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 		The Blob: Ciaran's Journal

Welcome to my journal. This is where I'll be revealing my innermost thoughts and feelings to the world. Occasionally I'll talk about other stuff, but mostly about my experiences.

Are you looking for the journal code?

13 entries shown (most recent first):

[view all entries]
Nov 29, 2002: Some more stuff (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 22:44 - Mood: Both happy and sad - Location: Home - Now playing: n/a

Well, I'm in a bit of a weird state of mind today.

Let's start with the bad news first. My company is in the middle of doing some restructuring, as it's not doing too well. As a result of some of these changes, I'll be made redundant at the end of the year. :(

It wasn't only me, though - there were four others in the same situation, including people who I thought had been very good at their job. But as I say, it's not doing too well, so...

It's a bummer. But God's with me, and he's already provided openings for me. It remains to be seen what'll happen, but I'll keep you informed of what happens.

Now onto some slightly better news. :) As a result of my earlier post, I've been blogrolled by Fantasy Island. :D I've put you on mine, too - check the list to the left. :) Now if only she had TrackBacking capabilities... :D

So, as I say, a bit of a mixed bag, this post. But I'll get through it, with God by my side. :)
Nov 29, 2002: Just a tip... (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 22:28 - Mood: Happy - Location: Home - Now playing: n/a

...don't ever select a company based on their Qaulity Assurance department.
Nov 27, 2002: Gah... (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 15:14 - Mood: Happy - Location: Work - Now playing: n/a

Sorry for the lack of line breaks in the last post. I definitely put some in, but it didn't seem to honour them for some reason. Odd...
Nov 27, 2002: Blog confusion (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 15:12 - Mood: Happy - Location: Work - Now playing: n/a

Being the curious person I am, I was interested to know which blogs were linking to me in their blogrollls. So, using the 'Search' link on BlogRolling, I searched for "theblob" and let it do its stuff. The resulting list wasn't that surprising. I saw that I was linked to by The Sakamuyo Log, Richy C's Blog, Tim's Journal, Neil's World, and even BlogRolling itself (they link to their contributors). I knew about all those links, so I was just going to go to another page when I saw another entry. Apparently, Fantasy Island had linked to me. Which was surprising, as I'd never even heard of it before. So, of course, off I went to take a look. My first thought is it's a pretty good blog, in the sense that it seems to reflect the author's personal views and feelings, rather than just being bland facts and maybe a little bit of opinion. Call me fussy, but I'm quite particular about blogs like that. Of course, it turns out I was completely wrong in my excitement - looking at the BlogRoll on the site, it actually links to The Blob, which is a different journal. But it's a good one, too. I particularly like the blog entry there called Problem Solved... that one made me laugh. :D Hmm, maybe I'll contact him and we can trade links...
Nov 25, 2002: Addendum to last post (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 14:50 - Mood: Thoughtful - Location: Work - Now playing: n/a

I forgot to mention in my last post that I *did* twirl the mouse around for about 10-15 seconds afterwards, and I had verified beforehand that /dev/mouse was generating characters from doing this. So that's not the problem...
Nov 25, 2002: Why didn't this work? (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 14:44 - Mood: Puzzled - Location: Work - Now playing: n/a

I encountered something odd just now that I can't explain.

You see, I was experimenting a bit with Slackware Linux in VMware, and I suddenly got the urge to do a spot of vandalism to the virtual hard disk and see what happened.

So, I first made sure that my original hard disk could be restored (okay, okay, so it wasn't true vandalism :D), then I rebooted, logged in as root and gave the command cat /dev/mouse > /dev/hda1, cheerfully thinking that this would have the effect of turning the hard disk into so much mush.

Only trouble is, it didn't. I was able to reboot and log in successfully, and nothing untoward had happened as far as I could tell. I guess the only real way to find out would be to run a fsck, which I'll do as soon as I can figure out how to get it to force an fsck on startup. But I doubt it'll show anything; by rights, my vandalism should have killed the boot loader on the partition. The fact that it could boot seems to suggest that, er, it didn't.

Odd...
Nov 25, 2002: Faith Like A Child (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 10:43 - Mood: Happy - Location: Work - Now playing: n/a

They say that I can move the mountains,
and send them crashing to the sea,
They say that I can walk on water,
If I would follow and believe,
with faith like a child...

-- Heels To Heaven, "Faith Like A Child"

Hiya. :)

Not really sure what to say here right now. In fact, I mostly posted just so I could post the lyrics above. I have that song in my head, and it's good. :D

I'll do a real post a bit later, probably.
Nov 24, 2002: Wow! (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 09:19 - Mood: Happy - Location: Home - Now playing: Nothing

Well, after my previous blog entry, I sent Tim the new code. And what did he go and do? He went and made it even better!

He's added quite a few extra features, such as the ability to comment, a good navigational system between entries, and those "Read More" links you see on the front page that link to the full thing. As a result, his blog/journal is looking more like I think one should look. :D

This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to encourage when I cleaned up my blog code - people changing the code, and making it better. Yes, I'm planning to release the code soon. :) There are still a few improvements I want to make first though.

Even though I can't TrackBack him from within this journal code right now, I'm going to manually do it so that he knows of this, and also because I want to test it. :D

Great work, Tim! :)
Nov 22, 2002: It works! :D (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 22:20 - Mood: Very happy - Location: Home - Now playing: Nothing

Well, as you can probably see from the "trackback: 2" link on the post below (which of course may have gone up by the time you read this), my TrackBacking piece of code works. :D

Since I did the rewrite of this code, the CGI file has more than doubled in size - from 5,343 bytes to 13,005 bytes. The growth is probably more to do with my restructuring than the new TrackBack feature, although obviously that would have had some effect. It'll make it easier to add stuff to this journal in the future, though, which can only be a good thing. :D

Some more info for the interested: the whole blog code itself is made up of only two CGIs - this one (13,005 bytes), and the one that adds the posts ("addjournal.cgi" - 4,342 bytes). So, in all, the total code size is 17,347 bytes, or about 17KB. That's a heck of a lot smaller than Moveable Type, of which the compressed download is 397KB and, when installed, takes up about 2.5MB. :D

Of course, there are disadvantages. There's no admin CGIs at all - if you want to change any settings or anything, you need to delve into the files themselves. However, with my restructuring, these settings are now clearly labelled at the top of the file, so it's quite easy to change if you know what you're doing. :)

There's also no way of editing or deleting blog entries without, again, delving into the blog data files. This is quite a bit harder than editing the CGIs, because the entry is URL-escaped before going into the file, which makes it harder to get at. I had to do this though so I could put characters like carriage returns and so on in there.

BTW, as I type this, the blog data files come to about 144KB - of which 143KB or so make up the actual entries, and 547 bytes make up the two TrackBack entries on the previous post. So the data files are quite small too.

Basically, I wrote this blog CGI with me in mind (obviously), and so I'm not put off by the techie side of things. Besides, I don't really agree with the editing of blog posts anyway, except maybe to correct typos and stuff. Hey... there's an idea... I could integrate it with ispell so you could check your spelling before posting! :D

As far as I know, there are only two other sites that use this blog code as a base - Tim's Journal, and the old OpenMoz site (now called FreeMoz). They both use the old code, but I'm hoping to let Tim know of this new code so he can upgrade if he wants.

Well, ain't it a small world... just after I typed that, I looked at my email and saw that Tim had started a topic on CS-FSLUG about blogs, and whether people blog or not. I'm gonna reply to that now... I'll have another post up soon...
Nov 22, 2002: New: TrackBacks! (link | trackback: 2)
Time: 16:36 - Mood: Very happy - Location: Work - Now playing: n/a

Well, I've done my rewrite of the code, and basic support for TrackBacks is now built in. You should now see "trackback" links next to the "link" links - please feel free to try and TrackBack this post and let me know if it works. :D
Nov 22, 2002: About Moveable Type and this blog... (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 12:01 - Mood: Happy - Location: Work - Now playing: n/a

Well, I've had a good think about whether or not to use MT, and I even installed it on theblob.org so I could see what it was like to work with. But while it seems to be a very good system, a lot of my entries are made while in lynx, which is a text-based browser. It shows up okay, but I prefer the way that my blog works for me.

But never fear! I will instead be incorporating the features into my version of the blog - so you'll be able to ping my blog to do TrackBacks in exactly the same way as you would for MT, and you'll be able to do comments too. As for me, I'll be able to TrackBack other journals too eventually, but I'm working on allowing others to ping me first.

I've also decided that the journal code itself needs a lot of cleaning up, so this will result in an almost-total rewrite of the code. Stay tuned!
Nov 21, 2002: Er... whoops? (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 11:45 - Mood: Happy - Location: Work - Now playing: n/a

Just now, I used my "Random Blog Link" on this page to take a look at a blog at random. I found one, and after reading, decided to comment on the most recent post. However, I almost made a bit of a faux pas with my ending... I had meant to type "God bless!", but instead typed "Gob less!". Luckily, I caught it and corrected it before posting.

But that is so not what I meant to type...
Nov 21, 2002: Sorry... (link | trackback: 0)
Time: 11:08 - Mood: Happy - Location: Work - Now playing: n/a

Heya all...

I'm sorry I haven't updated for ages. Sorry to those of you who were waiting for the Halloween article.

Truth is, I've been busy, and a number of different things have happened.

Firstly, with regards to the Halloween bit, I experienced my usual sense of writer's block. That's the trouble with me; I can start something like that (and usually make a pretty good job of it), but I'm not too good at finishing it, as I usually lose interest. Those of you who've seen the first page of my Windows XP review will know that I've been "thinking of some more to write" for a loooong time now...

I've also recently come across the alt.fan.dragons newsgroup, where people who think they're dragons or can relate to them meet. Now, before you ask, I'm neither of these things; however, the newsgroup doesn't mind RPing (role playing), and I like RPing, so... :D

Looking through Neil's blog, I see that ODP editor beebware (who I've spoken of before) has his own blog! There's another link to go on my blogroll...

Talking of blogs, I'm beginning to wonder whether or not I should move to a 'proper' blogging system like Moveable Type or GreyMatter. Then I'd get those cool-looking TrackBack things. And people could comment on my articles. And all sorts of other stuff. Hmm...

I'll think about it and ask Neil what he thinks, too...

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