tin_the_fatty weblog

In a history project I am helping out with, there is a need to convert a bunch of dates from Chinese calendar to Gregorian dates. I googled for solutions, found the Perl library “DateTime::Calendar::Chinese”, and wrote a small script on my FreeBSD machine to show that it works.
It would be good to make a long-term [...]

[Read more →]

Via 小影, 十年一覺程設夢

我只聽過玩 Online Game 玩到暴斃, 還沒看過寫程式寫到暴斃的案例.

[Read more →]

MT4 has been released under GPL, so I played with it for a bit last night. Except for a very very brief period of time, there has always been a free (beer) and somewhat limited but very usable for single blogger version of MT. Now GPLed MT4 is fully functional multi-user multi-blog.
MT has a few [...]

[Read more →]

I have been playing w/ VMWare Fusion (for Mac OS X) and VMWare Server (for Windows) over the weekend, and now have a couple of FreeBSD virtual servers running on my iMac and my X40 (both with 1.5GB RAM). This provides a server environment virtually identical to our production server facility, for use as a [...]

[Read more →]

Regex for PostgreSQL. I didn’t know that. COOL.

[Read more →]

Chroma key.

[Read more →]

WordPress 2.3 is now out. Four WP installations to upgrade. Sigh.
Update (26/9): The K2 theme (even the RC1) appears to break WordPress 2.3, giving an error about not finding the table wp_categories, so I had to roll back after upgrading one of the WP installations I maintain. Maybe it would take awhile for all the [...]

[Read more →]

Follow up w/ the Centralize No-call List project, I did a little benchmark on phone lookup using python, running on my wimpy old Thinkpad X40.
It takes a little under 0.08s to perform a search for a single item in 988,889 items, around 10% of all the mobile phone numbers in Hong Kong as of June [...]

[Read more →]

Noticing the ordeal James went thru recently and the business news I read in the paper about one of the local telecom companies setting up some sort of free no-call online list got me revisiting the idea.
It is actually an interesting and worthwhile project. A database of the no-call list. You send a query containing [...]

[Read more →]

The TextDrive people survived a Slashdot, and switched to lighttpd as the web server while taking it.
I have been playing w/ lighttpd and php-Fastcgi for the last few days on my home server/development machine, and the initial impression is very good. It seems to do everything I am using Apache 1.3 for on mother, so [...]

[Read more →]

OpenBSD 3.6 has been released. I purchase the official CD set on every other release and bought 3.5, so this round I needed to download it and create my own boot CD. This is actually relatively straightforward if one isn’t scared of the command line. Mind you, cdrecord the Unix command line CD burning software [...]

[Read more →]

is no more, so I am shutting down my RSS feed.

[Read more →]

Been working on the infrastructure for our blog-related project. Decisions have to be made. The immediate (and probably final) being what sorts of source code control management system to use. CVS has the major advantage that the WordPress developers use it themselves, but Subversion is just far more powerful and probably easier to use. I [...]

[Read more →]

About half finished prototyping a CSS skin for a web project. Now I am waiting for a bunch of graphics fit for production use from the project leader. I didn’t like the design itself very much, but I am just the codemonkey. The important thing is that now I know CSS much better, and am [...]

[Read more →]

A big piece of the puzzle has been found!

[Read more →]

A good domain name, an ambitious project, an over-ambitious project leader, sucky designs, uncooperative and idle project members, resulting in an never-ready website.
Professional web publishing is still costly.

[Read more →]

Our diving instructor Marcus registered a half-decent domain that has a reference to wildlife a couple of years ago. He wants to use this domain for a website to promote wildlife-related activities and his own diving courses. WordPress seems to be very capable and suits him. The problem is that, decent and unique contents [...]

[Read more →]

Diving season is approaching quickly, so I need to get Marcus’ diving instructor web application rolling ASAP. Lost my postgresql installation on my TiBook since my last reinstallation (probably a good thing, ‘cos that particular installation was very outdated).
Installed postgresql via Fink. Maybe I didn’t RTFM or something, but I couldn’t get the postgresql server [...]

[Read more →]

Some major updates over the weekend on the subject RSS feed.
The link is now http://mt.rollingegg.net/881summit.xml. The old link still works, but now instead of sending out the feed it sends an “HTTP 302 FOUND” response, which redirects most web clients (i.e. your RSS reader) to go grab the file from the new location. It should [...]

[Read more →]

Ctlee requested some sort of backup system on Mother. I have been playing with rsync as described here, and will be implementing it on Mother once I figure out how to make (automatically!) the following snapshots of the /home directory:-

six rotating snapshots, every four hours
seven rotating snapshots, every day
four rotating snapshots, every week

monthly snapshots
The beauty [...]

[Read more →]