Just Like (a) Human

About 20 minutes ago, I logged in so I can update my WordPress install by Subversion. I see this:

[dollar@cake ~/pxnet_html]$ svn up
U wp-includes/version.php
Fetching external item into 'wp-content/plugins/akismet'
Updated external to revision 19778.
Updated to revision 6166.


Checking WordPress after that, I see that it is indeed WordPress 2.3, and just in time. I finished ironing out a few kinks here (UPDATE YOUR PLUGINS NOW) and there (Look at the new Plugins interface, now with “Update your plugins now” deliciousity) before I took the leap, and now, it’s official, with a nice green sticker on the WordPress.org homepage, 2.3 is here.

I finally caved in.

Since I wanted something else to play on my DS, and I came to the realization that we only live once, I decided to buy the R4 card for the Nintendo DS.

I simply wanted a card that had better compatibility than this Datel Games ‘n Music card I got at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago. Some of the homebrew stuff just does not run on the GnM all that well (DSLinux, for example), and I think it’s because of an artificially imposed bottleneck on the card itself.

So hopefully, I’ll be having some kind of fun with this thing next week.

I’ve noticed lately that whenever I attempt to blog a photo by phone, the post to this blog here fails. It’s getting annoying, despite everything I’ve tried to make it work.

I’ve tried release versions of WordPress. I’ve tried CVS versions. I am trying SVN versions. None of them get the blog posting on the first try, and that’s just totally annoying!
I’m just not sure who to point the blame at, though, because it might be my fault for mostly using CVS and SVN for WordPress, however, I haven’t tried on a non-SVN blog hosted on this domain.

I just wish I had a better way to make sure I could send an image from my Sprint phone and make sure it posts over to this weblog.

I’m also open for suggestions on how to fix my image blogging issue.

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]

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.

Just a reminder, there’s only a couple of weeks left to help save Internet Radio as we all know it.

Rather than waiting until it’s too late to tell our government that they’re out of their fool minds here, please spend a few minutes of your time, and have a read over at SomaFM’s website, on how you can help to save Internet Radio.

It can be as simple as a phone call, or a written letter, but please don’t forget to do your part to help save it.

Thanks.

Just a short entry to let those of you reading me from anywhere on the internet about a few new features added either to this blog, or done around the entire domain.

1. Zookoda support. — You are now able to subscribe to my weblog by email, and receive a once-weekly update each Saturday morning of what has been posted here.
2. New theme! — I am trying out a new theme for now, which looks fine, but I do need to give it a weather eye about HTML validation (which I will do next week, once I’m done setting things up the way I want it, so I can verify whether it’s the plugin, or the theme at fault, in one swell foop).
3. Yearly Archives! — Don’t go back and read those old things. The LJ entries, I’ve discovered, weren’t imported quite the way I’d expect them to be, so they look like poop (heh heh heh).
4. Gallery2 update! — I finally got with the times, and updated that to the latest stable version. I just need to get in and svnSlim it down, since svn (and CVS, I understand) adds a lot of bloat to any given software package, due to the nature of how svn works.
5. Araiya Light! — Betcha didn’t know I have an oekaki (though it’s pretty much dead at the moment). I’ll see about getting that up to date sometime in the coming week, since I’m sure there must be a new version of the software or the applets involved.

I’ve been surprisingly productive on my own website, despite the fact that I don’t have a permanent connection to the internet. I guess it’s because I know I only get so much time (I’m racing a clock of two minutes right now, for example) to get things done, and get back to the Salvation Army in time, so I work harder and faster, to do things better, and it makes me stronger.

Anyhow, explore around, and feel free to email me if something happens to be wrong on this site. See the About the Author page for contact data.