A Review of the
Cisco-Linksys & Vodafone 3G/UMTS Wireless LAN Router
It’s a 3g router, so now you can connect a small network to the internet anywhere you can get vodafone 3g connectivity.
Total price = 150 GBP + about 50 GBP/month which allows 1GB.
It’s hideously expensive still but if you need this kind of thing you can now get it 🙂
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc968.txt
An RFC in rhyme 🙂
See also the complete collection of April 1st RFCs (at wikipedia)
I’ve been doing some stuff recently with XMLRPC for both SQLEditor and an unannounced new product.
One of the key parts of XMLRPC in cocoa is the Apple web services Core. It provides almost everything you need to use web services.
However I did discover one oddity that led to some puzzelment
As part of my development I’d written a test server in php which operates a few simple functions that the client can try. This means that I can simulate various commands and cause intentional failures to see what happens. I also have a php client to check the server independently.
I had been making alterations to check a particular function in the client worked correctly. It was a new function that provided an array of values that could be placed into a menu on the client. The idea seemed sounds, the design had been worked out and new functionality had been added to both client and server. The server seemed to work fine with its test client and I was ready to try my main client application.
Unfortunately it either crashed or generated an exception on every call to WSMethodInvocationInvoke. Initally I assumed that it was a bug with my client application, perhaps I’d passed in the wrong arguments or made a mistake in setting up the context for the call.
However after some testing of various possibilities I discovered what seems to be the actual cause.
One of the included php files contained an extra new line character at the top before the doctype.
Removing this extra new line solved the problem
(presumably because it was now valid XML).
Moral of this story:
XMLRPC implementations and XML parsers are not always very forgiving of whitespace at the top.
Interestingly, the xml parser in camino doesn’t like xml files with extra lines at the top either.
I’m still looking to see if there is some setting that can be changed to make the parser more forgiving, or to pre-process the xml first.
(I’ll be reporting this issue as soon as I can produce a suitable test case)
The default debian stable packages for php4 don’t seem to include pspell. I’ve been looking at using the AJAX spell checker in something, but then I realized that it wouldn’t work, at least not with my current server setup.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg00064.html
As it stands, the only value the Titan TTC-K8ATB/825/SC holds is as scrap metal waiting to be recycled.
There’s nothing quite like paid shills for writing reviews, but that obviously didn’t happen here 🙂
I often find really critical reviews to be more interesting than positive ones.
(From FrostyTech via the inquirer)
I was just looking today at Disney DVDs when I made a curious discovery and an odd realization.
You CANNOT currently buy most of the main animated feature films AT ALL on dvd. They are simply not available. In some cases films may not be released until 2007 or 2011, in other words years away.
The realization was that there may be children who will never see classic disney films, because they are neither being shown in the cinemas or available on DVD.
It also made me realize that I’ve only seen a fraction of the Disney animated movies. I think this is mainly because the others were not available easily (or at all)
Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why Disney isn’t doing very well financially.
An obvious rule of commerce: If it’s not on sale your customers can’t buy it.
An odd thing occurred today, I was trying to do trim($string) on a string in php, but I kept getting strings back that appeared to have a space at the beginning, the exact thing that trim is supposed to remove. I carefully checked and the space was definitely found when I copied the result out to TextWrangler. Finally I tried substr($string,1) and then I got the answer, the new string started nbsp; the string I was trimming had , a non-breaking space at the beginning, which trim doesn’t remove. A quick switch to str_replace and now my string doesn’t have a space at the beginning. 🙂
It’s taken me a while to write about it, but last week, Natwest in Edinburgh held a really great session for business banking customers. A breakfast and two seminars. Starting at 8am they gave an excellent breakfast and then went on to give two really interesting talks for people starting or running businesses.
It made me feel really positive and gave me an opportunity to hand out my new business cards, as well as meet people in a similar situation to myself.
Today I released SQLEditor 1.1b3. I think this could very well be the last beta version before 1.1 final release.
My first minor point release application!! (x.1)
Originally I hadn’t intended to update all of the websites today, but they discovered it automatically so I uploaded the details onto the others so that everything was consistent.
However one thing really stood out today: Softpedia. The people at Softpedia not only grabbed all of the details, they also created some screen shots and gave me a nice “No Spyware, adware or viruses certified” logo. And it wasn’t just a quick screen shot either, they must have spent some time using the application as can be seen on the screenshot page.
I was amazed 🙂
Obviously I should have some screenshots of my own to distribute and they should arrive with the new manual, but still, I was really suprised by this.
And very grateful.
I came across this site the other day when I was looking for information about radioactive fiestaware.
The author collects radioactive artifacts
[Link]
I’ve finally upgraded to wp 1.5, plus the image authentication thing in the comments works again. 🙂
I’ve also decided that the theme must be changed, so it may change in the next few days. (default for the moment though).
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2005-06-10&res=l
From Penny-Arcade 🙂
SQLEditor 1.1 is now approaching release. It seems to have taken much longer than expected, however it does have a number of interesting improvements.
The most interesting improvement is that it can export directly to a database. This is still slightly experimental but pretty much works.
There is also a new structure for connector lines, the layout algorithms for each type of line have been moved into separate classes, so new types could be added in the future.
There is a new toolbar which allows for faster object creation.
There are also lots and lots of bug fixes (including one in the SAX XML parsing code which was causing occasional but serious problems in load and save).
I’ve also been working on the documentation, using docbook to make everything nice and multi-purpose.
I’m really hoping that version 1.1 can be out by the middle of next week.
I realized that I’d managed to update to Sarge (v 3.1) mostly without noticing. I should have pinned my packages to woody (3.0) but didn’t realize, which meant that I went through the update process without actually noticing. This led to a number of odd problems. In particular I hadn’t disabled a number of backports, which led to difficulties with apache, php, mysql and postgresql. This happened because the ports were set up to target woody (3.0) rather than Sarge (3.1).
However I have now properly upgraded to Sarge on marilac. Hopefully this will be a suitably satisfactory release and will provide many hours of happy uptime. 🙂
The Lucky Despot Hotel and Casino was the name of an establishment in a story that I was reading recently. 🙂
Following the suggestions in this article, I’ve been considering forum software recently to offer customers (and others) somewhere to discuss SQLEditor.
Currently I’m considering PunBB, because it seems to be simple, fast and well received by reviewers and users.
PhpBB seems a popular choice but is probably a bit more than I actually need for this project.
Since I live in a small house as opposed to a flat I have a small amount of garden. Most of this is grass.
I haven’t gone bald, so I also have some hair on my head.
As I was looking at the grass the other day, un-mown for too long, I came to an odd realization. The length of the grass is proportional to the length of my hair. When my hair is long, the grass is long, when my hair is short then the grass is short.
This is a curious realization.
But it does have a logical explanation.
I think that when I’m less busy then both grass and hair get cut at the proper intervals. When I become more busy the intervals get longer.
And so there is a link.
Which is kind of weird.
Recently I haven’t been managing time very well, with the company business and the new release of SQLEditor things seem to have been building up and not getting done fast enough. The grass and my hair are growing too long as well 🙁
I’m hoping to improve things, but if I’ve been running behind on things like email and communication in the last month or so, I ‘m sorry.
I hope to resolve the back log shortly.
STANDARDS
The plutil command obeys no one’s rules but its own.
from the plutil man page
The Register has a new article up about the Osborne effect, a supposed problem that means that if you excessively pre-announce products then nobody buys the stuff that you’re selling right now. The article suggests that the whole idea is rubbish and that osborne was actually suffering from a totally different problem, Managment failure. Supposedly an executive found some old parts and spent a vast amount of money trying to put them into products, in the process wasting far more than the value of parts.
Yet again Management failure causes a company to fail.
[Article]
