Software Documentation

I use the Seamonkey integrated web browser - I've done so for years - but as I plunge more and more into using Google Earth, I've been noticing something that would annoy the heck out of anyone running Google Earth and Seamonkey at the same time:

As soon as you try to access something on the web through Google Earth, it tries to uninstall Seamonkey. This would be filed under 'making me unhappy'. Thus, I searched around and came up with this page in the Google Earth forums that, in turn, got me to the real Seamonkey/Google Earth answer:

I have the same issue. After some investigation, I found this is becuase GE (or possibly MSHTML.DLL ?) attempts to run SEAMON~1.EXE, with no path, so goes looking for it in C:\WINDOWS, and finds SeamonkeyUninstall.exe, which in 8.3 name format is of course SEAMON~1.EXE, so it runs it.

Why it is doing this, when previous versions did not, is not yet clear, but at least this is something to go on.

Workaround to prevent seamonkey being closed every time you click on a link is to rename seamonkey to something that does not match SEAMON~1.EXE, eg put a "1" in front of it or something - "1 seamonkeyuninstall.exe" works nicely.

This does not make links works, but at least it stops all your seamonkey windows being closed.

Props to smeenz for helping me sort that bug out. { Read more }

Yup, it is official. Aside from the time off of SecondLife tomorrow which is notably of very short notice - which will may fix some bugs that people have had their virtual thongs twisted over, the sculptured prims are coming to... well, to... to give people to build stuff outside of SecondLife (which is cool) and utilize their 3 dimensional software skills.

I mean - everyone has those, right? So everyone will be uploading froody textures of all sorts of prims if they follow the authoritative wiki page on sculptured prims. Either people will run out and get copies of Maya (because if one guy at Linden Lab has it, everyone does - horse dead, stopped beating here) or will get one of the Free 3D Modeling apps pointed to. If you're ahead of the curve - good for you, enjoy the supremacy you have and go ahead and sell those sculpted prims for exorbitant prices because you had to pay for the software licenses. Well, if you had Maya laying around. { Read more }

Chat logging can be a handy thing for meetings and so forth within SecondLife. The problem, of course, is that not everyone wants to have their chat logged - and by Section 4 of the Community Standards of SecondLife:

Disclosure
Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Lives. Sharing personal information about a fellow Resident --including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, and real-world location beyond what is provided by the Resident in the First Life page of their Resident profile is a violation of that Resident's privacy. Remotely monitoring conversations, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without consent are all prohibited in Second Life and on the Second Life Forums.

The key word is consent. So I looked all over for a chat logger which met the community standards (not to mention just plain good taste). I did find one SL Chat Logger, but again - it didn't ask for consent.

This is beta code - and it is at version 0.1 (the plan is to release updates via comments on this page, at least for a while). If you find bugs, feel free to fix them and let me know, or plain let me know. To report a bug, please copy and paste some text of the bug and note how it can be recreated in IMs to Nobody Fugazi in world, or comments here.

The code, upon being touched by the owner, starts logging chat. The first time a person within chat range says something, it asks their permission to log their chat. If they decline, the script ignores anything they say from then on (until the script is reset, when they will be asked again). If they accept, their chat is logged.

Touching the logger again will cause logging to stop and the text, formatted in HTML, to be sent to chat - where, using History, you may copy and paste to your heart's content. { Read more }

Drupal came in second at the 2006 Open Source CMS Award, which I'm happy about (working on some tweaks for this site off and on myself, and it runs Drupal).

Joomla! came in first, and Plone came in third.

The judges say that the top 5 Content Management Systems chosen are all very good - you can read the full details of the results here.

Congratulations to all communities in the top 5 are in order. :-)

Of course, I'm sticking with Drupal here. By the end of the year the site will be a little less 'Plain Jane' and have more features, but it takes time.. and with almost 17,000 nodes, database changes always have my heart in my chest (even with backups). Of course, I'm doing some things off the beaten track, so...

Mark Shuttleworth, Tim Bray and Simon Phipps were in SecondLife today, discussing the future of Java (programming) with the GNU General Public License. I (Nobody Fugazi) got there about an hour early and met a few new people and some other people - I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get there at the last minute, since a simulator in SecondLife can only hold so many people.

I watched Tao Takashi set up for the video, and there was some good geeky discussion going around as well. I finally got to 'meet' Kitten Lulu as well, which was an unexpected bonus.

Java and the GPL

The news hit earlier that Java has been GPL'd by Sun Microsystems. The reasoning given was, quite simply, that the GNU/Linux market needed to be tapped. While sitting there, I noted that all the media was reporting open - but Mark Shuttleworth and everyone else was talking about Free Software - the distinction which is often glossed over. Therefore my burning question was whether marketing and the philosophy varied, and the response was that there was some confusion - and that this would be straightened out over time.

Questions related to the effects of the licensing were par for the course, but there were no questions as to the value of adding Java to distributions of Linux; that seemed apparent. The questions mainly revolved around the interactions of the licensing with other products - such as Apache Web Server. It was good to hear that many of the communities would be responsible for redefining those interactions. The issues of licensing Apache code with Java is something which will have to be hashed out, as many other things, but Java is GPL'd. That's that. { Read more }

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)are an integral part of websites, allowing the content of many pages to be formatted and reformatted by changing only one file - something which many people now take for granted. It wasn't always as easy as changing one [t:CSS] file. And even now that it is as simple as changing CSS files to affect the way an entire site is formatted, there are lots of tricks for doing different things - and they are compounded by differences in web browsers, the most notable differences from open standards being Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Because of the incompatibilities, and because of the amount that can be done with CSS, it can be daunting for the new user. It can also be problematic for more experienced users; all the neat tricks and tweaks which can be done aren't always easy to remember. I know that I don't play with CSS every day, and because of it I might forget little things. It can be time consuming trying to 'rehack' a problem, and it certainly comes in handy to have some old code lieing around. The problem with the old code is that it's old, and may not do the same things with newer browsers. Thus, people write CSS cookbooks to give us a hand with these things.

I'd used the first edition of this book and found it useful; it was a solid reference in 2004/2005 which somehow disappeared from my site - probably in Costa Rica at a conference in 2005¹. When I got an opportunity to get my hands on the second edition, I jumped on it. Updated for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 1.5, it's certainly more up to date than the first edition. With Firefox already up to 2.0, there might be some differences - so I checked the Firefox 2.0 release notes and didn't see anything related to CSS, so it would seem the book is completely up to date.

In a robust 502 pages, the book covers a lot of CSS related problems and solutions - 161 subsections in 12 sections (not including the 4 appendices): { Read more }

One of the inherent beauties of PHP is how versatile it is. You can write quick hacks in it, or write a full blown content management system. It's a robust language with semicolons which is an integral part of LAMP servers around the world. It's open source, and it's fairly easy to learn for even the most novice of programmers.

The trick, sometimes, is getting it to do the little things that you want it to do. Suddenly, you may need to write something which deals with SOAP and you may need some pointers. Maybe you want to parse some XML, or maybe you want to generate it. Or maybe you need to read and write a compressed file. Whatever it is, maybe you're doing it for the first time in PHP, or perhaps the first time ever. Maybe you have so many languages in your head that it's nice to have a reference just to remind you how you do things within PHP. Enter the PHP Cookbook, 2nd Edition, which puts code and explanations together with distinct titles related to problems.

The book itself weighs in at 758 pages and is split into 26 sections. These sections cover an impressive amount of code solutions to real world problems. { Read more }