I've updated my tutorial All About Python and Unicode again. It is now fully integrated into Drupal instead of being a standalone HTML document (in a different style and without the ability to add comments ... how 1995!). With this revision I've tried to clarify the section about splitting up Unicode strings, explaining a little more about why it is needed. Enjoy!

Update (2007-03-06): Oops, forgot the table of contents ... added.

I finally made the plunge to Drupal 5.1 . As you can see, I'm using the default theme since my old theme doesn't work with 5.x. I will fix it at some point.

With this upgrade, I've turned on anonymous comments again. Drupal 5.1 finally added a "select all" feature when viewing comments, making it MUCH easier to delete spam. (Putting it on par with Wordpress which has had that feature for a long time.) Comments still have to be approved, just to keep boodebr.org from becoming a spam site when I'm out of town for a few days.

UPDATE: The theme is decent now. Finally got it working under IE6. 

 

I discovered TiddlyWiki this week, and as the title says, WOW! If you haven't heard of it, essentially it is a serverless blog/wiki, implemented purely on the client-side (in Javascript). That's cool enough, but on top of that, it is head and shoulders above (in terms of user-interface) any other blog/wiki I've used. It is implemented as a single file (code+CSS+content), so it is trivially easy to carry around on a USB stick, etc.

Earlier this year I was playing around around a little bit with DHTML (trying to figure out what all this AJAX stuff was about). In doing so, I realized how much of what is called "AJAX" is really implemented in the browser. I had a vague idea that you might be able to write browser-only AJAX-ish apps, but had no idea they could be this cool. You can use TiddlyWiki as a blog, a wiki, a homepage, a bookmark collection, a todo-list, ... the possibilities seem endless. For all the times that I've opened up a text editor to scribble down some random fact (and then was never able to find it again), now I can use TiddlyWiki.

It has been about a week since I installed Kubuntu 6.06.1 (as documented here), and it has gone pretty well so far, with just a few snags.

One snag was the newly infamous xorg bug that rendered X11 useless on my machine. I still have not upgraded to the newest xorg for fear that it may make X11 unusable again.

A second snag occurred when using KDE's runlevel editor (Control Center -> System Administration -> System Services). It screwed my system up so badly I ended up rebuilding it instead of trying to figure out what it did. Something is a little non-standard about Ubuntu's (and Debian's) runlevel scheme, and doesn't seem to play nicely with the KDE tool.

I updated my installation guide a little bit, to change the default Java installation to use 1.4 instead of sun-java-5. Firefox seemed to lock up frequently on Java sites, so I'm downgrading to 1.4 to see if it is more stable.

So ... a few more snags that I'd have hoped for (I didn't expect to have to rebuild the machine so soon ...), but a positive experience so far. Still enjoying the near-perfect multimedia experience; it is working better than any Linux distro I've ever used in that regard.

By the way, my box-rebuilding was much less painless that it could have been, due to having separate partitions for "/" and "/home". Highly recommended! Just remember to tell the Kubuntu installer not to reformat your /home partition when reinstalling (FYI, my fairly "loaded" Kubuntu box is currently using 3Gb on the root partition, just to give you a ballpark estimate of the space required.)

UPDATE (8/24): Just upgraded xserver-xorg-core and it works fine, even with NVIDIA drivers. Make sure you get at least version 1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4

 

I seem to be able to go 3-4 years with a Linux distribution before I get bored of it and switch to something else. I've been running Gentoo for a couple of years now, but I'm getting that "time to change distributions" feeling again, so I thought I'd write up how it goes. What follows is the results of about 3 weeks of installing, testing, installing, testing, etc., recent Linux distributions to try and find a compelling replacement for my current Gentoo desktop.

Instead of trying all 3000 distributions, I decided to start with the (supposed) best-of-breed, unscientifically chosen by looking at the current Top 3 on Distrowatch. As of today, those are: Ubuntu 6.06 (I used Kubuntu ), openSUSE 10.1 , and Fedora Core 5 .

I'm going into this expecting a lot: It was OK to have to do a lot of manual configuration with Gentoo, since that was the whole idea. However, I expect these "Top 3" distributions to do all the work for me. I expect them to be as point-and-click easy as possible, and will note anything that strays from that expectation.

The story begins here: Moving from Gentoo to SUSE, Ubuntu, or Fedora Core?

Urgh ... boodebr.org wasn't talking to pingomatic, leaving me effectively "off the air" for the last couple of weeks. I had assumed that the point & click magic of Drupal was doing its thing and never checked till today, when I noticed that technorati hadn't updated me in a while.

The easiest way to install Drupal is to have it live in the root of your webserver. However, I don't like doing that, because I have other top-level directories under my webroot, and I don't want to clutter up the root with the Drupal files. Having Drupal in a subdirectory makes maintenance a lot easier (IMO, of course).

For reference, my webserver is set up like this:

• boodebr.org root = /var/htdocs/boodebr
• Drupal root = /var/htdocs/boodebr/main
• boodebr.org is an Apache VirtualHost (the real root is /var/htdocs).

I have to do three things to set it up the way I want:

1. Redirect visitors from http://boodebr.org to http://boodebr.org/main
2. Tell Drupal that it is living under "/main" and not under "/"
3. Tweak the Apache httpd.conf so that URL rewriting will work under the VirtualHost.

Site news:

• boodebr.org has moved to a new server. I was tired of the limitations of shared hosting, so I've moved boodebr to a VPS.
• I had similarly grown tired of Wordpress, so I'm now running Drupal.

All content (including comments) has been moved, and any old links should work. There may still be a few rough edges, but hopefully nothing major. One issue is that I can't get mod_rewrite working inside a VirtualHost, so the URLs aren't clean yet. I'll do a little googling later to try and fix that.

UPDATE 6/18:

• The clean URLs are now working (see next blog entry).
• The site has some display issues under IE6 - I'll work on those next.
• The old permalink structure is not compatible with the Drupal scheme, so links to individual articles will be broken. However, links to major sections (like Python and MYOML ) are working.

The custom markup language has been designed to have a certain structure. That is, there is supposed to be one <article> tag, followed by a <section> container, followed by a <text> container. The CSS stylesheet has been designed with this in mind. However, nothing actually enforces this structure. There is nothing stopping you from writing an article with arbitrary tag structure (or even using undefined tags). There are two problems with this:

1. Both the XSLT and CSS stylesheets were designed with a certain nesting order in mind, and allowing a different structure risks having a document that doesn't look quite right when displayed.
2. Not having a consistent structure makes it hard or even impossible to write an XML query tool for indexing articles, etc., since there is no fixed structure to parse.

IE-only websites are an unfortunate reality on the net. They are especially prevalent on the corporate intranet where I work, where the slogan "thou shalt only use IE" is seen in full effect. I use Firefox as my primary browser, and was getting really tired of having to constantly switch to the desktop, find IE, copy & paste an URL from Firefox, and continue browsing in IE.