Xarg blog Archive

Dave Hyatt just posted

Safari now passes the Acid2 test. There were two issues left that needed to be resolved.

which is indeed a good thing, but even better is that at the end he says:

Here are the patches for all of the problems fixed in Safari to make the test pass.

And then of course provides all the patches! That the fixes come back to the open source code base is a great thing. Also, seeing how little had to actually change and what exactly those changes were makes it hard to see why the other reasonably standards complaint browsers couldn't get there as well. I wonder if it's something they will even attempt to do with IE?

I have been looking vaguely at distributed SCM's again, with the idea that we might switch to Arch, svk, or monotone. One thing I have been watching is the stuff around git, which is what Linus is now shifting to for the kernel patch management -- and I ran across this hilarious and 100% accurate assessment of peoples concerns about SHA1 vulnerabilities...

in fact, this attack cannot even be proven to be malicious, purely via the email from Malice: it could be incredible bad luck that caused that good-looking patch to be mistakenly matching a dangerous object.

I really hate theoretical discussions.

The fact is, a lot of _crap_ engineering gets done because of the question "what if?". It results in over-engineering, often to the point where the end result is quite a lot measurably worse than the sane results. You are _literally_ arguing for the equivalent of "what if a meteorite hit my plane while it was in flight - maybe I should add three inches of high-tension armored steel around the plane, so that my passengers would be protected".

That's not engineering. That's five-year-olds discussing building their imaginary forts ("I want gun-turrets and a mechanical horse one mile high, and my command center is 5 miles under-ground and totally encased in 5 meters of lead").

General Bits is a column loosely based on the PostgreSQL mailing list pgsql-general. To find out more about the pgsql-general list and PostgreSQL, see www.PostgreSQL.org.

I had known about this newsletter for a while but noticed recently they had an rss feed. It's a nice collection of articles and getting a feed for it is even nicer.

This article (via Jon Sequeira) addresses something we have been thinking about a lot here.

Kellan (I’m guessing) offers some insightful thoughts about hosting software for nonprofits. He raises two challenages facing folks who build nonprofit solutions using so-called ‘niche’ platforms like Zope or Rails… well, really anything other than PHP, right?

Our current project is to extend the software used for CASWeb which is OpenACS based, to have stronger CMS functionality and to support vhosted subsites better. Local authorities would then provide free (or very cheap) hosting to community organisations via subsites and we would host (or in some cases just support) the overall site.

We do the heavy lifting that the extremely cheap PHP hosted sites don't provide (backups, a failover box, bug fixing) and the local organisation gets a high functioning database backed website.

About the only story I remember having read in elementary school was Examination Day by Henry Slesar. It was originally published in Playboy in 1958 and elsewhere and it somehow found it's way into my fifth grade reader...

I wonder if it's still read in elementary school in the US?

I have been using a personal css file with firefox for a while and recently added two rules:

*:target { border: 1px solid red !important; }
a[rel="nofollow"] { border: 2px solid green !important; }

The first puts a red border around an anchor element and the second highlights links that are rel nofollow (I want to watch what people are actually doing with this -- and so far the answer is not too many people do anything at all with it). Here is an example of using :target from w3c; naturally :target does not work in IE.

The file to add these to is ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOURDIRNAMEHERE/chrome/userContent.css for firefox.

(btw, You might want to play with the useChrome.css file while you are there...).

The postgres performance documentation has gotten pretty good.

Another great place to look for this sort of stuff is this article PostgreSQL 8.0 Performance Checklist by Josh Berkus and Joe Conway (frequent posters to the pgsql-performance list -- which is itself a tremendous resource for the lore of db tuning); They are running the site for their upcoming book Power PostgreSQL and have a blog as well.

Open source software development should strive for even greater code maintainability -
A study of almost six million lines of code tracks how freely accessible source code holds up against time and multiple iterations.

Nice issue focused on QA. More wisdom than concrete data though.

Nice survey of things you might like your blog software to do

Beginning with a question of whether blogs can be hosted on a specific Web site, a colleague of mine wondered if I'd give him some suggestions about getting started blogging. Here's a version of the answer I e-mailed to him.

I think I would be a better blogger if I managed to post here to answer the questions I spend time answering for one person in email.

This article about two column layout was good
but the neatest thing about this site was the
cool bilingual layout -- It switches based on clicking
the sidebar and includes a tiny text version of the
alternate language.

I have been testing with PostgreSQL 8 for a month or so and I have to say it is most excellent. There is a long list of improvements in functionality but the things that I like are the little things they don't really mention like \d VIEW shows you the rule body if it exists and functions are parsed at the time they are created which catches lots of bugs and best of all is getting tracebacks from plpgsql errors.