Archive for July, 2006

• Discovering Electronic Music is a fascinating movie presenting the pioneers of electronic music. It's very interesting to watch these music geeks creating a radically new kind of music. I'm in love with vocal trance personally. As a side note, this movie has 3 parts in case you didn't notice.
• The Palm Islands totally amaze me. I've just seen a documentary movie about their constuction on Discovery Channel in Megabuilders which presented the design challenges that engineers had to face. It was very exciting.
• The Krakatoa volcanic island had a huge explosion in 1883. Atmospheric shock waves reverberated around the world seven times and were felt for five days. The forces of the nature are frightful.

• We should be more aware of our cognitive biases.
• What about speeding up opening documents using D-Bus?
• The Cathedral of Santa Eulalia is a beautiful building.

Since I'm genuinely interested in future technologies, I was learning a lot about Web 2.0 and related stuff in these days. I want to see how the evolution makes its way in the cyberspace regarding the web. Web 2.0 seems very natural to me, because I see it as a clear advantage after the nascent web.

Looking further in the future, one can also see the emerge of rich internet applications. They are particularly interesting to me because they're so capable and innovative. OpenLaszlo seems to be the most powerful platform that could drive future RIAs. You have to see some OpenLaszlo demos, but beware, because they may seriously blow your mind. You've been warned.

Pandora is also an OpenLaszlo application in case you didn't know.

• Some wicked GIMP tutorials.

I used to be a big believer of dynamically typed languages, especially Python. While I do think Python is great, I think C#, Java and well designed statically typed languages are better suited for large scale applications. Whatever the case is, I found two good resources on the topic on Wikipedia, the Type System article and another article titled Is Weak Typing Strong Enough on Stevey's Home Page.

I just wanted to install the FancyCaptcha extension for the Ultimate Commander MediaWiki to block those pighead spammers from autoregistering fake accounts. Sounds simple, doesn't it? It got pretty messy, unfortunately. The extension didn't wanted to work, so I went to #mediawiki at freenode for help. After a while it finally became clear what the problem was.

<mlaci> is there a chance that the fancycaptcha plugin in the svn is totally fucked up? it seems to me that it doesn't even register correctly its own special page.
<brion> mlaci: you running 1.7?
<brion> if not, try upgrading
* brion points to release candidate link in channel topic
<mlaci> brion: i'm running 1.6.7. the extension seems to register its special page by assigning an array to #wgSpecialPages['Captcha'] instead of creating a SpecialPage object as the rest of the special pages. so did the api change in 1.7?
<brion> yes.
<CIA-12> brion * r15395 /branches/REL1_7/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES: add note about new special page registration interface
<mlaci> brion: it's very useful to know about

A few minutes later, I finally succeeded.

<mlaci> revision 15016 seems to have a beautifully working fancycaptcha extension for mediawiki
* mlaci is a happy bastard

Moral of the story:

• Do not suppose that the API is consistent across a project.
• Do a "svn co -r 15016 http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/ConfirmEdit" if you wanna fetch the FancyCaptcha extension for MediaWiki 1.6.7.

I've just finished improving my home page, my blog and ultimatecommander.org.

I've:

• upgraded all the CMSes to their latest version,
• revamped the skins, so that users that are not logged in cannot see the links related to the authoring functions and
• made the sites almost 100% XHTML compliant. Well I didn't want to hack the DokuWiki parser any longer, that's why some of my blog pages didn't validate correctly because of some evil blockquote tags.

I'm pretty satisfied with the results, overall.

• BumpTop is an extremely interesting project.
• Miguel blogs about MonoDevelop. It kicks some serious ass, indeed.