May 2007

I’m curious, since I don’t have that many people to follow on Twitter…

Do any of you use the service with any sort of regularity? I’d like to be able to follow some others while I’m using it, since I actually like the service for what it is, and what it does.

Censorship?

Sometimes, I don’t want to see things, like people drinking beer on the bus, and no one else giving a rat’s ass about the idea.

Sometimes, I don’t want to say things, like a comment to some jackass who’s got the whole seat to himself and his bag, while the rest of the bus is sharing seats. I can stand until someone gets off, though it hurts my knee when the driver hits bumps.

Sometimes I don’t want to hear things, such as your top-of-your-lungs conversation on your MetroPCS phone about how “NO HE DI’INT”, or whatever it is you crazy black women keep talking about AT THE BACK OF THE BUS while I’m AT THE FRONT OF THE BUS, and easily able to keep track of your conversation through my isolating headphones.

I think this picture personifies my thoughs perfectly.

What I would like to do one day soon is to write an indexing script in PHP, but it’s not as simple as I’m making it sound.

Instead of your classic “Here’s what’s in the directory, regurgitated onto your lap for your convenience” setup, I need it to do three special things.

The first one is that it needs to read subdirectories, and present them to users in a list, be it ordered or unordered.
For example, I have three folders: Movies, Wallpaper, Ringers.
The script would sit in the folder where those three folders sit. It would look in each folder, and for each file it found, it would generate a General Content Descriptor file, usable by Sprint phones, and dynamically served on request.
I’m thinking that to generate the proper mimetypes for the GCD, I’d start by looking at the extension on the file. To generate the content name, I’d look at the filenames, which should all be formatted in such a way that a separator won’t affect the file, but will make it easier to build the content, eg: ‘P_moss–Xial.jpg’, content name = “Xial”, content vendor = “P_moss”, version will always be 1.0.

I’ve sort of brushed on the second part of what I want it to do: Generate those General Content Descriptors. I’d like to do this cleanly, without actually spitting files onto the system, but instead, serve the file dynamically in some method. Hopefully this will be easy to do.

The third thing the script should do is be capable of serving the content both as a wireless markup language (WML) page, and as a normal HTML or XHTML page, depending on what the browser asks for. I do think this part would be a bit tricky, but in most cases, the browser requesting the page would be a WAP browser. I think that if I were to sniff the browser and see whether it announces it can handle HTML or XHTML, rather than sniffing to see if it supports WML, this would work. If it doesn’t say it can handle HTML or XHTML, I serve the watered down WML pages. If it announces HTML, then we get HTML and perhaps extra features.

I would need to learn WML first, however, and I’d need to relearn PHP, since I’ve just about forgotten it.
I need to find out what part of the browser to sniff to find out if it supports HTML or better, as well. I know that it can be done in PHP, since I did it once to serve XHTML 1.1 a long time ago, and water it down enough for Internet Explorer to actually view a page.

I don’t know if a project like this would benefit from database access. I somewhat doubt this, but if it does need one, I don’t want to require MySQL to be installed. I’d like something else that’s very light and can be used on any operating system.

For those of you who speak PHP, would an idea like what I’m considering even be doable, or do I need to change my angle of attack somewhat?

[tags]Sprint, GCD, WAP, WML, PHP, HTML, Content Delivery[/tags]

Just to let the lot of you all know here, I’ve got a Threaded Comments plugin working, finally, which should help in commentary and reply to anything I’ve posted. It’s fairly easy to use, since the system to trigger a comment thread is right below the comment box.. Simply select the comment you’d like to reply to from the drop-down menu, before hitting the submit button, and your comment will be properly nested and colored to make some sense.

Also, you may have noticed a link at the top to a message board.
This will be a bit of a soft launch, once I finish setting it up shortly, but it’s just to give a place to make off-entry commentary and talk with each other. I’m still ironing out the kinks in the message board however, but that’s fine. This is, after all, just a soft launch, to get a feel for how this message board works.
If you’ve registered as a subscriber to my blog, you should be able to use the board.

[tags]Threaded Comments, Message Board, Soft Launch[/tags]

A bit of a humorous aside, but I’ve got this small container of Tetley Rooibos Vanilla and Pear tea here on my desk.

The problem is, I can’t spell Rooibos most of the time, unless I’m looking at it.

I blame being in the furry fandom too long as the problem, because I keep spelling it as roobois unless I look and correct it.

It’s really a great tea, however, and the smell is so aromatic and lovely, that I’d keep a serving here, hot and ready, just to absorb the wonderful aroma of the brewed tea.

[tags]Tetley, Rooibos, Tea, Humor[/tags]

I seem to be dieting in a sense as of late.

I’m avoiding sodas most of the time, simply because of the high fructose corn syrup. It seems to leave some sort of awkward aftertaste in your mouth when you drink, and you end up drinking more of something to try to keep the aftertaste away.

When I did a little shopping on Sunday to have things to eat this week, between work and home, I was checking labels to see what all had high fructose corn syrup in it. I was annoyed to find that the bagels and most bread products that you see in the freezer section generally have HFCS in them.

(Before it starts, know now that I don’t care what they say at HFCSFacts, because I don’t believe them, frankly.)

I’d like to find more products that lack the high fructose corn syrup, simply because they taste much better (most of them lack that excessive sweetness that bothers me as of late), and are more fulfilling overall. I have slowly weaned myself off the massive amounts of soda I used to drink, in favor of teas sweetened with sugar or honey, sodas sweetened with things other than HFCS (eg: Ramune), or just drinking water. I’m also weaning myself off [tag]Gatorade[/tag] and [tag]Powerade[/tag], because the bottled versions contain [tag]HFCS[/tag], and the powder unfortunately hoses my stomach if I drink more than a quart of it per day at normal strength.

I hear that [tag]Jones Soda[/tag]’s gone with the [tag]Pure Cane Sugar[/tag] flow, so I should pick some up. In the meantime, I’m going over to the Oceanic Supermarket to get some Ramune (which I used to wean myself off the 64 ounce sodas).

Right now, I’m poking around in Damn Small Linux running in QEMU, sitting on a Windows box at the moment.

It’s about as close to having Blackbox on a system in front of me as I’ll be getting for a while, it seems, so I’m making the best of it.

The good thing is, I now have a private workspace within another workspace that I can toy with, and run some programs within. The bad thing is, it’s somewhat slow, and even slower still, because I have it on my USB stick, and I am emulating an entire computer on top of another one.

I think it’d perform smoother if I had an external USB 2.0 drive, but I haven’t found one at a good cost yet to bother trying that theory out upon.

I can’t complain too much, though. It actually, uhm, works.