TriNetre - Archive for September 09, 2003
(no longer updated)
September 09, 2003
BlogPortal, MT and XML-RPC-overkill
[Software]
@ 12:28 PM
I have never been able to get my MT to make an XML-RPC-overkill call to Vikas Kamat's Blogportal XML-RPC interface. Initially it was the problem with Blogportal's use of different order of parsing values (aha!) than the Weblogs.com API that MT uses. But later Vikas mentioned that he would fix that. I am not sure whether he has fixed it or not, it still does not work for me.
Since I believe that the basic quality of any programmer is laziness (yup, just like Larry Wall), I just could not get myself to go and use the web based ping interface for Blogportal every time I jotted down something in TriNetre. So I have hacked up a small script that accepts the MT/Weblogs.com style XML-RPC-overkill call and then uses the BlogPortal ping interface to update the listing there.
It seems to be working, but before I can release it for public consumption, I really do need to do a bit of beta testing. Anyone interested in helping in the beta test, please contact me by leaving a comment here.
You will need an MT 2.63 or 2.64 install and will need to edit one single file to add a couple of lines and edit one line. If you are using 2.63, I can give you the modified file. You will also have to add another URL to your ping settings.
Water by Sepultura
[Music]
@ 12:02 PM
Do Not Believe It Only Because You've Heard It
Before
Simply Because It's Spoken And Rumored
One And All, Live Up To It
One And All
Do Not Believe It Simply Because It's Written In
Books
Let Us Understand Our Own Destiny
The Seekers Will Always Seek Out The Truth
We Are What We Make Of Ourselves
One And All, Live Up To It
One And All
Water - Sepultura
Economist on Ethernet's history
[Technology]
@ 10:36 AM
The Economist has a good article history of Ethernet. Though light on technical details, it gives a good idea of how Ethernet came into being and where it is now, and where it is headed.
An unfinished doctoral thesis and a chance encounter with an engineering intern gave Ethernet's inventor the inspiration for the popular computer network. But a lot of lobbying, brainstorming and clever marketing were needed to turn it into a global standard.
Why does Microsoft ask you for a CD when patching?
[Software]
@ 07:37 AM
If you have been updating your Microsoft Word with the latest patches, you would realise that Microsoft warns pretty much early in the installation that it will need the original Office CD during the process. It does ask for the CD. Now this can cause a lot of frustration, especially when you have shifted house and you have no idea where even your porn CDs are, let alone your Office CDs. Dave Faber too has this problem and he wrote to his mailing list:
OF COURSE MS IN THE EXPECTED "PROTECT OUR PRODUCT" MODE requires you to
have the cdrom in order to install this critical and important protection.
I have just moved and , like many, have no idea where the damn box is so I
can not protect my self except to not use the Office suite. Why are such
emergency updates conditional on finding the damn cdrom???
Yesterday, someone named Roy Levin provided the reason. I had thought it was yet another ploy to detect pirated copy of the suite, but seems it is not, it is to accelerate the patching process by reducing download sizes by using delta updates:
I was interested to
learn that the behavior is not the result of piracy concerns but rather
a side-effect of mechanisms intended to improve download performance.
The Windows Installer has quite a lot of machinery to minimize the size
of downloads by using deltas, which are computed relative to the
installation bits. In practice, this machinery reduces download size
quite substantially in many cases, but it obviously depends on having
the installation bits available on the user's machine. This works
smoothly if those bits are readily accessible (say, cached somewhere on
the user's hard drive), but otherwise the installer has to ask for them,
producing the annoying behavior that we (and doubtless many others)
experienced.
Ah, now to update my Office suite.
