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I don't moan all the time.

Once in a while someone goes out of their way to be helpful, or technology works the way it should or I find something which is useful / good value.

Today I bought a new keyboard.

Like many computer people I know, I've had the same PC for the last 15 years or so. In that time the motherboard has been replaced a few times, disk drives have come and gone, graphics cards and monitrs have been swapped. But the oldest component was an HP keyboard which has been putting in sterling service for the last 8 years.

So while I was in PCWorld/Curry's today, I picked up a Sandstrøm keyboard for £15. This has the nicest action of any keyborad around this price I'd seen, and has the added bonus that the keys have LED illumination.

The reason I was in Curry's was to pick up a simlarly branded HiFi for my daughter's birthday. Again which I thought good value.

Despite the scandinavian looking name, not surprisingly both are made in China, and although time will tell regarding the quality of the electronices, both seem to be reasonably solid construction.

I suspect that the manufacturer / importer / retailler are currently discounting heavily to establish the brand in the UK.

Getting all the keys to work on my home machine (currently still with Fedora 9 - a Linux distribution) was surprisingly easy (most of the extra weeks worked as soon as it was plugged in anyway).

It does have a somewhat compressed physical layout (the space bar is only 60mm) so I'm still hitting thEWRONG Kets some if the time but I@m sure that will pass/

Where can I get away from them

The internet is great - everyone has access

The internet is terrible - everyone has access

When I first started using online systems (some time before the arrival of the internet - but I'm not saying how long) people I met online always seemed so knowledgeable and helpful. As I progressed through my studies, and the internet became available I was getting at least as much out of newsgroups and mailing lists as I put in. But gradually the balance shifted - increasingly I saw people asking dumber and dumber questions. For a brief period Stack Overflow seemed to be the new hope, before it became as bad as anywhere else (although the rating system bolstering my ego still tends to outweigh my disappointment at the quality of the questions nevermind the "answers".

While I'd like to think I know what I'm talking about in the forums I participate in regularly, I don't think I'm any sort uber-guru (yeuch - what a horrible term) but primarily I go there to learn - and I'm not learning anymore.

Of course the same questions come up again and again:

• How do I make this pattern fit this problem?
• Do my Class Assignment for me
• The people I pay for support won't answer the phone any more so I'm posting my question here
• It's broken, I don't know why, but I expect you to fix it

Am I just getting too cynical in my old age? Maybe I'll take up nuclear physics as a hobby so I can go back to being a newbie and asking stupid questions on the internet myself.

C.

Little furry babies need adopted!

For those of you whom I've not met, my daughter breeds and shows rats. She's done very well winning several best in breed and couple best in show at national level.

The reason I mention this is that we also provide short-term fostering for rescue rats - and we're currently trying to find homes for 13 rescue rats. If you live in the West of Scotland, and are interested, please visit our site at www.ralstonrats.co.uk

Dokuwiki is smarter than I am

In a previous episode, I was moaning that I couldn't get my DokuWiki RSS feed to display using the RSS parser - it was my wetware which was not up to the job!

I'd configured this Dokuwiki to disallow any anonymous access - and the RSS generator (feed.php) was correctly showing all the items which the anonymous user was allowed to see - i.e.none!

I didn't realise this until I'd downloaded the latest stable DokuWiki and ported the hacks I've applied to it, then patched my installation - which obviously did not fix the problem.

In the meantime, I've created a new user with read access to the entire wiki - then changed my RSS wiki syntax to pass the auth details:

{{rss>http://www.mysite.com/dokuwiki/feed.php?u=anonymousRss&p=s3cr3t}}

Apologies to the DokuWiki team!

New Site Up

I've setup a website for my daughter's business (well the whole family are involved really). Its at http://www.ralstonrats.co.uk

Does DokuWiki eat its own dog food?

In the last exciting episode I wrote about my troubles setting up blogging/RSS in Dokuwiki - I eventually gave up and installed Serendipity to handle this.

Having done that, I've now gone full circle and am publishing the blogs as an RSS in DokuWiki. I wanted to provide a single news list, so I had a look at integrating the 'recent changes' feed from DokuWiki on the same page as the serendipity blog - however the DokuWiki RSS feed works with every reader I've tested except the one built into DokuWiki!!!!

AAAAARRRGGGGHHHH!

DokuWiki blogging

I've used DokuWiki as a base for a few PHP projects since it provides access control navigation and other such niceties, combined with a very capable Wiki CMS for publishing static content.

Adding your code to it can be as simple as editing a page and entering:

[php]
include("myPhpCode.inc.php");
[/php]

(where I've subsitituted square brackets for the usual angle brackets - since blogger.com seems not to like the latter)

There are a some complications around dealing with when the headers are sent vs when the contents of the page is generated, and around when the session is written back - but nothing insurmountable.

So when my boss tasked me to come up with a simple CMS solution which could provide RSS and atom feeds, needed authentication for adding content, and needed to have "lists of things" using a blog within DokuWiki seemed like an obvious solution.

Dokuwiki has a plugin 'blogtng' intended to replace the older 'blog' plugin. Both use files for holding the content which was not ideal (I expect that we'll be adding a lot of stuff in there, and require the ability to edit/remove old stuff, also actively pruning old data might be required too for performance/storage reasons). However blogtng uses a database for indexing the content. Great, I thought.

And then I discover that the PHP from RHEL5 is compiled without sqlite support. That's odd - but I'm not disheartened - I go find out local software guardian and ask for the installation media. There then follows much running around in the manner of the Keystone Cops - indeed if this were a movie rather than a blog it would undoubtedly be shown speeded up, and accompanied by Yakkety Sax - a la Benny Hill. Still no CD-ROM, however as far as I can tell, RedHat never implemented the sqlite extension. There are some third party implementations for RHEL :) except for version 5 :(

So then I try to rewrite blogtng using mysql. Which proves to be messy. Although it appears to have been written with the notion of some abstraction from the underlying database, direct calls to the extension occur throughout the code. So I first rewrote all these into the abstractin layer. Next, I doscover that sqlite seems to be completely untyped, so I have to reverse engineer the possible datatypes and update all the DDL scripts. Then I find that all the DML needs to be changed too. I also find that it seems to be creating blog entries whenver I view a page (even before I've added the page markup to create any blogs).

The RHEL5 does support the PDO extension with the sqlite driver, and now that all the database connection code is in one place, it was fairly easy to port it back to that and restore the original DDL and DML. It seems I can now create blogs, blog entries and comments, but still getting blog entries created randomly - so I go back and check the repository - its a known bug. Grrrr.