Categories
Random observations

2004-06-15 14:23:22

Troy was pretty much what I expected it to be: a Brad Pitt body-fest. But there were some good things in the movie too. Warning: there might be spoilers here. Eric Bana was not bad as Hector. I found myself wanting Hector to live. In fact I was hoping he’d give Achilles a right whipping. But this Hollywood blockbuster stayed pretty faithful to Homer’s Iliad, complete with the bit where Achilles drags Hector’s body around behind a chariot. Lovely. Although they were referred to quite a bit, the gods did not feature in the movie at all. This, in my opinion, was a good thing. Gods quarrelling amongst themselves is not my idea of entertainment, unless the script has been written by Douglas Adams, in which case the proceedings might be very entertaining indeed. In short, I wouldn’t start a war over Diane Kruger (who played Helen), and RGW assures me I am not alone in this view.

SRL and I finished off the paper we were writing on bridging service discovery protocols. We’re submitting it to a workshop in Lancaster. It is SRL’s first paper, so hopefully it gets accepted.

Lunch in the Valley on Saturday was kind of interesting. I had Honey King Prawns for the first time in who knows how long. I’d sort of forgotten about them.

Still reading Rebel Without a Crew and probably will be for some while.

Ye gods, it is not twenty past midnight!

Categories
Random observations

2004-06-11 12:52:36

Much of this week was spent paper writing and constructing an Ant build file to build and package all the bits of my service discovery protocol. The build file ended up being quite huge, but now building the protocol or any component of it, generating documentation and packaging it all up is very easy. I’m using the set of add-on Ant tasks available in the antenna package, which makes building J2ME components easier than it otherwise would be.

Tomorrow I’m having lunch in the Valley with a few friends. It ought to be good.

Mum’s gone to Melbourne for a few days for my uncle’s housewarming. She left on Thursday and will be back on Sunday evening.

I’m still reading Rebel Without a Crew. It’s quite interesting, but progress has been slow.

Categories
Random observations

2004-06-07 09:34:07

I’ve changed my sendmail setup to relay all mail (except for mail bound for an address at zion.dnsalias.net) to the Bigpond SMTP server. Everything works like a charm.

Mum has fumigated the whole house by cooking her chilli paste. It’s like a nerve gas agent. All of us were coughing uncontrollably through dinner. I’m still coughing!

Categories
Random observations

2004-06-07 09:00:09

So I’ve finished marking the third COMP4301 assignment (MS message queues). Wasn’t too painful, thank goodness, though I might have to deduct a few more marks from 19 or so submissions, depending on the lecturer’s verdict.

Nigel’s idea of being able to add entries to blogs is proving to be a good one. However, Bigpond’s new policy of blocking mail originating from an unknown MTA within its network means that confirmation e-mails are being blocked. So how does one make sendmail appear as though it is a user agent rather than an MTA?

Categories
Random observations

2004-06-07 04:11:13

I found a little tool called qprint, which I am now using to decode quoted-printable posts before submitting them to the blog database. This involves first checking to see whether the post is encoded, and if it is, decoding it. If you don’t do this check, things screw up even more.

Categories
Random observations

2004-06-07 01:04:06

From RFC 1521 (the MIME RFC):

       Rule #1: (General 8-bit representation) Any octet, except those
       indicating a line break according to the newline convention of the
       canonical (standard) form of the data being encoded, may be
       represented by an "=" followed by a two digit hexadecimal
       representation of the octet's value.  The digits of the
       hexadecimal alphabet, for this purpose, are "0123456789ABCDEF".
       Uppercase letters must be used when sending hexadecimal data,
       though a robust implementation may choose to recognize lowercase
       letters on receipt.  Thus, for example, the value 12 (ASCII form
       feed) can be represented by "=0C", and the value 61 (ASCII EQUAL
       SIGN) can be represented by "=3D".  Except when the following
       rules allow an alternative encoding, this rule is mandatory.

So that explains it, then. Now how to deal with it? …

By the way, I’ve reverted to my old blog script for entering this post! :)

Categories
Random observations

2004-06-07 00:49:26

AAaarrggghhhh! Evolution is putting the weird characters in the e-mail! Even when I’m apparently sending plain text it plays around with character encoding. Damn!

Categories
Random observations

2004-06-07 00:45:56

The URL problem was not a bug in our blog script. Rather it was a copy and paste error. Viewing the message source of the e-mail I sent revealed some weird characters at the beginning of the URL. Strange. Must remember to be wary of copying and pasting URLs into e-mails in the future. Just to prove it’s not a problem with the script, here’s a link I typed by hand: Vegieburger.

Categories
Random observations

2004-06-07 00:07:14

So the first bug uncovered with the new system is the weird thing it does with web links that appear in an entry. Check out the Vegieburger link in my last post.

Categories
Random observations

2004-06-06 23:48:29

Sitting in the Indooroopilly food court on Saturday afternoon eating a Hungry Jack’s Vegieburger, Nigel and I observed about five women wearing ugg boots. I had no idea that the sheepskin footwear had become such a popular fashion in this country! I’d have less to say if I was sure that those boots were being worn for their practical benefits (i.e. warmth and comfort) rather than because they’ve become a trendy fashion item. They even have these lace-up uggs now, which don’t even look good for heaven’s sake.

Nigel and I were at Indooroopilly to watch The Day After Tomorrow. For the record, I’m still not sure what day that was. However, I quite enjoyed the story of mass destruction due to climate change. Okay, it probably wasn’t factually correct and the acting wasn’t of the highest standard, but let’s face it, you don’t go and see a film like The Day After Tomorrow or Independence Day for their closeness to fact and great acting. You go for the blockbuster effects and over the top plot. The chance to suspend my brain for a couple of hours was thoroughly enjoyed.

I added a new account to my machine and set up its .procmailrc to redirect any mail sent to it to my blog script, which Nigel modified, so that we can add posts to the blog database simply by sending an e-mail. There are probably security flaws galore, but I don’t care. I’ve added this entry with the new system. I’ve also started re-writing my blog servlet so that other people can have blogs customised to look like their own website. That’s the reason Nigel was helping me. As if he’d do it for free. :)