Scott T: The Blog
RSS feeds
Posted Sat, Oct 20, 2007 at 5:43pm by ScottTagged: on-the-net, ssc
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I have a feed... Two in fact. Put simply, pages like Bloglines, Google Reader, etc can now subscribe to this page.
I spent most of last night (6pm till 1am although half of this was fixing fixing various bugs for other parts of the site) and today (10 till 3) working on getting two feeds together. The easy one was the RSS feed (edit 26 Oct: now removed as Atom is more flexible). I got that completed just after midnight and spent a little while just fine-tuning it.
The slightly more interesting one was the Atom feed. I had quite some trouble getting this one to behave with Firefox trying everything from downloading it to attempting to display as a webpage to simply showing the document structure. It was only after uploading to one of my test servers and running it through the Feed Validator that I noticed I had spelt the namespace wrongly.
Feeds are currently generated nightly so the atom feed linked above won't be present until sometime overnight. Similarly, any posts I make during the day won't hit the feeds for several hours. If there is demand, I might increase how often the feed is updated.
Links to the feeds are available on the bottom of each blog page, in the address bar for Firefox or the (hopefully) now orange feed icon next to the home icon in IE7.
As I was thinking previously, I've also moved the blog to the "front" of the website. Unfortunately there were a few minor problems but work-arounds were hacked together.
On a different note, I need to head across to the other side of the city for the second (and final) practical on Monday.
Edit @ 6:30pm - I suppose now I need to really consider a proper title to these pages rather than just "Blog" so the title on feed is actually relevant ;)
Paging and RMI
Posted Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 11:04pm by ScottTagged: programming, ssc, uni
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So the RSS feed wasn't the next thing on the list, but it is coming sooner rather than later! In the mean time, paging has been implemented (at least on the front end) to make it easier to read through older posts (and it was only a 100 odd lines added according to Trac)
Now to the bulk of this post. At uni these past few weeks, we've been working towards handing in an assignment for Computer Programming, however this one has been one I've really enjoyed working on (despite some of the head-banging moments) and even think it would be cool to take further. What we were working on was a multi-player Pac-Man style game.
The language of choice for the Comp Programming topics is Java (although other languages are taught for various topics), and cross-JVM communication for Java requires<0> the use of 'Remote Method Invocation' (or RMI). After being given the basic source code as a framework, we were essentially turned loose to fill in all the TODO's.
Initially, this assignment didn't grab much of my attention since it was just implementing the basics for a stand-alone game, however once Stage 2 started, things got more interesting. With exception of actual coding of connecting to the RMI registry and initiating connection between client and server (the source of much frustration), the ability to get a server set up and have myself and friends join it (each with our own coded client) was quite enjoyable, to the point I was determined to work as hard as possible to eliminate server game-state spoiling caused by problematic clients.
Despite the fact that there were people who despised the task, it brings out the need for tasks to be enjoyable. Idealistically, projects and assignments should be as fun as possible (although the write-ups usually accompanying them aren't) as this encourages further learning and better understanding.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend :)
<0> - A Google search informs me CORBA can also be used
NB: Post titles are still hard to come up with ;)
On Blogs and Things
Posted Fri, Oct 12, 2007 at 10:47pm by ScottTagged: on-the-net, ssc
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Now that I've had a few weeks to get used to this 'Blog' idea it's really starting to grow on me. I've been around the net, and subscribed to sites the blogs for some sites I visit recently and after following links here and there, found some new blogs which make quite interesting reading at times :)
One obvious down-fall to this recent activity has also highlighted the items that are lacking in this blog too:
- Saving commentors details. Minor issue related more to CMS design flaws rather than module problem (namely lack of hooks et al results in modules being unable to use cookies).
- Customizable side bars. Minor. Also more of a CMS issue though could be solved by the module.
- Post history paging. Minor issue. All posts can however be accessed via the (currently only yearly) archive.
- Subcategories. Actually not sure how this one would work in the back end. Minor.
- Active readership - critical?!? Readers and active(-ish) people making comments would be nice at time.
- Semi-regular author - I'm working on it ;) This is a kind of catch-22. Knowing people read the posts encourages more posts yet people to read basically requires active posting to begin with...
- RSS or Atom feed - Almost critical. This is the next item on the to-do list. I'm actually getting a little excited about this as I think it marks a transition towards becoming a "proper" blog, along with the fact I need to learn new things to do it.
On a side note, anyone else noticed how hard it is to come up with decent blog titles these days?
70 Minutes to drive to Uni
Posted Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 5:38pm by ScottTagged: uni
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For a trip that usually takes a ten minute walk. Well that was certainly fun :p
Today I needed to travel across to the other side of the city to do a Practical and Lecture as the campus I walk to each day doesn't have the facilities. Hopefully something that I won't need to do often in the future either. Having to get up at 7 didn't phase me too much either (since I do that usually), but rather the 70 minute drive from one side of the city to the other in near peak traffic.
It also broke up the usual morning routine as we had to leave straight after breakfast. This meant I didn't have time for the usual early-morning net surf (to check out the forums and blogs I follow). I also wasn't able to have my morning Nescafe "Cafe Menu" Cinnamon Latte (I'm sure I'm semi-addicted to them).
And now to try and complete a few more lab reports...
Comments
Posted Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 4:33pm by ScottTagged: spam, ssc
3 comments
I'm taking a bit of a leap of faith here - I've just enabled comments without any "CAPTCHA" on it...
Hopefully this won't kill the server, and hence my account as that would be bad so if things get too bad I'll probably head for something more like WordVerify since it seems less likely to impair accessibility. One thing I am doing however, is checking how well the Akismet service works for spam filtering.
Hopefully you can now let me know if anyone IS reading this and your thoughts on any future (or past) posts I make.
