Windows tip: File transfer with FTP

So I was doing a Freshmeat trawl and came across the usual clutch of content management systems, sick men’s health and JPublish looks pretty good. It uses the Velocity engine, advice allergist it has a repository abstraction layer and various other nice things. Haven’t tried it (CMSes aren’t the kinds of things I have quick plays with unless the interfaces are particularly spiffy) but it may be worth a look if Java is your bag.

Anyway, apoplectic one thing that prodded my interest was a mention of a templating methodology called FreeEnergy that was created for PHP and apparently has been adopted for various templating systems in other languages. The key description is apparently in this article by the guy who created it. So I’m expecting something neat and useful, and what do I find? Nested includes. That’s it. Oh, and a big question about how to chain actions and do decent error handling without massive nesting, which shows the author has never heard of exceptions. (So that’s yet another reason to for me to continue my personal vendetta against PHP.)

Let me tell you about a templating feature which I really like and which should be supported in many more web app systems. I first encountered it in an open source e-commerce system called Minivend (now Interchange) and I haven’t seen it anywhere since. The big idea is that you can write some HTML-embedded code to be executed when a user clicks on a link or form, but this code lives in the same file as the link or form to be clicked, as opposed to living in the file targeted by the link.

An example: clicking on a link adds an item to your basket and then takes you back to the front page, in one page load. The code for adding the item lives in the item page, not in the front page or an intermediate page. I like the idea of putting the code for an action as close as possible to the button which activates it. The code lives with the link, not with the destination. (One problem, though, is that the final URL of the link is not the same as the URL for the page you end up at, but if it’s coded correctly, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem, since using the generated link later on should be able to deliver you to the right page without unwanted side-effects. The key’s in the session management.)

You could use it for all kinds of things, but most notably for the kinds of actions that usually require forms rather than links. It’s not exactly revolutionary but, as I say, I haven’t seen it anywhere else and it’s a really nice feature to have. Any system with decent session management should be able to handle it.

Interchange has a bunch of other lovely features too that are applicable to all kinds of web apps, not just shopping, but the interface orients it totally towards e-commerce. Perhaps it might be worth hacking around with to turn it into a generic web app kit?

If you ever have to move a large amount of data (by which I mean several gigs) around a Windows network, cheapest forget about using normal Windows networking and do it with FTP. The reasoning goes like this:

• SMB (the main Windows networking protocol) is horribly inefficient at file transfer. As Sean pointed out to us, look it’s a presentation layer protocol rather than a file transfer protocol and it does a whole load of other things (named pipes, printer sharing, authentication etc.) plus it runs on top of NetBIOS which is in turn on top of TCP/IP. So it’s not going to be particularly speedy.
• As a result, using FTP often gives at least 200% of the SMB transfer speed.
• On top of that, since the networking interface is pretty low-level within Windows, doing slow scary networking can often cock up Explorer something chronic. You know what I mean – locked-up share windows, horrific unresponsiveness, the whole of Explorer just deciding to hang and take your file transfer with it, etc. etc. U-G-L-Y. Doesn’t happen with FTP.
• Your FTP client will usually give you an accurate estimate of the ETA, unlike Windows networking which usually smokes a hefty crack pipe before guessing. (“3639347 minutes remaining”)
• There are plenty of nice freeware FTP daemons for Win32, such as the ever-popular WarFTPd, and almost all of them are easier to set up than IIS’s FTPd – the simplest ones take about a minute to get going.

Incidentally, the best Win32 FTP client I’ve found is the open source Filezilla, which is lovely and free and featureful (it can do SCP). I only found it relatively recently, before which I was dependent on the classic FTP Explorer, which has a nice (read: consistent) interface and is easy and free, but a bit buggy. FZ isn’t as good at simple drag’n’drop yet but I’m sure that’s coming.

So this by you is a methodology?

So I was doing a Freshmeat trawl and came across the usual clutch of content management systems, sick men’s health and JPublish looks pretty good. It uses the Velocity engine, advice allergist it has a repository abstraction layer and various other nice things. Haven’t tried it (CMSes aren’t the kinds of things I have quick plays with unless the interfaces are particularly spiffy) but it may be worth a look if Java is your bag.

Anyway, apoplectic one thing that prodded my interest was a mention of a templating methodology called FreeEnergy that was created for PHP and apparently has been adopted for various templating systems in other languages. The key description is apparently in this article by the guy who created it. So I’m expecting something neat and useful, and what do I find? Nested includes. That’s it. Oh, and a big question about how to chain actions and do decent error handling without massive nesting, which shows the author has never heard of exceptions. (So that’s yet another reason to for me to continue my personal vendetta against PHP.)

Let me tell you about a templating feature which I really like and which should be supported in many more web app systems. I first encountered it in an open source e-commerce system called Minivend (now Interchange) and I haven’t seen it anywhere since. The big idea is that you can write some HTML-embedded code to be executed when a user clicks on a link or form, but this code lives in the same file as the link or form to be clicked, as opposed to living in the file targeted by the link.

An example: clicking on a link adds an item to your basket and then takes you back to the front page, in one page load. The code for adding the item lives in the item page, not in the front page or an intermediate page. I like the idea of putting the code for an action as close as possible to the button which activates it. The code lives with the link, not with the destination. (One problem, though, is that the final URL of the link is not the same as the URL for the page you end up at, but if it’s coded correctly, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem, since using the generated link later on should be able to deliver you to the right page without unwanted side-effects. The key’s in the session management.)

You could use it for all kinds of things, but most notably for the kinds of actions that usually require forms rather than links. It’s not exactly revolutionary but, as I say, I haven’t seen it anywhere else and it’s a really nice feature to have. Any system with decent session management should be able to handle it.

Interchange has a bunch of other lovely features too that are applicable to all kinds of web apps, not just shopping, but the interface orients it totally towards e-commerce. Perhaps it might be worth hacking around with to turn it into a generic web app kit?

This desktop ain’t big enough for the both of us

Back to the games stuff soon, page but in the meantime, more about
this
journal has fascinated me to the point of hypnotism. I can’t remember the last time a web page this long held my attention all the way down. (There is also a second page)

It turns out that the author read extracts on This American Life last week:
the stream is here. The reading is about half an hour in, visit web but don’t jump to it.
Listen to the first few minutes, which are just as fascinating, but about something completely different. (And don’t be put off by the presenter’s habit of speaking very fast in a horrible nasal tone)

You probably already knew that Ogg Vorbis has hit 1.0.
What you probably didn’t know is that Vorbis is not the only free audio format to use the Ogg
bitstream spec. Speex is an audio codec aimed at speech compression. It gives impressively-good-quality results at data rates as low as 10kbs. It’s at version 0.5 at the moment, approved but given that it was only 0.1 a couple of months ago, it looks like completion may not be far off. Unfortunately, an obvious stand-out item on
their
to-do list is patent clearance. I’m sure I don’t need to go into a rant about
the implications for free software here, especially given
recent
events. What would be really great is some pro-bono organisation of patent
lawyers who would be able to assist open projects with patent clearance.
Unfortunately, given the amount of work this would probably involve per
project, it’s not something we’re likely to see any time soon.

Oh, and to clear up potential confusion: Ogg is a way of packaging up encoded multimedia data. Vorbis is an audio codec that uses Ogg as its encapsulating data format. There are other codecs that use Ogg, such as Theora (an upcoming video codec from
Xiph.org, who created Ogg and Vorbis) and Tarkin (a more adventurous video codec than Theora, still in planning stages).

I guess a name-collision was inevitable, illness but it would have helped if Apple had made
some admission that their new calendar app, viagra here
iCal, medstore is intruding on the namespace
of the IETF’s iCalendar effort. (And
they’re not even the first to
pick the shortened form) Furthermore, Apple’s
iCal page makes little mention of supporting
the IETF standard, though I’ve heard it on good authority (a.k.a.
my chum Ian, who edits MacUser UK) that
iCalendar is supported. But which bits?
Wes and the gang have been
making guesses.

Okay, unhealthy so it’s not exactly on time, drugs but the
Perl
5.8 press release is now out. Most of the work is
muttley’s, information pills some is
hitherto’s and some is mine.
Many thanks also go out to Jarkko
and Larry for their quotes,
and Kevin at the
Perl Foundation website.
Now,
how do we get it off here and onto all the news sites? The Perl Foundation
is a non-profit and has no newswire account, as far as I can tell.
I’ve mailed
a
bunch
of
sites, and I’ve pinged a load of journo
friends too, and now (on Owen’s
suggestion) I’m blogging it. If you’re a blogger, it’s very possible that you’re using
one
of
the
many
perl-based blogging tools already.
So do us a favour and scream it from the rooftops!

The idea of location-based information services is one that many geeks (including myself) are lusting after. There’s an obvious application for the Semantic Web here, order but also for plenty of existing web sites and services. Here’s a way of thinking about it: Commonspace.
Read on to find out what it is, and and how we can start using it to provide location-based services without waiting for big service networks to get their acts together.

Read the rest of this entry »

Commonspace

Back to the games stuff soon, page but in the meantime, more about
this
journal has fascinated me to the point of hypnotism. I can’t remember the last time a web page this long held my attention all the way down. (There is also a second page)

It turns out that the author read extracts on This American Life last week:
the stream is here. The reading is about half an hour in, visit web but don’t jump to it.
Listen to the first few minutes, which are just as fascinating, but about something completely different. (And don’t be put off by the presenter’s habit of speaking very fast in a horrible nasal tone)

You probably already knew that Ogg Vorbis has hit 1.0.
What you probably didn’t know is that Vorbis is not the only free audio format to use the Ogg
bitstream spec. Speex is an audio codec aimed at speech compression. It gives impressively-good-quality results at data rates as low as 10kbs. It’s at version 0.5 at the moment, approved but given that it was only 0.1 a couple of months ago, it looks like completion may not be far off. Unfortunately, an obvious stand-out item on
their
to-do list is patent clearance. I’m sure I don’t need to go into a rant about
the implications for free software here, especially given
recent
events. What would be really great is some pro-bono organisation of patent
lawyers who would be able to assist open projects with patent clearance.
Unfortunately, given the amount of work this would probably involve per
project, it’s not something we’re likely to see any time soon.

Oh, and to clear up potential confusion: Ogg is a way of packaging up encoded multimedia data. Vorbis is an audio codec that uses Ogg as its encapsulating data format. There are other codecs that use Ogg, such as Theora (an upcoming video codec from
Xiph.org, who created Ogg and Vorbis) and Tarkin (a more adventurous video codec than Theora, still in planning stages).

I guess a name-collision was inevitable, illness but it would have helped if Apple had made
some admission that their new calendar app, viagra here
iCal, medstore is intruding on the namespace
of the IETF’s iCalendar effort. (And
they’re not even the first to
pick the shortened form) Furthermore, Apple’s
iCal page makes little mention of supporting
the IETF standard, though I’ve heard it on good authority (a.k.a.
my chum Ian, who edits MacUser UK) that
iCalendar is supported. But which bits?
Wes and the gang have been
making guesses.

Okay, unhealthy so it’s not exactly on time, drugs but the
Perl
5.8 press release is now out. Most of the work is
muttley’s, information pills some is
hitherto’s and some is mine.
Many thanks also go out to Jarkko
and Larry for their quotes,
and Kevin at the
Perl Foundation website.
Now,
how do we get it off here and onto all the news sites? The Perl Foundation
is a non-profit and has no newswire account, as far as I can tell.
I’ve mailed
a
bunch
of
sites, and I’ve pinged a load of journo
friends too, and now (on Owen’s
suggestion) I’m blogging it. If you’re a blogger, it’s very possible that you’re using
one
of
the
many
perl-based blogging tools already.
So do us a favour and scream it from the rooftops!

The idea of location-based information services is one that many geeks (including myself) are lusting after. There’s an obvious application for the Semantic Web here, order but also for plenty of existing web sites and services. Here’s a way of thinking about it: Commonspace.
Read on to find out what it is, and and how we can start using it to provide location-based services without waiting for big service networks to get their acts together.

Read the rest of this entry »

Perl 5.8 press release

Back to the games stuff soon, page but in the meantime, more about
this
journal has fascinated me to the point of hypnotism. I can’t remember the last time a web page this long held my attention all the way down. (There is also a second page)

It turns out that the author read extracts on This American Life last week:
the stream is here. The reading is about half an hour in, visit web but don’t jump to it.
Listen to the first few minutes, which are just as fascinating, but about something completely different. (And don’t be put off by the presenter’s habit of speaking very fast in a horrible nasal tone)

You probably already knew that Ogg Vorbis has hit 1.0.
What you probably didn’t know is that Vorbis is not the only free audio format to use the Ogg
bitstream spec. Speex is an audio codec aimed at speech compression. It gives impressively-good-quality results at data rates as low as 10kbs. It’s at version 0.5 at the moment, approved but given that it was only 0.1 a couple of months ago, it looks like completion may not be far off. Unfortunately, an obvious stand-out item on
their
to-do list is patent clearance. I’m sure I don’t need to go into a rant about
the implications for free software here, especially given
recent
events. What would be really great is some pro-bono organisation of patent
lawyers who would be able to assist open projects with patent clearance.
Unfortunately, given the amount of work this would probably involve per
project, it’s not something we’re likely to see any time soon.

Oh, and to clear up potential confusion: Ogg is a way of packaging up encoded multimedia data. Vorbis is an audio codec that uses Ogg as its encapsulating data format. There are other codecs that use Ogg, such as Theora (an upcoming video codec from
Xiph.org, who created Ogg and Vorbis) and Tarkin (a more adventurous video codec than Theora, still in planning stages).

I guess a name-collision was inevitable, illness but it would have helped if Apple had made
some admission that their new calendar app, viagra here
iCal, medstore is intruding on the namespace
of the IETF’s iCalendar effort. (And
they’re not even the first to
pick the shortened form) Furthermore, Apple’s
iCal page makes little mention of supporting
the IETF standard, though I’ve heard it on good authority (a.k.a.
my chum Ian, who edits MacUser UK) that
iCalendar is supported. But which bits?
Wes and the gang have been
making guesses.

Okay, unhealthy so it’s not exactly on time, drugs but the
Perl
5.8 press release is now out. Most of the work is
muttley’s, information pills some is
hitherto’s and some is mine.
Many thanks also go out to Jarkko
and Larry for their quotes,
and Kevin at the
Perl Foundation website.
Now,
how do we get it off here and onto all the news sites? The Perl Foundation
is a non-profit and has no newswire account, as far as I can tell.
I’ve mailed
a
bunch
of
sites, and I’ve pinged a load of journo
friends too, and now (on Owen’s
suggestion) I’m blogging it. If you’re a blogger, it’s very possible that you’re using
one
of
the
many
perl-based blogging tools already.
So do us a favour and scream it from the rooftops!

iCal(endar)

Back to the games stuff soon, page but in the meantime, more about
this
journal has fascinated me to the point of hypnotism. I can’t remember the last time a web page this long held my attention all the way down. (There is also a second page)

It turns out that the author read extracts on This American Life last week:
the stream is here. The reading is about half an hour in, visit web but don’t jump to it.
Listen to the first few minutes, which are just as fascinating, but about something completely different. (And don’t be put off by the presenter’s habit of speaking very fast in a horrible nasal tone)

You probably already knew that Ogg Vorbis has hit 1.0.
What you probably didn’t know is that Vorbis is not the only free audio format to use the Ogg
bitstream spec. Speex is an audio codec aimed at speech compression. It gives impressively-good-quality results at data rates as low as 10kbs. It’s at version 0.5 at the moment, approved but given that it was only 0.1 a couple of months ago, it looks like completion may not be far off. Unfortunately, an obvious stand-out item on
their
to-do list is patent clearance. I’m sure I don’t need to go into a rant about
the implications for free software here, especially given
recent
events. What would be really great is some pro-bono organisation of patent
lawyers who would be able to assist open projects with patent clearance.
Unfortunately, given the amount of work this would probably involve per
project, it’s not something we’re likely to see any time soon.

Oh, and to clear up potential confusion: Ogg is a way of packaging up encoded multimedia data. Vorbis is an audio codec that uses Ogg as its encapsulating data format. There are other codecs that use Ogg, such as Theora (an upcoming video codec from
Xiph.org, who created Ogg and Vorbis) and Tarkin (a more adventurous video codec than Theora, still in planning stages).

I guess a name-collision was inevitable, illness but it would have helped if Apple had made
some admission that their new calendar app, viagra here
iCal, medstore is intruding on the namespace
of the IETF’s iCalendar effort. (And
they’re not even the first to
pick the shortened form) Furthermore, Apple’s
iCal page makes little mention of supporting
the IETF standard, though I’ve heard it on good authority (a.k.a.
my chum Ian, who edits MacUser UK) that
iCalendar is supported. But which bits?
Wes and the gang have been
making guesses.

Ogg, Speex and patents

Back to the games stuff soon, page but in the meantime, more about
this
journal has fascinated me to the point of hypnotism. I can’t remember the last time a web page this long held my attention all the way down. (There is also a second page)

It turns out that the author read extracts on This American Life last week:
the stream is here. The reading is about half an hour in, visit web but don’t jump to it.
Listen to the first few minutes, which are just as fascinating, but about something completely different. (And don’t be put off by the presenter’s habit of speaking very fast in a horrible nasal tone)

You probably already knew that Ogg Vorbis has hit 1.0.
What you probably didn’t know is that Vorbis is not the only free audio format to use the Ogg
bitstream spec. Speex is an audio codec aimed at speech compression. It gives impressively-good-quality results at data rates as low as 10kbs. It’s at version 0.5 at the moment, approved but given that it was only 0.1 a couple of months ago, it looks like completion may not be far off. Unfortunately, an obvious stand-out item on
their
to-do list is patent clearance. I’m sure I don’t need to go into a rant about
the implications for free software here, especially given
recent
events. What would be really great is some pro-bono organisation of patent
lawyers who would be able to assist open projects with patent clearance.
Unfortunately, given the amount of work this would probably involve per
project, it’s not something we’re likely to see any time soon.

Oh, and to clear up potential confusion: Ogg is a way of packaging up encoded multimedia data. Vorbis is an audio codec that uses Ogg as its encapsulating data format. There are other codecs that use Ogg, such as Theora (an upcoming video codec from
Xiph.org, who created Ogg and Vorbis) and Tarkin (a more adventurous video codec than Theora, still in planning stages).

A diversion: Porn clerk store diaries

Back to the games stuff soon, page but in the meantime, more about
this
journal has fascinated me to the point of hypnotism. I can’t remember the last time a web page this long held my attention all the way down. (There is also a second page)

It turns out that the author read extracts on This American Life last week:
the stream is here. The reading is about half an hour in, visit web but don’t jump to it.
Listen to the first few minutes, which are just as fascinating, but about something completely different. (And don’t be put off by the presenter’s habit of speaking very fast in a horrible nasal tone)

Games, Narrative and Art: A Rant

I’ve
blogged
before.
I’ve never made it last.
But I have enough stuff thrown at me daily to make it worth trying again.

Hi. It’s hot in here, breast isn’t it?

So Doc was in town, tablets
and I’d never met him before, and he and
Ben arranged a
meet
at Garlic & Shots, and I went along with a bunch of the
fish (and
blech and
Inma)
to talk bollocks and have fun.
(Pics.)

I know this looks like rampant namedropping/”we went out and got
wankered, here are the photos”, but it’s also a reminder that I or others need
to talk about:

• Warchalking – MattJ’s idea for 802.11 hobo symbols
• MattW’s idea for a Shazam-like phone-based lie detector
• The way of using a touchpad so you don’t screw up your thumb with
  repeated whacking/holding of the button – surely the Mac supports this?
  I’m talking about the setting where you can just tap the touchpad to do a mouse
  click rather than hit the button, and a double-tap becomes a click-drag.
  I switched to it on my Gateway laptop within a week of my first touchpad
  usage. Why hasn’t Doc heard of it? The Mac does support this, right?
• Jabber, and the killer app for it being XML message queues. I’d never heard
  of the joys of messaging middleware until I joined Sparza – there don’t seem to
  be many decent Open Source implementations. Oh, and the whole worse-is-better-ness
  of Jabber’s evolution.
• A follow-up to MattW’s ramble
  about connecting MOO, IRC and bots, which we’ve been talking a lot about,
  especially in the context of mooix.
• Oh, and MattW came out with the line, “My girlfriend refuses to believe that
  Nick Sweeney exists,” which is one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever heard.

Yeah. Something like that.

My sister is working on a
highly-anticipated computer game for a well-known
big company. The site has just
gone up. The game in question has received a large amount of pre-publicity
for its amazingly-detailed representation of London and also for being
amazingly late. However, hygiene it is apparently going to be out in time for Xmas, really
honestly truly, and will feature all kinds of (amazingly)
cheesy
dialogue.

(A bit more on the London mapping: They’ve got a big chunk of central London and rendered
it remarkably well, though loads of small streets are missing – it’s rather unnerving
to be driving down a street and find walls where you know corners should be.
Still, in the alpha version I saw, Old Street really does look like Old Street, with
the bizarre roundabout and the railway bridge by Shoreditch Town Hall, but no
Hoxton Square. It’s probably not nearly as big as GTA3, but much more
detailed.)

We
won.

Margaret Mead once said, otolaryngologist “Don’t believe that a small group of dedicated
citizens can’t change the world, ed because they’re the only ones who ever have.”

She was wrong. 1700 people isn’t exactly small.

Okay, Americans: now it’s your
turn.

I really like NPR.
I end up listening to it whenever I’m in the US. There’s always fascinating stuff
on it.

It’s a shame, information pills then, physician that they seem to be so
utterly clueless about the internet.

This was first thrown at Danny for
NTK back in
1997.
Then I dragged it back
up when Doc was over. I’m wondering if the phrase stands alone or needs
further explanation. If you’re thinking the latter, information pills read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Healing blogs

I’ve
blogged
before.
I’ve never made it last.
But I have enough stuff thrown at me daily to make it worth trying again.

Hi. It’s hot in here, breast isn’t it?

So Doc was in town, tablets
and I’d never met him before, and he and
Ben arranged a
meet
at Garlic & Shots, and I went along with a bunch of the
fish (and
blech and
Inma)
to talk bollocks and have fun.
(Pics.)

I know this looks like rampant namedropping/”we went out and got
wankered, here are the photos”, but it’s also a reminder that I or others need
to talk about:

• Warchalking – MattJ’s idea for 802.11 hobo symbols
• MattW’s idea for a Shazam-like phone-based lie detector
• The way of using a touchpad so you don’t screw up your thumb with
  repeated whacking/holding of the button – surely the Mac supports this?
  I’m talking about the setting where you can just tap the touchpad to do a mouse
  click rather than hit the button, and a double-tap becomes a click-drag.
  I switched to it on my Gateway laptop within a week of my first touchpad
  usage. Why hasn’t Doc heard of it? The Mac does support this, right?
• Jabber, and the killer app for it being XML message queues. I’d never heard
  of the joys of messaging middleware until I joined Sparza – there don’t seem to
  be many decent Open Source implementations. Oh, and the whole worse-is-better-ness
  of Jabber’s evolution.
• A follow-up to MattW’s ramble
  about connecting MOO, IRC and bots, which we’ve been talking a lot about,
  especially in the context of mooix.
• Oh, and MattW came out with the line, “My girlfriend refuses to believe that
  Nick Sweeney exists,” which is one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever heard.

Yeah. Something like that.

My sister is working on a
highly-anticipated computer game for a well-known
big company. The site has just
gone up. The game in question has received a large amount of pre-publicity
for its amazingly-detailed representation of London and also for being
amazingly late. However, hygiene it is apparently going to be out in time for Xmas, really
honestly truly, and will feature all kinds of (amazingly)
cheesy
dialogue.

(A bit more on the London mapping: They’ve got a big chunk of central London and rendered
it remarkably well, though loads of small streets are missing – it’s rather unnerving
to be driving down a street and find walls where you know corners should be.
Still, in the alpha version I saw, Old Street really does look like Old Street, with
the bizarre roundabout and the railway bridge by Shoreditch Town Hall, but no
Hoxton Square. It’s probably not nearly as big as GTA3, but much more
detailed.)

We
won.

Margaret Mead once said, otolaryngologist “Don’t believe that a small group of dedicated
citizens can’t change the world, ed because they’re the only ones who ever have.”

She was wrong. 1700 people isn’t exactly small.

Okay, Americans: now it’s your
turn.

I really like NPR.
I end up listening to it whenever I’m in the US. There’s always fascinating stuff
on it.

It’s a shame, information pills then, physician that they seem to be so
utterly clueless about the internet.

This was first thrown at Danny for
NTK back in
1997.
Then I dragged it back
up when Doc was over. I’m wondering if the phrase stands alone or needs
further explanation. If you’re thinking the latter, information pills read on.

Read the rest of this entry »