dolphinling's blog

Blog moved

2005-01-19T02:02:48Z

On the offchance you didn't know, I've moved my blog to my own webserver. It can now be found at http://blog.dolphinling.net/.

Soundcards and more

2005-01-16T20:31:30Z

For quite a while, I've been playing all my music and stuff off of CDs. When I switched to Windows 10 months ago or so, I got rid of most of my computer collection, figuring I'd re-rip it, and then never bothered to find a program for Windows that could convert to .ogg. My stereo has a 5 CD changer and decent programming/shuffle capability, so it was okay. Then when I got back on Linux at the end of December, sound wasn't working at all—likely, I thought, because I have a pretty high-end sound card and needed to change some configuration files or recompile the kernel with the right drivers. When I switched to kernel 2.6.10 I found the right driver but it still didn't work properly. Again I figured it must be configuration files but I had no idea which, so I left it for a while.

Yesterday I decided to try to get it working. I doubted I could figure out what the problem with my current stuff was, so I decided to just go and install the latest version, following their instructions for that. This has worked for me in the past quite a few times (including with the kernel—that was my original "reason" for switching from 2.4 to 2.6). So I went to the ALSA site, got the sources, followed the instructions they gave on the site and the warnings given after (I think) make install that said I needed to change a config file and that it was muted by default, and it worked perfectly. Well enough to hook up my stereo's speakers and get (semi-)surround sound.

And now, in retrospect, the original problem was most likely that I needed to unmute it, or change that config file. Oh, well. I have the newest version now, and I learned a lot.

Asa makes a passing reference to WF2

2005-01-16T20:01:15Z

Asa yesterday made a reference to WF2, and I'm trying to figure out exactly what it means.

It's time for a new roadmap (well, maybe a little bit past time) and Brendan, drivers, and our development leads have been working out the details since last year's Developer day where Brendan outlined the big picture (slides available online). Discussion continues on the Wiki, in drivers meetings, in meetings with module owners and even representatives from other browser makers and major Internet technology builders. This document doesn't exist yet, but much of the work that will be reflected in it has been going on for quite a while. You can see lots of great work going on in areas like XULRunner, WebForms 2.0, SVG, APNG, Canvas, NPRuntime, Cairo integration, an entirely new storage system, etc. When Brendan gets free from other commitments, he'll post the new roadmap document to the web site, but all of this work (and more) isn't happening without coordination and direction -- just because we don't have that page updated yet.

(emphasis mine)

After a couple read-throughs, it sounds like someone(s) are already working on implementing WF2 in Mozilla. Is this right?

If so, cool.

Wishes

2005-01-12T19:21:10Z

I wish I could go to things like this...

via: Anne's HREF section

Kernel compiling

2005-01-05T06:15:37Z

Since the default kernel that comes with SuSE is loaded with support for pretty much anything and everything, and I don't have anything and everything (indeed, I have very little), I decided to recompile it.

This isn't the first time I've recompiled a kernel—I did it before when I had Fedora Core 1 and I had to put in a (partically binary-only, because the FCC is stupid) wireless driver, then again a few times as I installed Gentoo twice and got rid of it—but I haven't done it often.

So, the first thing I noticed was that make xconfig wasn't working. No problem, I thought to myself, I'll just use make menuconfig instead. That didn't work either. Apparently SuSE didn't install ncurses-devel. So I hunted that down, and menuconfig worked. Then I spent a couple days (in small sessions) going through all the options, many of which were familiar (because of those Gentoo installs I mentioned earlier) but many of which were eerily-similar-yet-different (because for Gentoo I used 2.6.9, but this SuSE came with 2.4.21). And after that, I compiled.

And it didn't work. That was the point at which I actually looked at the version I was compiling and saw that it was from June '03, and went to get a more up-to-date version. So now I'm halfway through make menuconfig for the 2.6.10 kernel (make xconfig still didn't work). Fun.

Spam that I really, really want to report to somewhere.

2005-01-04T02:56:37Z

Most of the time when you get spam, if it passes through your filters you just hit "j" to mark it junk, and never bother with it again, except to delete it and compress the folders. Every once in a while, though, you get a piece of spam that really irks you, like this one I just got today:

From - Mon Jan  3 21:36:34 2005
X-Account-Key: account1
X-UIDL: 3fa7318900003b7f
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
Received: via dmail-2000(11) for +INBOX; Mon, 3 Jan 2005 18:45:47 -0600 (CST)
Received: from rs10.luxsci.com ([10.225.3.202])
        by rs16.luxsci.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id j040jlL7024460
        for <user-5561@rs16.luxsci.com>; Mon, 3 Jan 2005 18:45:47 -0600
Received: from rs10.luxsci.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
        by rs10.luxsci.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id j040jlP6011050
        for <user-5561@rs16.luxsci.com>; Mon, 3 Jan 2005 18:45:47 -0600
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        by rs10.luxsci.com (8.12.11/8.12.11/Submit) id j040jlpk011049
        for user-5561@rs16.luxsci.com; Mon, 3 Jan 2005 18:45:47 -0600
Return-Path: <mentors@incomeopportunity.ws>
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        for <dolphinling@delphiforums.com>; Mon, 3 Jan 2005 18:45:47 -0600
Received: from unknown [210.245.197.4] (EHLO 1million2006.com)
        by p00m166.mxlogic.net (mxl_mta-2.5.0-63)
        with ESMTP id b37e9d14.2693663664.11516.p00m166.mxlogic.net (envelope-from <mentors@incomeopportunity.ws>);
        Mon, 03 Jan 2005 17:45:47 -0700 (MST)
Received: (from mentors@incomeopportunity.ws) by 1million2006.com (8.12.9p2/8.12.9/Submit) id 24zl4Oq1cN.4Y) for dolphinling@delphiforums.com; Mon Jan  3 20:51:38 2005) (envelope-from mentors@incomeopportunity.ws))
Message-Id: <1104756698.24134.24zl4Oq1cN.4Y@1million2006.com>
Date: Mon,  3 Jan 2005 12:51:38 GMT
From: "Scott Reese" <mentors@incomeopportunity.ws>
To: dolphinling@delphiforums.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Return-Path: mentors@incomeopportunity.ws
Errors-To: mentors@incomeopportunity.ws
X-Mailer: GDI Mailer (0.02...7739)
Subject: dolphinling.net is yours, right?
X-Spam: exempt
X-MAIL-FROM: <mentors@incomeopportunity.ws>
X-SOURCE-IP: [210.245.197.4]
X-Lux-Processed-For: user #5561 on rs10.luxsci.com
X-Lux-Envelope-Recipient: <dolphinling@delphiforums.com>
X-Lux-Rule: Deliver
X-Lux-Processed-For: user #5561 on rs16.luxsci.com
X-Lux-Delivered-To: "INBOX"
Status:

Hello,

Scott Reese here. I was wondering how you are doing with
dolphinling.net?

I've earned substantial money with my web site, partnering
with a California-based and Inc. 500 ranked Internet company
that is growing like wildfire - and it never cost me a penny
to get started.

If you're interested in generating an income online, I was
wondering if you would be willing to review this short flash
movie and let me know what you think?

http://simplehomebusiness.biz/scottreese

You can either check out that URL, or call my phone number
below for a brief 3-minute recorded overview.

This is an exploding opportunity in a $20 billion per
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If what you see and hear interests you, I'll show you how
to use dolphinling.net with this to make a serious income that
will grow each month and come to you for years.

Anyway, just thought I would ask. I'm doing well with this
and I'm very curious to know if other website owners find
the concept as interesting as I have.

Thank you in advance for your time. I know it's valuable.

Scott Reese
760-494-4355









If you wish to never receive an email from me again,
please go here: http://1million2006.com/delete.html

     Box 10715 * College Station, TX 77842

Since I just got my domain name yesterday, this person is obviously monitoring DNS changes and spamming anyone on the list. Is there somewhere I can report this to?

Oh, yeah, and my domain's through DNS now! http://dolphinling.net/ :-) Still working on a few things with my friend who I share the hosting costs with before I actually do anything with it, but YAY!!

Back

2004-12-30T22:31:07Z

I don't particularly feel like writing right now, but I'm back online after about two weeks. I'm on SuSE 9.0 with gnome (with lots of updates--the 9.1 CD, which is out, didn't work on my computer for some reason) after trying several other distros, all of which gave me at least some problems. A lot of the time was also due to me being sick for the first time in years, and my own laziness. I still have stuff to work out, but for the most part everything's good now.

Oh, I'm also getting a webserver (sharing with a friend). Yay

List-Id email header

2004-12-15T05:53:00Z

I was just looking through the full headers of some emails, and I noticed one called List-Id. Apparently this tells you what mailing list something was sent from. Now I can filter things based on where they really came from, instead of trying to fake it with the Subject, From, or To headers (which often fails when something is sent to multiple lists at once—my original reason for looking through said headers).

Yay. *hopes he helped someone with this*

More abbr

2004-12-13T18:07:45Z

Another thought on abbr: is it proper to do something like <abbr title='HTML'>HyperText Markup Language<abbr>? If so, when should it be used rather than the more normal way of putting the long form in the title?

The spec says

ACRONYM:
Indicates an acronym (e.g., WAC, radar, etc.).

which doesn't in my mind forbid it, and

The content of the ABBR and ACRONYM elements specifies the abbreviated expression itself, as it would normally appear in running text. The title attribute of these elements may be used to provide the full or expanded form of the expression.

which seems to contradict itself.

Take, for example, something like

As a result, Penn State's Information Technology Services (ITS) is urging that the University computing community use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer…

Now, the part that would "normally appear in running text" is Penn State's Information Technology Services. It's only after this that the acronym is introduced, and it's parenthetical—one could almost say that it's not part of the content at all. But it makes no sense here to put the expanded form in the title, since it's already written out.

Blah, I don't want to finish writing this. I'll just say that I think it's perfectly acceptable to do things this way, and ideally XHMTL 2 will introduce two new attributes to distinguish between the two, and title can be left for when it shouldn't be written out at all, but you want to still let people know what it means, like on Anne's site .

dolphinling @ 2004-12-08T20:11:00

2004-12-09T02:23:20Z

I just read Once With Heads Held High from Eric Meyer's blog, and I agree with nearly the entire post, but I'm confused about one thing:

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

—from the opinion of the U.S Supreme Court in 388 U.S. 1, Loving v. Virginia, 1967

I entirely agree with the Court. And no, I don’t see an ethical difference between prohibitions of marriage based on gender and those based on race, which is what 388 U.S. 1 addressed.

Why is this? I have, off and on, advocated the abolishment of marriage as a legal whatever-it-is altogether, as I think the current system is too flawed to be easily fixed, and I don't really see a good use case. (This as opposed to getting rid of marriage and putting in Civil Unions that are basically the same but differ only in name and that they allow both hetero- and homosexual unions.)

After all, what is marriage? To me it seems like a way for people to announce and/or formally state to the world that they are in love, and that they, together, are to be considered as a unit. Now, here I'm talking about marriage in its intended form, its simplest manifestation, not in all in all the various other incarnations it's popped up as (perhaps like, for those who understand the simile, semantic HTML rather than HTML 3.2).

Now, as to why the current model is flawed, there are plenty of reasons. Obviously, same-sex marriages are illegal or at least in significant question as to be impractical in all but a few places (I think there is one/some somewhere in Europe?). Now what about polygamy? I frankly can't see any reason for that to be illegal either. Of course, when you put that in you have to make sure you don't accidentally leave out same-sex polygamy, nor make it so it's only a one-to-many thing (i.e. if man A has multiple wives, wife B should also be able to have multiple husbands (and/or wives)). There's really also no reason to limit something to only a group of two people--represented with these crude ascii art drawings as

                 C        /---\
A--B--C   !=   /  \   !=  |ABC|
              A----B      \---/

(Don't try to convince yourself that that's never happened, either. It's uncommon enough that it's not often voiced for fear of people thinking them strange (just like homosexuality used to be), but I'd be very surprised to find that it's never happened or that, as society becomes more open and tolerant, people don't start voicing it.) And when we can finally communicate with an extraterrestrial species, or if another earth-based species happens to become intelligent and we can communicate with them, (or, I suppose, if artificial intelligence immerges), why should cross-species marriages be illegal?

Now, allowing all that would require a significant rehaul in the marriage system. Admittedly, the final product could be quite simple--something along the lines of allowing allowing any two entities that both understand and consent to be included as part of a new entity. But here we get to the question of the use case.

Namely, what is it? Sure, something like a credit card could be issued to the entity (person A and person B), but it could just as easily be issued to person A and person B. Child care could be the privelage/responsibilty of (person A and person B), but again it could just as easily be the responsibility of person A and person B, just as (I expect, not know) it is now for an unmarried couple who have a child now. And when you get to taxes... if you have two wives and a husband, how do you pay your taxes? You can't just do "filing jointly", because you have to do three different "joint" filings, plus probably one of your own for things you do unrelated to any of them. It is, quite frankly, much simpler to do away with all joint filings and simply have each person file their own taxes.

So it seems to me that marriage, as it stands now, is fatally flawed, and that any other way of doing marriage, while perhaps much better, doesn't have a good reason to be implemented. After all, I agree that Love is a human right—and indeed one nearly impossible to take away—and the ability to announce that love—to let it be known, to constantly show it, to shout it out to the stars—is too. I just don't see how marriages is a right or even something useful.

Keep in mind as I write this that I'm only 17, so I really don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just here to provoke thought.

Thunderbird 1.0 is out!

2004-12-07T06:02:17Z

Thunderbird 1.0 is out! Go get it!

I'm glad to see that it's on the mozilla.org home page :-)

Update: I just realized that since I'm switching over to Linux whenever my dad burns the Gentoo CDs for me, I should probably wait. That's no excuse for you, though. Go get it. Now.

Update: Ooo, pretty!

(Pointed out to me by Ali Ebrahim)

Livejournal's Text Formatting

2004-12-07T05:52:27Z

Is anyone else that uses a Livejournal really annoyed by the text formatting options thing? How it defaults to formatting, there's no way to change the default, and it's a dropdown box instead of a checkbox, meaning you can't switch it with just one click, you instead have to click, move the mouse the right amount, and click again?

/me wonders if there's anywhere to ask to get that changed.

abbr, title, and generated content part 2

2004-12-07T05:50:15Z

abbr[title]:after{content:" ["attr(title)"]";} seems to be working pretty nicely. Anne's site breaks (the WP up in the top right corner, which IMO probably should just be written out anyway, pushes the word Limpid onto the next line where it covers part of the search box), and it provides some interesting insights into people misusing code like this post of Gerv's where he wrote <abbr title="A ceremony in the Catholic church">Mass</abbr>, but in most cases it's only helpful.

So now I'm going to try modifying it slightly, to

abbr[title]:before{content:attr(title)" (";}
abbr[title]:after{content:")";}

This basically just moves the expanded form of the acronym to the front, as well as switching [] to ().

I wonder how this will work out.

Non-wireless internet, finally!

2004-12-06T01:51:38Z

I finally have a non-wireless internet connection! Yay! Not that the process of getting it wasn't annoying... It went approximately as follows:

Get wire to room. This wire is 140some feet (+ a bunch coiled up), and goes clear across the house, literally from opposite corners. Just this could be (and partially is) fodder for many many more entries.
1. Unplug everything from computer
2. Get computer out into open floorspace and open it
3. Take out wireless card
4. Realize I probably should have uninstalled the drivers first, seeing as this is windows and when I installed the card in the wrong order I had to reformat to get it to work
Plug everything back in, turn computer on and uninstall drivers
1. Unplug everything from computer
2. Get computer out into open floorspace and open it
3. Take out wireless card
4. Find network card
5. Realize that this actually ISN'T a network card, it's a modem.
Get angry and depressed
Plug everything back in
Notice that computer has a built-in network card
1. Unplug everything from computer
2. Get computer out into open floorspace and open it
3. Take out wireless card
4. Plug everything else back in, and the ethernet cable in too
Find the drivers for it, which takes forever and involves going to another computer, looking up the service tag on the dell website, and having trouble getting the driver off the CD. But eventually I got it.

And now I don't have 4 second ping times (over a LAN! See why I don't like wireless?), so it was worth it.

dolphinling @ 2004-12-04T01:09:00

2004-12-04T06:22:00Z

I just read ABBR and ACRONYM are for user agents not for end users (it's down at the moment, so try the Google cache, and I disagree, for one reason: abbr[title]::after{content:attr(title);}.

I'm also, now that I've thought of it, putting that in my user stylesheet. I wonder how that'll turn out, and whether I'll have to retract my disagreement (but I don't think so).

dolphinling @ 2004-12-03T00:48:00

2004-12-03T05:48:40Z

Computer Cases

2004-12-02T22:04:57Z

My friend Sam is buying a new computer, and we were discussing cases today:

Sam: The one I'm looking at now has 5 external, no internal 5 1/4 bays and 4 external, 5 internal 3 1/2 bays.
Me: What do you need 4 external 3.5 bays for?
Both of us: RAID your floppy drives?

Holes through the floor

2004-12-02T04:27:13Z

So I finally have the hole drilled through the floor, and the wire put through it, but of course as of right now I don't actually have the non-wireless network card in the computer. I'll do that maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, then back up my stuff onto my dad's computer, install linux, and finally be off of windows.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYY!!

data urls and namespaces

2004-11-23T02:29:15Z

I was just trying something with a data: url of type application/xhtml+xml and it kept giving me a "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." error until I put in a namespace. I (don't think I) have the resources to test it, but is this the case with stuff served over the wire, too? Or is something funky with Mozilla's handling of the data url?

Thunderbird "Compact Folders"

2004-11-17T23:59:46Z

I've been wondering for a while if there's any way to make Thunderbird really delete messages, since when you delete them from the trash they still show up in the .mbox files. Thanks to Bug 270386 I now know how: File -> Compact folders. It seems to me that this should happen automatically, but apparently most email programs work the same way as Thunderbird. See also the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article on Compacting Folders.

Update: I cleared off over 126 megabytes by doing that!

HTTP headers, part 2 (previously "accept in about:config")

2004-11-09T00:27:56Z

So I was reading up on the HTTP header definitions (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14) and I see that I was definitely misguided at least on the quality values. So here's what I'm considering changing them to:

intl.accept_charsets (Accept-Charset): utf-8,iso-8859-1;q=0.9,*;q=0.8
intl.accept_languages (Accept-Language): en
network.http.accept.default (Accept): application/xhtml+xml,text/xml;q=0.9,application/xml;q=0.9,text/html;q=0.8,text/plain;q=0.7,image/png;q=0.6,*/*;q=0.5

This adds a total of 24 bytes to my headers, but it better reflects what I want. Once again, any comments? (Not that anyone reads this...)

Why I need a hole in the floor before I start learning to program

2004-11-07T23:04:05Z

Blah. I don't like windows. I think I'll just wait until I get Linux to learn how to program.

I've been wanting to learn to program for quite a while now, but have never been able to, or have always had a reason to put it off. Here's my current reasoning:

Windows is annoying. Really annoying. So I don't want to program in it. I've tried several times to start learning, but have failed to get things working in a way that I like. Besides, I like Linux better, so I'll start programming when I get Linux back on my computer. Unfortunately, I really can't use Linux unless I have a properly-working internet connection. My room is in the exact opposite corner of the house from our server, and the house is rather old (originally built in 1835), so there aren't any network cables running up here. When I got the computer, I got a wireless card with it. Again unfortunately, the only Linux driver I can find for it has... problems. It works for ~15 seconds, then stops working for 7. It works for the next ~15 seconds, then stops again for 7. This is a real pain, and means that I really don't have any good internet connections in Linux. To fix this, we (my dad) have tried putting in a cable. To do this, we need to drill a hole through the floor. So, as the title of the post said, I need a hole in the floor before I start learning to program.

Getting this hole in has been a problem so far, but hopefully it'll be done tonight. If not, I'll keep bugging dad until he manages it.

accept in about:config

2004-11-05T04:01:22Z

Currently I have 4 settings that (AFAIK) are related to what content I get served. They're all at their default settings, which are

intl.accept_charsets: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8
intl.accept_languages: en-us, en
network.http.accept-encoding: gzip,deflate
network.http.accept.default: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

I'm concerned about some of these. For the accept charsets, it looks like it's saying utf-8 is worst, even though there aren't any qualities attached. I would rather have utf-8 as my first choice. How will servers interpret this? Should I put utf-8 in front? Also, for the MIME type pref, why is image/png listed explicitly with the same quality as */*? Does that have any effect at all? And is it a bad idea in any way to put application/xhtml+xml with a higher quality than text/html? I think ideally I'd have something like application/xhtml+xml;q=0.95,application/xml;q=0.9,text/xml;q=0.89,text/html;q=0.8,text/plain;q=0.7,image/png;q=0.6,*/*;q=0.5—would there be any problems with that?

What constitutes a "security" bug?

2004-10-29T03:33:39Z

Bug 226034—onmouseover return true blocks url being displayed in status bar was just resolved invalid, and had its blocking-aviary1.0 flag switched from + to -. Aside from the fact that I'm pretty darn certain it is a real bug (and reopened it accordingly), I think the reason it was closed was the developer was annoyed at it being considered a security bug.

Now, that makes me wonder whether it is or not. It does, after all, allow a website writer to in a very minor way specify the UI of the browser—which I'm sure we can agree is a bad thing. I'm beginning to think, though, that this kind of thing isn't a security problem (unless it is for other reasons, like making a social engineering attack easier) but is its own little category off to the side, where all the bugs in it default to major rather than critical. <Insert reasons that I had but lost my train of thought for when I went and did something else here>

Blah, I'm not very good at this blogging thing unless you have a really short attention span, am I?

IRC

2004-10-29T01:04:09Z

So right now I'm on IRC. I really have no idea what I'm doing, but it seems to be going all right other than the fact that no one seems to be talking. It is, in fact, my second time on IRC—the first went similiarly. No, wait, it's my third. I listened in on a bugday once.

I probably should have learned to use IRC sooner. I have fun reading the bash.org quotes and I know a lot of useful stuff can go on, but I've always been somewhat afraid that I'd accidentally flood a channel or something. But so far I haven't been flamed by email or cast out of the community or anything, so who knows, maybe I'll be on IRC more often now.

This entry is going nowhere. I guess I'll just let it stop like it wanted two after the first sentence.