Today's work started as an effort to tidy up and improve the Movebook code to cope better with heritage engines - and sort of spiralled from there. Mainly as a marker for me, the following bits and bobs have seen work:

• Search highlighting/Permalink display bug fixed
• Search on both article content and title implemented
• Movebook now knows about most heritage engine class numberings
• Stock Reports also take into account heritage class numberings
• Generated error pages (404 etc) improved and working with secure areas of site

If I can keep up the momentum in spare moments, I'll try to fix one or two other irritations over the coming weeks. It's certainly reminded me that at times when things are, shall we say a little fraught in the workplace, the mental effort of solving programming problems is a rewarding task.

Movebook Entry

I got things up and running fairly swiftly at first, but soon stumbled into trouble attempting to get Cyrus IMAP configured and playing nicely with Postfix and the various other bits of the mail system. It's been years since I played with these systems, and with my much tampered-with config files now gone and my skills very rusty, I floundered a bit at first!

Finally, today I managed to get the last bit of the puzzle going, and salvaged some final bits of data for this site. Everything should be back to normal, and given that I've had precious few hours to fiddle with the box I'm happy with the results. Finally, the machine really is a server, with no X or GNOME at all. Given it's age, the performance is pretty incredible.

Last night, I wandered into the #lemmings chatroom on Freenode to see which of my old friends was around. It's been a while, and following a few turbulent times lately I felt like I needed to catch up and relax a little. It was good to see some old faces around, and I was welcomed back into the fold like I hadn't been away. Later, when I was happily chatting and completely off-guard Fuzzy posed the question:

I'll confess I've wondered myself in the past - and even experimented a bit, and I shared my thoughts on how it would work. We even managed to get it building and running - but things had changed a little and it crashed on https:// URLs. We also talked about how the configure ought to try to check for Firefox or Mozilla and proceed accordingly. After agreeing this would make someone a great project, and remarking on how I'd used mental muscles which hadn't been flexed for years, I slipped off to bed happy to have chatted with friends again.

Well, a curse on FuzzyTheBear because I think he knows that once he'd woken me up and placed the trap, I'd fall right in! I never could resist a challenge, and tonight in an unguarded moment I set about figuring out why Denzil crashed on secure sites. I soon cottoned on to it being something to do with the Firefox and Mozilla profile system, and found a neat fix by looking for a user profile in .denzil. If it wasn't there, the libs were smart enough to set things up. Great! Next I tried to fix up the configure script. This was tougher, and the arcane syntax took awhile to resurface from the depths of my mind. After a bit of playing, tweaking and research I got the application to check for either Mozilla or Firefox, but always to prefer Firefox - because it just seems lighter and neater to do so. Inspired by this success, I fixed a bunch of warnings and complaints caused by building an ancient package, and even got the .desktop file installing correctly into the Applications menu.

Soon, not noticing how much time had passed since I sat down to 'just see if I could fix that bit...' I found myself bumping the version number, writing up my ChangeLog entry and doing make dist...

...and that's how Denzil managed to get it's first release since 15th July 2003!

Looking at the local news with Denzil

Denzil still does what it always did, still has its funny 'self-contained' bookmark system, and still relies on wget to download things because I still haven't managed to figure out a smarter way. Best of all though, the stripped binary is still less than 20Kb in size! I'm sure that there are still lots of ways to break it too, and I'd be interested to hear of them - but for now it seems to work well enough.

You can download the source code for denzil here:

denzil-1.0.6.tar.gz

If you find it useful, I'm glad to be of service...and don't forget to thank FuzzyTheBear for knowing just which buttons to push to get me working!

Movebook Entry

The Squeezebox in action

So far, things have gone well - the Squeezebox discovered almost all of its own network settings except of course the WPA key, the server software was simple to set up and the quality of the audio is excellent. I'm really impressed with how solid and well put together the unit and the remote control feel too. I had some brief problems with the box losing network connectivity today, but I think that was probably of my own doing, and some tweaks to network settings seem to have cured this entirely. If I lived somewhere larger, I think I'd be looking for one of these in every room. Time to buy more storage space and start digitising more of the collection...

All sorts of things planned for today which didn't quite come off. Firstly to be in London, but my stupid and annoying illness conspired against that. Then to be in Newport, but general confusion and a desire to stay warm and recuperate scuppered that one too. So, nothing to do but stay here and work on some bits of the Movebook which have been bugging me for a while.

Dusted off my PHP skills, and added the 'via route' option and made the mileage pre-filling code cope with routes we've used before. Mucked about with some monthly mileage reports, and finally plugged the stock reports into the user interface. Along the way, did some tweaking to Areopagitica too to keep pace, and lots of general database maintenance.

So, I still have no voice and a stupid sounding cough, but version 2.0 of the Movebook is here, with whizzy reports, cleverer recording of routes and easier ways to get to things.

You can enter the Movebook here.

Having not installed Windows for six or seven years now, I didn't know what to expect from the shiny new Windows XP disk we purchased from the computer shop. The install took a long time, and seemed to load drivers for all kinds of esoteric hardware prior to beginning 'just in case'. Whilst it wasn't prepared to upgrade NT4, it sorted itself out in a way that left NT intact, along with all the data created with the previous install.

I was pretty impressed with the results - it seemed quite quick to learn, easy to use and nice to look at. Whilst it still suffers from some of the frustrations which drove me away from Windows in the first place, lessons seem to have been learned in terms of multiple users and security. A nice touch was the dialog which walked me through installing a virus scanner, firewall etc.

Ironically, the DSL install on XP took literally seconds and was so simple my friend could have done it unassisted! I don't think I'll be switching back to Windows XP any time soon but I'd consider a second machine with it installed just to play around with. It seems to have come a long way.