i summon one kim

I announced tcsh 6.14 today. The major “new feature” for me in this release is working UTF-8 support. Anyone using multibyte character sets should be much happier now. It has been great having a number of people work on the code — there are over 70 fixes in this release.

I have been practising release engineering for tcsh by cutting the last 3 developer test versions. I have automated the release procedure a bit more to minimize the chance for errors from having to type in detailed commands repeatedly. Let’s see if I can push out another release a bit closer to my desired goal of every 6 months.

I have also installed an issue tracker to make it easier to produce change logs and make sure that issues are not falling through the cracks. I hope it will also provide a searchable long-term memory on past decisions on what will get included in tcsh and when.

Naturally right after announcing the release I updated the pgksrc package for tcsh, so you can install the package right now by updating your pkgsrc tree.

I like to look around in the recent referrers of my website. Today I saw a referral from GeoURL, to my surprise. I had already given up ever seeing anything but “we’ve gone away” on the front page, with the “near” lookups just returning an error.

Well, they are back! I need to work that little box back into my layout now. For the time being: have a look at the sites near me, courtesy of GeoURL.

If you are running a recent nightly or svn checkout, you’ll probably need to upgrade to DoFollow 1.3.

The patch detection stopped working due to a change in the wp_filters data structure. I probably should not be looking inside such stuff, but there is no interface to check if a filter has been enabled. I don’t have any other clever way to see if the speedup patch has been applied. (And I don’t want to give up hope yet on the patch being committed to svn one day…)

Given that I’ve successfully avoided spam by using me at example dot com as an “obfuscation” method for email addresses, I’m not surprised by the findings that spammers are lazy. But it is still interesting to read about good proof through a real test, and I’d hazard a guess that using hex entities may be a longer-lasting method.

I’d consider replacing the JavaScript I currently use, if it weren’t for the fact that people already seem to be able to find my email address just fine. Actually, Phil’s article would seem to support the case that disabling JavaScript is rare. He only got a couple of actual messages to the non-JavaScript address. I guess that’s good news for me.

I just deployed DoFollow on a vanilla WordPress 1.5 installation, and found out that there was a bug in the nofollow tag removal logic used with an unpatched version of the code. If the timeout was set to zero for immediate tag removal, it wouldn’t work. I’ve fixed it, so you should all upgrade to DoFollow 1.2 now.

Another WordPress plugin: Finnish Quotes

The quote marks used in Finnish differ from those used in English. The reverse curly quotes are not used at the beginning of the quotation, instead the same quotation mark is used for both the beginning and the end. This plugin will insert an additional filter after all the default wptexturize() filters to replace the reverse curly quote marks with the forward one.

Download: finquote.php

After a dozen years of living in the United States, I can relate to a lot of what Therese Catanzariti writes in her column titled Communication – Finnish style, published on Crikey.

But many of her comments don’t apply just to Finns. From my experience of working in a subsidiary of a German bank, I tell you Germans are a lot like the Finns described in the column. It always drives me nuts when I get asked for the “actual status” of a project. (The reference to Amélie is just perfect!)

I also remember having a visiting professor from France at the University of Delaware. Everyone was complaining how difficult it was to understand her. I had noticed also, but had no trouble — I was using the literal translation approach mentioned in the column, automatically.

I’d warmly recommend a few years of living in a “foreign language” to everyone.