i summon one kim

My brother just told me that this site is broken (again) in Microsoft Internet Explorer: the links in the “asides” entries are not clickable and pictures in posts are not visible (but the layout still has their space reserved). This is especially frustrating since there haven’t been any changes to the site code (XHTML or CSS) since September 11th, and everything definitely worked then in both Firefox and IE. Of course, there have been a number of “IE updates” since through Windows Update…

I’d like to fix this right away, but I’m far too busy with other things at the moment. I did try a couple of CSS changes, but didn’t land on the solution yet.

In the mean time: Get Firefox already. :-)

I was having trouble with ½ and ¾ in an article I was trying to publish on another WordPress-powered site. First I thought my browser was acting up, but soon became doubtful and realized I should look at the source of the page generated by WordPress. To my surprise I saw that the entity codes had been deliberately mangled.

I tracked down the source of the problem in the WordPress code. This patch fixes the problem.

Call me an Internet addict (it might be accurate, actually), but I’m very used to having broadband Internet access always. I consider having available on-demand (some might say “constant”) access to my Internet-connected servers the norm. I read my mail on-line (in plain text, no less). My RSS aggregator is on-line on the web. I contact my friends on-line on IRC.

Yet there are times when I’m not online. Most commonly this used to be while commuting to and from work. I’d be on the train for about an hour each way. My favorite pastime for the commute was reading. But sometimes I would have liked to write down some thoughts, either for the blog or maybe for an email reply.

I knew about offline blogging tools but I had never really looked into them. I had experimented with Windows Notepad and the Blackberry memo application. Both are fine for writing the bulk of the text, but the “cleanup” tended to be too tedious: there are a number of fields you still have to fill in before a blog entry can be published or an email sent out.

I recently went through the weblog clients listed in the WordPress Codex to see what my options were. I chose to install w.bloggar on my laptop. With just a little bit of configuration (and a couple of tweaks on my non-standard WordPress installation to accommodate language selection) I had successfully published a test entry. Quite painless so far.

With w.bloggar I can set all the common post attributes (title, tags, timestamp) without any of the tedious cut-and-paste that would be necessary without a dedicated offline blogging tool. Once I’m connected to the Internet I can easily open each saved post and publish it. (That statement will be validated by the fact of this post appearing on my site…)

I’ve released DoFollow 2.0 to go with WordPress 1.5.1. The functionality is the same as before, and the plugin can be used with (an unpatched) 1.5 as well.

The patch I had proposed to core WordPress functionality is gone: the developers prefer to keep the current nofollow implementation as is. If you had previously applied the patch, you can download a copy from Mosquito issue #1087 and reverse it (e.g. using patch -p -R).

I wanted to make this change to DoFollow, as it removes a chunk of code that was digging in some internal structures of WordPress that don’t have an exposed and documented API. Now it is much less likely that changes to DoFollow would be required for maintaining compatibility with future WordPress releases.

Antoine Reilles submitted a package for the Little Brother’s Database (lbdb) in PR pkg/29164. I’ve had lbdb in my reminders for quite some time, but never got around to packaging it. I tweaked Antoine’s package a bit, and now I have committed it to pkgsrc as databases/lbdb. Thanks, Antoine!

The Little Brother’s Database provides a lookup interface for mail addresses for several data sources. It can retrieve data from its own database, Emacs bbdb, abook, LDAP and even MacOS X addressbooks, and provide the results to external programs such as the Mutt mail reader.