The Blog of Lucien Stals

I assumed that since we had been so slack over summer, that nobody was using any of the ByteClub stuff.

But I just had a look at the recent changes list on the Wiki and it seems quite a few people have been contributing to the pages there. It’s great to see.

So I’ve set up firefox to start listening to some RSS feeds, since I’ve been ignoring the online world for a while. It’s time to start getting active again!

We have uploaded some more themes to the blogs. Anyone using these blogs should be able to go into their “Presentation” folder and select any of the new themes. Please note that we are sticking to our policy of not making the themes editable via the Wordpress interface. Sorry about that.

“It’s called security”.

But we are happy to upload new themes. Just email them to me and I’ll have a look at uploaded it for you.

Also, feel free to submit requests to have current themes modified. I have noticed some of them lack certain features, like getting access to your admin page, and I’m fixing such things as I find them. Feel free to point stuff out which you would like fixed. Just remember, changes to a theme affact all users of that theme. They are not being applied on a per user basis.

There are signs of life in Tyler.

Some minor twitching was noted earlier in one of his toes. It’s not much, but we are encouraged by these signs.

The wiki was updated to the latest version today (more security patches )

We are currently working on the blogs. Actually, I’m writing about it while Clinton’s doing the work.

We have uploaded several new themes, but the main issue is that we have decided not to allow user editing of themes. Why? Because it involves letting users edit the runnable PHP files. Not a good thing. So we are going to see if we can make it so users can edit their CSS files instead. CSS is presentation layer only, so this shouldn’t pose any security issues.

But WordPress only ships with 2 themes, and if you can only edit the CSS files, then you are fairly limited in what sort of changes you can make. But if we give people more themes to play with, then we might start comming up with some fun stuff.

Clinton is muttering to himself, which I *think* is a good sign

The project I’m working on involves parsing a rather large (24+ meg) input file. At the moment, I don’t know anything about the output format which is required, so I’m working on parsing the file and turning into an almost vermatim XML representation of the original file. The idea is that once it’s in XML, it will be a relativley trivial task to apply a transformation to the XML to convert it into teh target format.

The input file is in ASAP2 format (some kind of engineering thing). Fortunatley, this file format is well specified, and the documentation comes with the EBNF notation. This means it should be a relativley simple task to build a grammar file to feed to a parser generator and get it to do all the hard work for me.

Easily said

Now I find myself in the strange dark woods that is compiler theory. I never imagined I would find myself in this place. But apparently one can’t tackle parser theory without having to get your feet wet in compiler theory.

I’m hoping this work pays off in the long term, but right now I’m finding it hard going. The two parser generators I’ve been looking at, antlr and javacc, have appalling documentation (for a beginner).

I get pretty tired of the “if you need to ask, you aren’t worthy of the answer” attitude in many computing circles. Well, I need to ask, and right now, I’, finding the “documentation” on the above mentioned programs web sites next to useless.

What I did find, was The University Of Birminghams’ tutorial pages which have a great tutorial on antlr. You guys rock. (this does make me wonder why our own CS department here at Swinburne doesn’t have such resources online?)

I was just trwaling through some articles at Wired News and came across the following three notable articles..

• From Zero to the Infinite, Fast
• Grappling With Climate Change
• Coding Tool Is a Text Adventure

The first is bloody interesting science. Evidence of the big bang. I love it, but I have my own burning questions now. Where does the idea that the speed of light is the universal speed limit stand if we know that the universe grew from the size of a marble to being billions of K’s in a fraction of a second.

The second is bloody interesting as well. But the dark side of climate change still gives me night mares

The last article just looks like a lot of fun. I have just downloaded the playsh code from their source forge project. Not sure where to deploy it yet. Perhaps I can find a quiet corner of Tyler to run it on and see how we go with collaborative coding

Oh, I almost forgot.
In other tech news, Mozilla has released v0.1 of their Lightning project, an integration of the Sunbird calander into their Thunderbird email client. Ultimatley Lightning is supposed to support syncing with other programs and mobile devices. Since turning my back on Outlook in favour of the functionality of Thunderbird, my PDA has been in retirement. But if Lightning shapes up to be what is claims to be, then I might have to dust of the PDA. I know small things make me happy, but I dream of being able to sync my PDA with Thunderbird.

I was just able to get all my old blog posts imported into this new Blog. Happy I am.

I just don’t understand why it needs to be via RSS file upload instead of being able to link directly to an RSS feed. I needed to copy the feed into a text file and upload that. Seems like a bit more phaphing around than necessary, but I’ve got my posts back, so I shouldn’t be complaining.

I did lose the old comments, so I’m going to have to start posting like mad to get people interested again

It has taken a while, but ByteClub is slowly clawing itself back into the land of the living. John did some great work over summer, in his own time, to see how we could deploy Wordpress in a secure manner.

We like Wordpress as a blogging engine. I’ve been using it for quite some time on another blog I sometimes use. But we needed something to work as a multi blog engine. By that I mean we needed something that we could deploy once, yet allow individual users to have their own seperate blogs with their own logins etc. There are commercial solutions for this like livejournal, but the anual subscription fee was outside the ByteClub budget.

Wordpress works as a stand alone engine, so each user would have to have their own copy of it in their user directory, just like we used to do when we were using SimplePHPBlog. But maintenence gets to be a big hassle. If we could install a single code base, then we only have to patch once to fix things.

But John has come up with some very smart solutions. Now we shall test out a couple of blogs for a bit before we go big time.

The mistake we made with ByteClub the first time was being too keen to get stuff going, at the expence of security. That came back to bite us in the ass. This time, we are taking it slow. Evaluating our options and taking things one small step at a time. And considering that none of have any kind of time allocation for this ByteClub stuff, it’s all a labour of love

But I’m glad to have a blog again. I felt a little starved of an outlet few the last few months. I look forward to more regular blogging.