hacking

A minor hardware triumph

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 needs service
E10

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You can skip this one (and that five, and that seventeen...)

Programmers: know your Excel!

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Software was created free and is everywhere in ipchains

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 couldn’t understand if I did access it.

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Flickr images without the API

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.

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Can't find a hint

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:

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Rolling feed on jpstacey.info

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.

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Percussive maintenance, with a twist

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 major hardware failure (the disk making a repetitive ticking noise) that they diagnose before employing the rather hard-core fix discussed below.

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Blogthis!

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:

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Who owns this node?

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

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Blosxom to WordPress: tying up loose ends

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.

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