Not that I’m a developer; the nearest that I come to that is “KWord alpha tester” (which reminds me that I haven’t checked out today’s version yet). But I’ve wanted to stand behind a stall for a long time, and this is a nice opportunity. Also, I’ll go and see something of Brussels on Sunday, for instance the Hallepoort (Porte de Hal if you prefer French to Flemish). I’m determined not to do anything useful, like volunteer for another half-day of Fosdem or even go to church. Perhaps the hotel I’ve just booked a room at (Euro Capital Brussels) is full of Fosdem people, but I won’t let them sway me.

Repost, because there’s a new really awesome version: the xkcd comic animated by Noam Raby and sung by Olga Nunes.

Discovery Channel loves the world (and for the video-challenged, here is the whole thing in text).

ETA: Here’s a Star Wars version. The galaxy is awesome!

ETA: And a Harry Potter version, too.

xkcd loves the Discovery Channel.

These people love xkcd.

It’s been around for some time, but I rediscovered it by accident and thought I’d share it in case you haven’t seen it yet. I love the blogosphere, too.

Case: I have some files from folder A open in application X. I create a new file and want to save it. Where does the application suggest I save it? And if I want to open another file, what folder should the application give me to open from?

A well-behaved application should offer folder A in both cases, because that’s where all the rest of my work apparently is. It’s a sensible default— opening in A and saving to B does occur, but not as often as opening in A and saving to A. Kate does this, and goes even further in predicting correctly which folder I want; just now I opened a file and closed it in the folder where I want to save what I’m currently typing, and it got it right. Also, if I have a file from A open in one tab and a file from B in another, it gives me A when I hit ^o (for Open) in the A-file and B when I hit ^o in the B-file.

Not so OpenOffice. It stubbornly offers the last folder used, even if I already have a file from another folder open. But then it seems to open every file in its own instance, so that makes a weird kind of sense. Its options are hard to find —they reside in at least two different places in the menus— and harder to understand, so if it can be changed I haven’t found how.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t working on several different projects at the moment that all involve more layout than I can manage with just a text editor, and I don’t trust KOffice yet for critical business stuff.

I have an embryonic business web page at irinarempt.eu. It has a standard footer as a server-side include, to be expanded with more relevant information later. For now it contains a small blurb and the last-modified date as <!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED" --> .

It works perfectly one level down (on both of my mail-form pages) where it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: October 12, 2009

but not on the main page, where the timefmt directive doesn’t seem to work, so it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: Monday, 12-Oct-2009 20:39:05 CEST

WTF? I copied the relevant line (<!--#include virtual="/include/footer.html" -->) from one file to another, so it can’t be a typo in the text; it can’t be a typo in the footer itself either, because it appears as it should in the mail forms. It’s reading the file, because the “Optimised” part does appear, and when I add something arbitrary to the include that appears on the offending main page as well. It’s only this directive that works in the subdirectory but not in the root:

<!--#config timefmt="%B %e, %Y" -->

This should give “October 12, 2009” and indeed does in the subdirectory.

Is there anything about timefmt that makes it not work in the document root? Am I missing something glaringly obvious? Should I give the main page a different footer and dispense with the server-side include there?

No, I don’t have it, but my website does: I registered irinarempt.eu for corporate purposes and I’ve convinced our Apache server that it’s called that and to find it where in fact it is, at http://rempt.xs4all.nl/irina/zaak. And also at http://www.valdyas.org/irina/zaak, because valdyas.org is an alias for rempt.xs4all.nl (but the server has nothing to do with that, it’s administered elsewhere, in a place I haven’t gone yet). The web site isn’t much yet, slightly more than a placeholder, but at least it’s there.

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As you can see I’ve fixed the comments problem here, so I thought I’d go and add comments to Valdyis galsin as well. As soon as I opened the page template file I saw why I’d given up the last time around: comments are in fact enabled, but whatever I do I can’t get it to show on the page. It’s exactly the same syntax as here in Found Objects (in fact I copied and pasted it), all the files it might be looking for are the same, and it does read that bit of the page too because if I put some random text in place of the comments link it shows up all right.

WTF?

Any Blosxom gurus about who can shed light on the case? I admit that I’ve been tweaking the page template a bit more than with Found Objects (for one thing the postinfo is on the left side in a box of its own) but placement-by-stylesheet shouldn’t affect the commands inside the paragraph, should it?

And the previous time I tried to fix Valdyis galsin comments, I broke Found Objects comments. This time, apparently, it hasn’t happened yet. Let’s keep hoping.

Finally, I fully realise what a “cult classic” is, because now I’ve found some of my own. Warning: most of the links are to German-language pages and video clips. I’ll mark the language with a mouseover title.

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No paper this morning. Trying to tell the paper that on their Improved Service Page (which needed re-registration, a bit of a hassle with my cold-clogged sinuses) had this result:

I was about to mail them the screenshot instead when it occurred to me to try with Firefox instead of Konqueror, which worked perfectly. Now who do I send a bug report— the Konqueror maintainers, or the paper because they ought to make it work in all browsers, or both?

Or: biology is easy, physics is crunchy

(Blosxom doesn’t do tagging, at least not without a plugin that would destroy other things. Faking it:)

Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09, #ALD09

The school is in a sad state of rebuilding, not only renovation but also much structural work. There is hardly a classroom, hallway or common-room that doesn’t sport boarded-up bits or is covered in plastic. All except the new science wing with combined theory-and-lab classrooms.

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I think I’ve got the hang of desktop activities now. For a while I liked the idea in theory, and even had a couple, but never really used them because I didn’t use a lot of widgets— I’m of the empty-screen school. But I do a lot of things that do require stuff on the screen, and that’s what I’ve discovered activities are in fact for.

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