2002-12 - Weblog - Xiven.com

Happy New Year!

Don't make any resolutions that you can't keep. Much safer that way.

And no, I'm not telling anyone mine.

Posted: 2002-12-31 16:03:16 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (1)

Manoeuvre, Manoeuvrable, Manoeuverability??

Oh, the joys of the English language!

This little saga was started by this bug report on Voidwars. Actually it started a little before when I first looked up the word manoeuvrable for use in Voidwars (we have to indicate manoeuvrability of ships for example). I looked it up by starting up my word processor, setting the dictionary to UK English and just typing in what I thought was the correct spelling: maneouverable. To my suprise, upon running the spell check, it said I was right, and so that was the spelling I used throughout.

Then came that bug report. From the original post, I could see that the bug reporter was going by the American spelling (maneuverable) so I quickly responded by saying that we're using UK English (proper English ☺) and that it was in fact correct.

Unfortunately however, a later post by someone who had looked the word up on dictionary.com said that I was in fact still wrong and that the correct spelling was in fact manoeuvrable. So I checked this out and it seemed to be the case.

I also needed the spelling of manoeuvrability so, going by the spelling already given, I guessed how it would be spelt and checked it on dictionary.com.

No entry found for manoeuvrability. 1 suggestion found: manoeuverability

Eh? Where on Earth did that extra 'e' come from? Puzzled by this, I went downstairs to get the big guns: the Oxford English Dictionary, which most UK English speakers consider as being The foremost authority on current English.

It turns out that I was in fact correct with my guessed spelling for manoeuvrability and that the spelling on dictionary.com was in fact incorrect.

So endeth the saga (I hope). Sorry for boring you all.

Posted: 2002-12-31 15:53:48 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (4)

In the world

What's going on in the world then? (I haven't done one of these yet, so I think it's about time)

The RIAA got hacked (or h4xX0r3d, if you like). It couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people...
Aquarion has his pingback server and client up and running again (at last ☺).
Kamakaze is currently sans-internet. ☹
Everyone in the entire world is linking to Mark.
There are now at least ~~four~~ three known weblogs (this one, ~~Dive into Mark~~ , Aaron Swartz: The Weblog and The Freaky Weblog) in existence that send XHTML as application/xhtml+xml. And at least 1 of those is broken at the time of writing this ☺

And in other news I've been trying to figure out why Mozilla was completely ignoring any "Last-Modified" HTTP headers that I sent. Couldn't figure it out for the life of me: I was comparing the headers I was sending to those of other weblogs and couldn't see anything wrong. In the end it turns out that the Last-Modified header was being sent perfectly fine and Mozilla was using it correctly, it just wasn't displaying it.

Posted: 2002-12-31 04:28:55 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (3)

In Dulci Jubilo

Image: photograph taken with my digital camera of our dog carrying a stick while walking along a canal towpath

Guess what I got for Christmas.

No, not a dog; a digital camera. ☺

Now I can post lots of random pictures on this weblog....

Posted: 2002-12-25 07:03:12 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Happy Christmas!

Just got back from singing at Midnight Mass, and it's now 1am on Christmas Day so Happy Christmas everyone!

Posted: 2002-12-24 17:09:39 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Breaking stuff

I seem to have an intense desire to stop my computer working.

Yes, I am now installing DirectX 9 for no good reason whatsoever. In fact there have been reports that it's actually full of bugs (to quote: Anyone who uses this except on a spare machine is nuts - The Inquirer).

Well I guess I must be nuts then. ☺ I don't know why I do it, I just seem to love installing new things...

Posted: 2002-12-20 18:49:50 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

More invalid HTML/XHTML problems

I was just playing around with the highlight_file() function in PHP. Lovely function except it's putting  tags in (urrghhh). So after a little playing around I made a little bit of code to sort it out.

The following code will reformat the output from the highlight_file() function into valid XHTML (removes  elements, replaces with  <code> ). It also makes use of the <pre> tag instead of all those   and   tags being in there.

Note: It has since been brought to my attention that using <code> tags is more semantically correct than  (thanks David) so the code below has been updated to do just that.


<style type="text/css">
  .source code.html { color: <?=ini_get('highlight.html')?>; }
  .source code.default { color: <?=ini_get('highlight.default')?>; }
  .source code.keyword { color: <?=ini_get('highlight.keyword')?>; }
  .source code.string { color: <?=ini_get('highlight.string')?>; }
  .source code.comment { color: <?=ini_get('highlight.comment')?> }
</style>
<?php
echo '<pre class="source">';
$source = highlight_file('xxx.php', true);
$search[0] = '<font color="'.ini_get('highlight.html').'">';
$search[1] = '<font color="'.ini_get('highlight.default').'">';
$search[2] = '<font color="'.ini_get('highlight.keyword').'">';
$search[3] = '<font color="'.ini_get('highlight.string').'">';
$search[4] = '<font color="'.ini_get('highlight.comment').'">';
$search[5] = '</font>';
$search[6] = '<br />';
$search[7] = "\r";
$search[8] = '&nbsp;';
$replace[0] = '<code class="html" xml:lang="x-html">';
$replace[1] = '<code class="default" xml:lang="x-php">';
$replace[2] = '<code class="keyword" xml:lang="x-php">';
$replace[3] = '<code class="string" xml:lang="x-php">';
$replace[4] = '<code class="comment" xml:lang="x-php">';
$replace[5] = '</code>';
$replace[6] = "\n";
$replace[7] = '';
$replace[8] = ' ';
echo str_replace($search,$replace,$source);
echo '</pre>';
?>

Yes, some code very much like this was used to make the above listing of the code look nice, and yes, the real reason why I made this post was to test it out... :)

Posted: 2002-12-18 18:03:37 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (2)

Pingback revisited

I just upgraded my Pingback server to include logging of all attempts (successful or not) to pingback me so I can see when its broken. I also decided that I really should release my pingback server source code since the server is (according to some people) the hardest part to do (you'll need these XML-RPC functions also). I won't release the client stuff yet since my code for that sucks. Well, more. ☺

Posted: 2002-12-17 16:46:21 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Be afraid...

Kamakaze has decided to put his humour into comic strip form. Actually it's quite an amusing little strip, though you really have to have played Voidwars to truly appreciate it.

Posted: 2002-12-16 02:34:39 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Style is everything

I've just added a couple of new alternate stylesheets to this site (a "High visibility" one which makes the pale blue into a very very bright blue, and a "Printable" one which lays out the page in a more printer-friendly way) so if your browser supports alternate stylesheets (currently only Opera 7 Beta and Mozilla are known to do this), by all means try them out or ignore them at your convenience.

In other news, this site now conforms to the W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (Level AAA). At least that's the theory anyway. Please feel free to let me know if you think I've missed something.

Further information on accessibility for this website.

Posted: 2002-12-15 13:30:57 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Q Who?

In the continuing saga of "Things I hate about Internet Explorer", today I tackled the issue of IE's screwed support of the <q> tag (specifically that it won't add the quotes in like it's supposed to).

Abandoning the <q> tag altogether is unacceptable in my opinion (though obviously for some people it is the only way to get around the problem), so now all weblog posts get quotes (") automatically added inside any <q></q> tag iff it detects that the user is using IE (otherwise it leaves it well alone). For outside of the weblog, I made a small PHP function to perform the same task. This I suppose, is one of the advantages of dynamically generating all your pages.

If only we didn't have to do such silly things to work around browser bugs.

Posted: 2002-12-12 16:42:58 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

...that's stupid Oh.. then it's beta

After much faffing around, the public beta test of Voidwars has finally begun. This test is only a test of the Terran race (the other 2 races: the Bakani and the Etrib are still unfinished) but it should still be good fun and a pretty good test of the system. We're pretty proud of what we have created here (damn well should be, it took long enough...) so let's hope it all runs smoothly.

Well, what are you still reading this for? Go there now and check it out... ☺

Posted: 2002-12-11 18:10:37 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Who, me?

Apparently, Hixie mentions xiven.com as an example of a site which serves XHTML as application/xhtml+xml in a lot of w3c discussions.

Such infamy! ;)

Posted: 2002-12-09 03:42:53 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

xiven.com stating the blatantly obvious since 2002

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