Graceful Exits

After a bit of a struggle I’ve managed to get wireless networking at home. Unfortunately, my first attempts to test the connectivity to the rest of the world coincided with the power outages at Telehouse, a “bullet-proof” ISP that too many people rely on, including ADSL services, the BBC website, Nominet, some DNS servers….
I have [...]

I’m looking for a simple website management system (not necessarily a CMS, just something that can handle templates and a consistent look and feel) and an even simpler blogging system. The latter would have to be in PHP, but I’m easy either way otherwise.
Does anyone have any recommendations?

I couldn’t find this on the Goggle, so: if your Coldfusion template occasionally furnishes you with the unhelpful, lineless error:
can’t load a null

then this might be caused by the following. You may be trying to compile a function using something like this code:

<cfset bar = “something”>
<cffunction name=”foo”>
    <cfargument name=”bar” default=”#bar#”>
</cffunction>

At the point of trying to interpret [...]

A number of posts are currently in stasis waiting for me to actually finish them, but I thought it was worth mentioning the selection of my most recent Flickr photos that now graces my homepage. While the rest of that page awaits serious styling and content work, I’ve dilly-dallied by creating this bit of eye-candy.
The [...]

Don’t get me wrong: I think that Stallman has contributed massively to the open-source movement. But Tim O’Reilly is right: he simply doesn’t get the problem that closed web services present. I think talking about open access to the data is missing the point too. Often I’ve no wish to access the raw data, and [...]

If your web application ensures that all your incoming CGI variables are free of the most common source of malicious site damage, can you stop worrying?
I wondered this as I got far enough into a PHP publishing system that I had to start thinking about adding new content through the system (rather than just jamming [...]

Programmers: know your Excel!
People who don’t know how to hide rows and columns still do hide them. They just find… innovative and unexpected ways of doing so. Changing row height and column width, then protecting the cells against being resized (how they can do that and not know how to hide the cells is beyond [...]

If you’re working with XML, as I currently am, XSLT can sometimes be a godsend. Something that would take ages to do in a structured, procedural way can be reduced to two or three lines of functional XSL code.
So it was with a growing sense of consternation that I noticed that adding XML namespaces to [...]

Today has been a day of minor disasters. More on those once they come to some sort of resolution. But I’ve also effected a minor hardware triumph with my old Kodak CX6230 camera. For two years (and two house-moves: God bless my hoarding instinct!) I’ve occasionally switched it on to be confronted with the message:
Camera [...]

One of the last tasks that moving to my new machine involves is to stretch the Ubuntu desktop across both of my monitors. Our sysadmin had very kindly set it up to work with the monitor card integral to the motherboard, so in principle I only had to tweak the configuration for X, the standard [...]