Linuxlore

I was planning to head to the LUG meeting today, but a combination of over tiredness, things that needed doing and apathy set in and it didn’t happen. What did happen was supposed to be reasonably productive - once I’d got myself going that is!

The first achievement was a good positive one. I tried the scanner I picked up from Jamies a while ago for the second time and found it actually worked. My first test was simply a power on test and when the scanning light didn’t come on and it made no noise or other indication of life I feared the worst. Well it seems that the modern USB scanners do the sensible thing and stay dormant until required - and this includes keeping the light off. My ancient SCSI one has the bulb lit permanently and makes a solid clunking sound as the mechanism checks that it is settled in the parked position as soon as power is applied.

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By the looks of things there is a bug in the Planet software that HantsLUG is using. I’ve just been tidying up my posts to ensure that my HTML is correct. The fact that each individual entry is then stitched together left me with a few teething problems unfortunately.

Anyway, all is now working fine, but in the process I had to escape some sections of quoted HTML. This left me with a whole load of < and > characters converted to &#60; and &#62; entries in there. This is fine except when it occurs in the title line of the RSS feed that Planet works with. In this case the first & of the escape secuence is escaped itself, so you end up with &#60; and &#62; actually showing up in the text because the first & has been replaced by &amp; (and you should see how this entry looks in raw HTML!).

Daft subject? Maybe, but one more reason why Windows is clearly not ready for the desktop yet! I’ve spent good chunk of today trying to install 3 Hewlett Packard network printers onto a Windows XP Professional installation. This is a clean install of the OS, so shouldn’t be far away from pristine condition.

It should be easy, especially with the Install Network Printer Wizard that HP provide. This scans the network to identify any printers available and will then configure and install all the necessary settings. Well it will if it doesn’t get to the last stage and then decide that it has an unknown error and back out the whole operation. This happens every single time it is used on all three network printers.

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I’ve just had a bit of fun hunting around to remind my self of this very handy URL for working with the Firefox configuration, so thought I’d post it here so I can access it easily. - about:config - just type that into the location and off you go. I’d post it as a link, but it doesn’t work when I do that

Actually this gives me a good idea. I have a whole raft of text documents sitting around waiting for me to experiment with a Wiki for long enough to define a structure and migrate them into it for reference. Blosxom could actually act as either a very quick and handy stop-gap or possibly a excellent alternative to this! Since it basically works by turning a directory structure of .txt documents into a Blog all I need to do is categorise the .txt files into directories and add a first line matching a subject and Blosxom will handle the rest.

OK, just need about and hour spare an I can do that

OK, I succumbed and did the Which dot dot dot? quizes. Not sure about some of the results though!

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My first ever computer was a ZX81 bought for me on my 13th birthday. I never upgraded it in any form and only ever had the tapes that came with the computer (so none of the dreaded ‘RAM pack wobbles’ for me!). I had that machine for about a year before selling it and having a painful time without a computer whilst waiting for my Spectrum to arrive. The only thing my ZX81 ever got used for was writing my own programs or typing in listings from magazines. While I was waiting for my Spectrum I wrote a Pacman style game for it, and since I didn’t have any manuals for it yet I used the list of commands on the back of the brochure and listings in Your Computer magazine to work out what the commands did and their syntax (needless to say it didn’t work right away!). All that programming was great fun and probably most of what I used my computers for. I did have a good number of games for my Spectrum too (obviously!), but programming was always more fun.

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Well after a bit of reading through the code for Blosxom I’ve tracked down the right place to put a temporary hack in to create the required entry into the RSS output. It lacks the seconds information on the time so I have manually set them to :00 (not a major issue, but untidy to my mind). There also doesn’t appear to be a suitable variable to use for the timezone information. For now I’ve done another nasty manual configuration of +0100, but clearly this isn’t going to work well once the clocks go back again! The question is will this hack actually work beyond a visual inspection of the output!

Here’s the diff from the original Blosxom code for anyone interested:

436c436
< rss story   <item>\n   <title>$title</title>\n   <link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn
</link>\n<description>$body</description>\n   </item>\n
---
> rss story   <item>\n   <title>$title</title>\n   <link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn
</link>\n<description>$body</description>\n   <pubDate>$dw, $da $mo $yr $ti:00 +0
100</pubDate>\n   </item>\n

OK, a very quick update here to note that I’ve made a few modifications to my Blosxom install. First off I’ve added a calendar plugin (currently on the left hand side). Nothing fancy, but looks to do the job - and I’m hoping that the movement between months will present some live links once I’ve got some posts in more than just the single month!

The second one is the new Atom feed. This is partly a stop gap pending getting an RSS 2.0 feed working properly, but I’ll probably leave it there. This took a little bit of playing around with to get it working, but in the end all that was needed was installing XML/Parser.pm which came in the libxml-parser-perl Debian package. This brought a small selection of other packages with it, but I’ll investigate that later

Just noted this link Windows Vista product editions revealed on the ALUG list. Is it wishful thinking that this is likely to cause enough confusion and dissatisfaction for people to start looking more seriously at the alternatives to Windows on the desktop?

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