking it quite well though). I just can’t get into that kind of thing. I kept a diary for a bit when I was about seventeen, but the book I wrote in only had really small spaces, so I only wrote a little bit.

Now I’ve got to thinking that there isn’t much point having a weblog unless it’s public, so I might go and publicise it. Not too much, I think I’ll just post the link to Google. Then again, the stuff that I have written here is kind of disparate and, I suspect, not very interesting. What I found interesting about the blogs I was reading today were the day to day “Mom is mad at me” bits, because they’re clues about lifestyle in all these places in the world. Norwich is not interesting or uninteresting, it’s just another place in the world. More than that, when it comes to weblogs, it’s just another way of life in the world, different from the others. Weblogs are perhaps the one thing I have found that are as international and as Global Village-y as the internet is hyped to be. There’s millions of them, all by everyday people, going about the little things. Time to head over to blogdex again…

Also, Mat Denney lives in a Two Dimensional Pink Plastiverse.

Spent all weekend doing it pretty much, but Tullis and I managed to get City Rd’s Debian box sharing our brand spanking new lovely speedy ADSL connection around our little LAN. I posted this message to Hypothetical to explain how we did it to one of Hype’s users. The whole thing was a excellent learning process. We had to rebuild the kernel which was not new but is always fun. Then PPPD has modules for PPPoA/E, and that’s about all is needed to support a USB ADSL modem.

Getting our heads around iptables over ipchains or ipfwadm proved to be a steeper learning curve. Basically we spent a day getting ADSL working and a day getting IP masquerading et al working. In the end we just had to download an example set of tight firewall rules and then hack it open a bit. cityroad.hn.org currently reports every known port as open or filtered when basic nmapped, which is not ideal, and it does reply to incoming ICMP type 8 packets (that’s ping, hehe), which I’m not sure I like, but it will be handy.

Tonight I will get on to shoring the defences up again a bit more. At the end of the day, we are there, no two ways about it, but the fact that we have some security will hopefully discourage any potential h4x0rs and move them along to one of our windoze-runnin’, no-clue-havin’ virtual neighbours.

Got this reply from Emily Kidd, Tessa Jowell’s policy advisor! Check it out:

Dear Mr Godfrey

Thank you for your email addressed to Tessa Jowell dated the 30th July 2001 concerning the Channel 4 programme Brass Eye. The Broadcasting Policy Division deals with television regulatory policy and I have been asked to respond.

Under the current broadcasting arrangements, responsibility for what is broadcast on television and radio rests with the broadcasters and the broadcasting regulatory bodies -the Governors of the BBC, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), the Welsh Fourth Channel Authority (S4C) and the Radio Authority. They are independent of the Government and accountable for safeguarding the public interest in broadcasting. They also maintain guidelines for programme makers on the standards which should be observed. It is important that the views of the public are brought to the attention of the broadcasters and regulators so they can reflect these views in their codes and guidelines.

Within this framework it is for the broadcasters to make judgements about the content of individual programmes and the time at which they are broadcast, in the light of the responsibilities placed upon them and of their more detailed programme guidelines. It is a long-standing principle that the Government does not intervene in programme matters, either on arrangements for scheduling or on content.

Tessa Jowell expressed her personal feelings as a viewer and a parent and made it absolutely clear that the programme content and regulatory issues that have arisen from this are matters for the regulators to deal with and not the Government. A heavy responsibility sits on them to safeguard public trust and confidence. For her part, she wishes to be sure that the regulatory system is able to respond rapidly and effectively to issues of the kind we have seen in this case.

Yours sincerely

Emily Kidd
Policy Advisor

And my reply…

Dear Emily,

Thank you for your reply of the 17th. I was very happy to see a human on the other end of my communication.

I understand that Ms Jowell’s comments were personal, but she should be concerned with the Brass Eye issue as part of her Governmental role also. Whilst I see no particular need for broadcasting regulations to be either tightened or relaxed at this point, I think that certain media organisations are currently allowed to provoke and promote public anger in a way that belittles the issues and the genuine views of the people. It also makes some of the celebrities who open their mouths to agree look pretty stupid, but that’s their fault. The tabloids’ handling of Brass Eye and, more recently, the Express and the Glasgow Daily Record’s coverage of the asylum seekers issue has caught the attention of this country’s neighbours — we are presented as bigots. Specifically in the case of the Daily Record and of the Bradford paper who’s offices were recently torched by rioters, it is arguable that the reporting was directly responsible for inciting violence.

I realise that this is a very grey area and one which would be difficult to legislate. What are Ms Jowell’s views as Culture Minister? If she or you have a chance to reply I would be very interested to hear more from the democracy I appointed. This whole Government accounting for itself by sending me email is a new thing that I quite like :-).

Thanks for your time,

Ben Godfrey

So there you go. It’s a conversation I will continue.

What with link click-throughs now being tracked on the Hype home page and soon to be tracked on other pages the autolinks mini-site is kind of redundant. That makes me think about the way that links are scored in general. Links are not going to have their scores demoted all that much anymore. Maybe they should start lower and climb more slowly.

Additionally, Hypothetical needs an Autolinks portlet and any page that deals with messages needs to run mark_links().

Netscape sucks ass, everybody knows this. However, Hypo should probably be tested a bit more on Netscape to ensure useability. This is mainly a theme thing — Kurish and Legacy both definitely have problems, other probably do also.

For some reason, the file list on the profile page doesn’t have any links to look at/download the files. This is retarded.

I spent a lot of time this weekend hacking about with the Psion. I found the whole thing a bit wierd because some stuff was mind-numbingly easy and other bits well tricky. My 64mb Compact Flash card does not work, so I will have to return it and ask Dabs for one that does. Pending that I have had no storage space and so nowhere to actually install Linux to properly.

This is is a big issue, the Psion itself only has 300k free after loading the PsiLinux ramdisk image. Maybe I should try the non-CF one as it may be smaller.

The ramdisk image is interesting. It contains busybox, a single binary responsible for many of Unix’s traditional little commands, like sh. It also contains a custom init, one that doesn’t seem to want to use an inittab. This has so far prevented me from setting the Psion up as a serial terminal, which would be really useful. More useful still would be SLIP across the PC connection. Then I could just plug it into any machine (assuming Windoze boxes can do SLIP fairly easily) and telnet into a Unix box.

My main focus is comms stuff at the mo as I have no space to bother doing anything. I don’t even have space for a compiler, which sucks ass as I need to build loads of stuff.

I want to get Microwindows up and running, and a hundred thousand other things, but they all take disk space. One thing that did occur: If I get SLIP up I might be able to export some of my desktop’s disk space to the Psion through NFS, or any other sharing platform, which would be dead handy.

Guess I’ll phone Dabs for now though…

I, in my capacity as h4x0r, blagged a Psion 5 off Ben Thompson and installed linux on it. You two can be like me, get a Psion from ebay and then, for the series 5 at least, follow these instructions.

What am I going to do with Linux on a Psion 5? Here’s what:

• Install Microwindows
• Get ViewML (web browser)
• DOOM! For Microwindows!
• IrDA, to the phone then out to the net… Tullis’s help req.
• Apache + PHP + MySQL development environment if poss
• Try and find an ethernet adapter
• Other linuxy things…

All good clean fun then.

Here is a cool looking list of Emus for OS X. I like emus, they rule.

More useful OS X bounty is to be found at the ADC. They have the developer tools and something claiming to provide an NBP plug-in for something, I wonder what… ADC account name is 4ftern00n {password = $npwd . reverse($npwd)}

1. Paid
2. Mac OS X

OS X is neat. It’s still a strange beast. I had the beta for a few days when that was around, but only on an iMac. Now I have it as my main operating system on a beautiful bang up-to-date turquoise G3 at 350mhz. It crawls a bit. It would be nice if it was a bit more responsive.

My main problem is that it rather looks down it’s nose at trad AppleTalk, “the NBP flavour” of which is handily used by all my OS 8/9 work mates to send files whizzing everywhere. I would say it an outrageous oversight, but I’m happy to find a hack for the other bits. True I haven’t seen Fireworks or Dreamweaver all day, I currently have no classic environment. To be honest, I’m not sure my machine is up to it, despite having 400+mb of RAM. However, I can see some remote machines, fairly recent OS-ed ones, so I’ll concentrate on them. In the meantime I’ll get samba going and that will give me access to our office fileserver. Doh.

Places to look are hard to find, it’s another alien web community to get into. I just skimmed the surface of the Classic world. Hey, I haven’t gone to tucows yet. OS X FAQ looks handy. Versiontracker has a big collection of OS X software.