RasterWeb!Go read Vinny Carpenter’s Blog. Vinny and I used to work together years ago, and he taught me a lot about Linux, Perl, and Apache… For that I owe him all sorts of thanks… He’s a Java geek now, so if you’re into that Java thing, go see what he has to say.
Them: Is there a calendar around here?
Me: Sure, just type ‘cal’ at a unix prompt.
Them: I don’t have unix.
Me: Get it.
In case anyone is keeping track of this stuff, we started this weblog 6 years ago. This is well before the term ‘weblog’ existed. So can it really be called a weblog? I mean, I guess we were doing this stuff before we had a name for it, or we were doing it, not knowing what it would be called. Or something like that.
Anyway, we’re still not using Blogger, or Movable Type, and now were not using TypePad either. At least to maintain this site. Oh, no Radio either, though we once used Frontier, and once used Pike, actually we used Radio too for a short time I think. Anyway, now we used a hacked up collection of perl scripts and such, and as soon as a system comes along that meets our requirements, we’ll consider switching.
Oh, as for the 6, since starting this here ‘weblog’ we’ve moved three times, had a second child, changed jobs once, and probably written a zillion lines of code…
Damn you Extensis…
Your PortWeb application produces invalid HTML.
Now look, it’s bad enough the application is crippled and limited in how it operates, and requires hackish workarounds to get what you want, but when someone comes along who just wants to create a simple web front-end to their Portfolio database, and thinks PortWeb will do the trick and wants to do so with valid HTML, well, they are out of luck. Stuck with another case of “it validates, except where some stupid application inserts invalid code” syndrome.
It’s not the end of the world, it’s not ever disastrous, it just annoying. It’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a templating system that was perhaps just a little bit smarter, or more flexible.
I’m sure Extensis isn’t the only guilty party when it comes to producing crappy code you can’t fix, they’re just the most recent I’ve had to deal with. (Check back next week though…)
P.T. Barnum is credited with the quote “There’s a sucker born every minute” though supposedly he never said it. Well, guess what folks, you’re not getting the whole story. What story is that? The HTML email story that is! Gather round kids…
See, like most people, I get a lot of what we call spam. Unsolicited commercial email, as it were. Now as a reasonably intelligent person, I don’t like HTML email much, over 95% of the HTML email I get is spam, so I generally ignore it. Now, I use Mozilla for Mail (and Thunderbird as well) and they let you easily toggle between seeing an email as plain text or HTML, or viewing the source if you’d like to do that. Now, those familiar with email, Content-Type, and multi-part messages know that you can have a section of your message show up to plain text folks, and another version show up to HTML folks. So I got curious when what appeared to be spam by the subject, showed the following message in plain text.
In 1835 he removed his family to New York, taking a house in Hudson street. For a time he tried to get a position in a mercantile house, not on a fixed salary, but so as to derive a commission on his sales, trusting to his ability to make more money in this way than an ordinary clerk could be expected to receive.
I mean, at least some spam makes sense, I want a better rate on my mortgage, don’t I?
So I figured I’d view the HTML part of the message, and sure enough, it was spam about what else – getting a better rate on my mortgage.
I had to know what that plain text was all about though, which led me to learn a little bit more about ol’ P.T. Barnum, and in doing so, discovered the quote is from The P.T. Barnum of the Barnum and Bailey Circus
by Joel Benton.
Thinking about the relation between P.T. Barnum, suckers, and spammers, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…
(Oh, I did recently get a better rate on my mortgage, and it’s due to my neighbor, not to some random email I received…)