A while ago, I read this fluff piece about Python. As with most fluff pieces, it was quite inane, but our anthropologist wunderkind Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier succeeded in citing Guido van Rossum incorrectly as “Rossum” instead of “Van Rossum” no less than six different times.

I went through the very tedious process of registering for a login at the offending site in order to post my thoughts in the talkback forum on this embarrassing faux pas. My post never appeared in the talkback forum, but: all except one of the incorrect citations were silently fixed.

Read More

I have often heard the open source phenomenon (if you want to get pedantic with me about open source vs free software, start by blowing it out yer ass: I’m going to be pragmatic about it and use the two interchangably) compared to religion, but last night was the first time that I had this almost religious open source experience. In spite of all the grudges I have against organised religion, this experience was altogether quite a pleasant one.

Read More

Paul just pointed this out: In Ximian Evolution, open your “Summary” window, Select “Tools|Settings” from the menubar, select the “News Feeds” tab under “Summary Preferences”, click on the “Add news feed” button and add this URL: http://cpbotha.net/weblogs/cpbotha/index.rdf Now select this feed from the left hand list and click on the “Add” button in the middle.

Your Evolution summary window will now contain a live listing of my weblog. JOY! Get this URL from any Movable Type weblog by copying the “Syndicate this site (XML)” link.

Read More

This is an AnandTech review of the Hypersonic Sonic Aviator 3.06GHz Pentium 4 laptop which is just another rebadge of the Clevo 5600. I bought mine (rebadged as a Promedion) a while back, but with a 2GHz P4 (Northwood) and a Radeon 7500 Mobility instead of a Radeon 9000 Mobility.

In case you didn’t know, this laptop does Linux.

Read More

After a few minutes of Perl *ptooooey* hacking, I’ve re-elevated myself back to the super-user that I am. I now have authoring permissions over all blogs on this system and won’t be able to lose them again.

If you’ve somehow lost authoring permissions on blogs in a Movable Type installation that you maintain, download and run this script. It will only work if you had permissions before and subsequently lost them. It won’t create these permissions from scratch. It’s left as an exercise for the reader to implement this last bit.

Read More

I quote from the Movable Type Movable Type User Manual: AUTHORS AND PERMISSIONS: “You can edit your own authoring permissions by selecting your own name from the pulldown menu. Be careful when doing this, however, particularly with respect to turning off author-editing permissions for yourself. If you turn off your author-editing permissions, you will be unable to turn them back on.”

I’ve gone and done this on all the blogs of the other users on my installation, so that I don’t get listed as author on the blogs that I don’t have anything to do with. Now I’m obviously not able to change author permissions on those blogs, which is something that I do want to be able to do!

Read More

I’ve made binary snapshots of my suspend/resume capable DRI Radeon drivers for XFree86 4.3.0 RC 1 (i.e. 4.2.99.901) available on the dri resume pages.

My patches weren’t submitted early enough to be included in the looming XFree86 4.3.0 release, but will be merged with the XFree86 CVS shortly afterwards. Once more distribution vendors have standardised on 4.3.0 and things have settled down, my binary drivers should also be able to stabilise.

Read More

My extremely exciting and immensely inspiring weblog will continue elsewhere.

Read More

It could be because I set something up incorrectly, but people have been seeing unusably narrow text entry boxes (TEXTAREA) in Movable Type 2.51 with Mozilla (1.0 and 1.2.1), Opera 7 and IE 6.0. So I ran:

mkdir new && for i in *.tmpl; do cat $i | sed -e \
's/<tmpl_if name="AGENT_MOZILLA"> cols=\"\"&lt;\/TMPL_IF&gt;/\
cols=\"80\"/g' &gt; new/$i; done &amp;&amp; cp new/* ./

in the tmpl directory and it all seems to be usable now. This is probably not the Right Way(tm) but it makes the entry boxes usable.

Read More

Rudolph paved the way when he moved out from LiveJournal. I’d been looking at alternatives myself and finally got around to installing the brilliant Movable Type. After having fixed (worked around really) a stupid bug with extremely narrow textboxes in Mozilla 1.0 and 1.2.1, everything seems to work now. Paul also came along for the ride. See my livejournal for what happened before.

Read More