Qef's Website

Articles for 2004

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January

• Google homonym breakage Thursday 8 at 19:17
  Google Ads falling down because of homonyms.
• Rice, feather, turban Thursday 8 at 23:25
  2004 is the year of rice. Plus a look at some nice Chinese characters.
• My little ray tracer, and some OO programming in C Sunday 18 at 20:05
  Some ideas about writing classes and using object-oriented programming techniques in C.
• Silsna: first ever texture Monday 19 at 02:48
  My raytracer finally gets texturing support, although it doesn't really work properly yet.
• AddDefaultCharset is bad, bad, bad Monday 26 at 22:52
  Why you shouldn't have your webserver claim to know what character set pages are in when it doesn't.
• Ideas for describing relational database schemas in XML Friday 30 at 01:35
  Writing a description of a database in XML might help in creating and changing databases for different DBMSs, as well as providing useful documentation of the database schema.
• Friend network website things Saturday 31 at 18:44
  Friendster and Orkut; are they interesting?

February

• Rendering glyphs to bitmaps with the FreeType library Thursday 5 at 22:11
  A small C program to create bitmaps of individual characters, using FreeType 2.
• Orkut — now I'm in the club Thursday 5 at 22:33
  After I asked, Andy invited me to join.
• Hikaru's Go Tuesday 10 at 23:00
  Some notes about Hikaru no Go, an interesting anime series about the game Igo or Go.
• Converting TrueType glyphs to PostScript Sunday 22 at 15:50
  A small C program for extracting outline information from a font for a single glyph and outputting it in an encapsulated PostScript image.
• Text::VimColor version 0.08 Wednesday 25 at 22:50
  New release which fixes three small bugs and expands the test suite.
• Finally got my camera to work with Linux Thursday 26 at 20:06
  A Mustek MDC 3500 digital camera works fine under Linux, but only with later kernels (2.6 at least). It's even possible to copy arbitrary files to the memory card.
• Random thoughts about code quality, timesheeting and CVS Thursday 26 at 20:35
  Discussion about what was involved in creating the latest release (0.08) of Text::VimColor, and why small changes to code can take a long time to implement. Could CVS help in tracking time taken on programming jobs?
• Using Perl Inline C to access FreeType library Thursday 26 at 23:33
  Some experimentation aimed at using FreeType from Perl, and using the Perl Inline module with non-inline C code.

March

• Procmail archiving and mail loops Tuesday 2 at 20:28
  How to copy every message you receive into an archive mail box, and not get a nasty mail loop in the process.
• Le Grand Bleu Thursday 4 at 00:08
  I watched this film years ago but was off my head. Rewatching it from DVD now I find it very good. Some pictures from the film.
• Blake's 7 on DVD, finally Monday 15 at 20:10
  Top notch BBC sci-fi from the seventies. It took them almost a year to get it released. It's very good.
• Folk in the Grove, 5th March (I think) Tuesday 16 at 14:14
  Music by Robin Laing and Joni Tuson.

April

• Scaling EPS images Friday 9 at 14:44
  A crufy Perl program for scaling encapsulated PostScript images. It doesn't always work.
• Adding an archive to my blog Friday 9 at 17:44
  My blog now has better date-based navigation.
• Spray-on usability indeed Sunday 18 at 18:00
  Some random wibble about ESR's rant on CUPS and John Gruber's counter rant. No, I'm not going to buy a Mac.
• Debian social contract fuss Wednesday 28 at 15:28
  Debian is having some serious issues deciding exactly what is non-free and what to do about it. Could cause serious delays to the next stable release.

May

• First try at Subversion Tuesday 4 at 16:06
  I'm trying out Subversion for the first time as an alternative to CVS. So far so good.
• Trip to York Monday 10 at 21:04
  Went to York to see a friend. Photo of the station at night.
• No-brainer technologies Monday 10 at 21:23
  Some technologies, like Ethernet, are now thought of as just the way we do things. Often it makes no sense to even think about alternatives.
• Using the Subversion ‘svnlook tree’ command from Perl Tuesday 18 at 13:33
  An example Perl program for interacting with Subversion through its command-line interface.
• Migrating from CVS to Subversion Wednesday 19 at 14:27
  Some notes I made while creating my first Subversion repository.
• DVD writer Wednesday 19 at 17:19
  Jörg Schilling makes it hard to write DVDs.
• Multi-user Access databases — it's not worth it! Monday 24 at 18:14
  Microsoft Access can be very unreliable, especially when lots of users are sharing a database file.

June

• Font::FreeType 0.01 — a Perl binding for FreeType 2 Wednesday 9 at 23:51
  My Perl binding of the FreeType library is finally released.
• Thinking the Subversion way Wednesday 16 at 12:05
  How the concept of revision control in Subversion (svn) differs from that in CVS, and how it can affect one's use of revision control.
• Will the Windows API be replaced by web applications? Saturday 19 at 16:05
  Joel Spolsky takes an interesting look at where Windows programming will be going as Microsoft try to phase out the Win32 API. The future may be with the browser, but at what cost?
• Undeleting files with Subversion Monday 28 at 12:21
  Subversion has a powerful, but not at first obvious, way of recovering files from older revisions after you've deleted them.

July

• Suggesting a filename for downloaded files Friday 2 at 13:50
  The Content-Disposition header can be used by web applications to suggest to the browser what filename it should use to save a downloaded file.
• Maintaining cached data with triggers in PostgreSQL Monday 5 at 20:10
  Triggers can be used to update redundant information a database when tables are updated. This is a description of one situation where I found them useful. I was able to reuse the same trigger functions for two different tables.
• A first attempt at using the CLISP foreign function interface Tuesday 13 at 20:55
  I've put together a little proof-of-concept GUI library for CLISP, using GTK+. It only does windows and buttons, but it shows how easy it is to call C from CLISP.
• Using regular expressions in PostgreSQL Wednesday 28 at 11:21
  A first look at matching values against regular expressions in a PostgreSQL database.

August

• UKUUG Linux 2004 Conference: day 1 Saturday 7 at 10:48
  A few notes about the four lectures I saw. One's meant to blog these things, right?
• UKUUG Linux 2004 Conference: day 2 Sunday 8 at 21:24
  Some more notes about talks from the conference, from the second day that I attended.

September

• Upgrading our server at work Tuesday 7 at 00:52
  A complicated upgrade from Debian Woody to Sarge, and also an upgrade of LTSP.
• Notes on file systems and URL structure in content management Wednesday 8 at 22:15
  Here I go on and on about URLs and CMS design. It's quite boring really.
• Networking grief and DBD::Excel problem Monday 27 at 12:07
  Some griping about my sysadmin duties, and the solution to a simple problem reading from Excel spreadsheets in Perl.

October

• Human Gyoza Tuesday 5 at 22:04
  Some notes about a particular episode of a Japanese kids TV show.

November

• Film notes: Koi no Mon / Otakus in Love Wednesday 3 at 21:54
  Crazy Japanese romantic comedy about manga artists.
• Fire breather Thursday 11 at 23:18
  Photo of a fire breathing guy outside a pub.

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