Graceful Exits

It’s one of the worst-kept tech secrets in the world, but Real Audio streams can be downloaded using software such as mplayer and then converted to MP3 format with lame. Both of these are available in Ubuntu using the non-Ubuntu package manager Automatix. The possibility of doing this conversion implies that, although the BBC offer [...]

As a prelude to the relaunch of short-story website Quiet little Lies (a relaunch which is long overdue), I’m distributing in print a seasonal special for 2006 called:

An ideal Christmas gift, this handcrafted pamphlet has been lovingly assembled from a dozen complex, thoughtful tales that [...]

I’ve recently been experimenting with calling external commands (mplayer and lame, so you might be able to guess what I’ve been doing) from within a scripting language (Python, although it needn’t have been as it turns out). Bizarrely, the external commands—argumentae intactae—worked absolutely fine on their own, chained together by me, by hand. However, when [...]

For reasons of speed I’m currently embedding Java in Coldfusion code. Given Coldfusion is built on Java, and can instantiate Java objects through createObject(”java”, class_name), you’d think that’d be reasonably easy. But the boundary between Coldfusion and Java is like the gap between two halves of a broken bone: jagged, bleeding-edged and painful when coerced [...]

A busy few weeks, but they’ve included an import from a Blosxom blog to a WordPress blog which is worth describing. There are a couple of established methods for importing the data, and I opted for the one that seemed the most modular. This was Eric Davis’ Import-Blosxom method, consisting of a PHP script on [...]

Firefox’s implementation of Javascript is quite forgiving: often a little too forgiving, when it ought to be strict about issues that could pose a security risk. Indeed, Firefox’s silent “the programmer meant this” in the instance I’ve just been tackling was only revealed by the IE error:
No such interface supported

Enlightening, no? The error message is [...]

You might notice the little “blog this” link to the right there. That’s my first Wordpress plugin.
The code is at http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/files/code/blogthis.zip. This contains the blogthis PHP code and a directory of images. To try it out (for the moment: I’ll sort this all later into a proper installable plugin) do as follows:
Edit: full documentation now [...]

Seen the “sad iPod icon” recently on your iPod? I was greeted by it yesterday on my 4th generation podlet:

The sad iPod icon (SII). Usually accompanied by a generic, unhelpful apple.com URL, which just makes it all the more sad.

Unlike most people who see this, I didn’t seem to have the symptoms of [...]

Now I know the title sounds presumptuous, but there’s a certain methodology I’ve settled into that seems to work really well for encouraging Javascript that’s legible and safe. I thought I’d share it with anyone that doesn’t consider themselves a JS playa, in case it’s of some use to you too.
Most Javascript libraries these [...]

Following my recent success with putting a Flickr feed on my website’s front page is the conversion of this to an all-purpose feed reporter, where RSS/Atom flavour and feed specifics are dealt with by Javascript associative arrays of functions, keyed on both variables respectively.
If you’re lucky then the feed should wait a bit while it [...]