Technology

Flickr Video Flickr Video

I should have done screencasts like the above long ago. It’s not that they’re great, but they are a wonderful excuse to use the canned lounge music I’ve got. Those videos are now on the front page of the official Scriblio site, and I did five more to demo the installation and configuration. Big thanks go to Collingswood NJ Public Library Director Brett Bonfield who let me use his library like this.

You’d think the top search results on the matter would be newer than 1999, but that’s where you’ll find this NYT article and PubLaw item story, both from precambrian times. Worse, both of those articles suggest that my links to them may not be entirely kosher.

The problem is probably that US courts have not spoken clearly on such a case. A Danish court in 2006 did, but I think that no case in the US has gone far enough to actually set a precedent. Another chance at settling this issue was lost earlier this month when BlockShopper settled, rather than continue a costly defense of such a case. The EFF is confident BlockShopper could have won, but that means little when the legal bills come in.

Related at EFF: Kelly v. Arriba Soft and Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.

I love BBEdit on my Mac, but I was left scratching my head again today when I was trying to remember how to make its regex engine match a pattern across multiple lines. My hope was to extract a list of initial articles from a page that had HTML like this:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" colspan="34" align="left">
      am
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Scottish Gaelic
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

<table>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" colspan="34" align="left">
      an
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      English,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Irish,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Scots,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Scottish Gaelic,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Yiddish
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

<table>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" colspan="34" align="left">
      an t-
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Irish,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Scottish Gaelic
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

Indeed, it has well over 100 tables like that, and I was looking for the contents of the first TD in each. The following regex does it:

(?s)[^<]*<table>[^<]*<tr>[^<]*<td[^>]*>([^<]*)</td>.*?</table>

The most significant part of this is the (?s) at the beginning that tells BBEdit to match the pattern across line breaks. A more ninja-like regex assassin would probably be able to do it better, but this worked.

Sure, Matt says it’s Thank a Plugin Developer Day, but let’s hear it for the developers who just tagged WordPress MU 2.7! Not long ago there were still 300 files to merge, now it’s done and ready for the next version.

# mysqlcheck -p -A --auto-repair --optimize
wp_1_options
info     : Found block with too small length at 17732; Skipped
info     : Wrong block with wrong total length starting at 17776
info     : Found block with too small length at 28776; Skipped
warning  : Number of rows changed from 444 to 441
status   : OK

Cleaning up the mess after a hardware failure can suck. This mysqlcheck output is from the wp_options table for this blog. Unfortunately, if the options table is unreadable, all of WordPress panics and fails to load.

Richard Moore’s Pac-Txt is even more brilliant than his Paper Pong (which, ironically, you can play online).

Here’s a transcript of my best Pac-Txt game to date:

Pac-Txt!
--------
You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.

> go east
Huh?!

> look
You are in a long corridor. You may go forward or backward and there are glowing dots in every direction. There is a glowing dot hovering near you. 

> eat
You have eaten the glowing dot!

> go forward
Huh?!

> forward
You have moved.

> look
You are at an intersection. You may go forward, backward or right and there are glowing dots forward and right. There is a glowing dot hovering near you. 

> eat
You have eaten another glowing dot!

> check score
Huh?!

lbjay uses both the Tabulator and Semantic Radar Firefox plugins to do magic with RDF in his browser.

Way back in 2002 Dave Winer made a bet:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.

It’s important to remember that in 2002 people still wrote “weblogs” in quotes, as though they weren’t sure how to use the word. Winer won his bet in 2007. Anybody want to make a bet about 2014?

WordPress 2.7 requires that plugins explicitly white list their options using a couple new functions. WordPress MU has required this security measure for a while, and it’s nice to see an evolved form of it brought to the core code. [Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7][1] article in the codex offers some guidance, but here’s how it works:

First, register each option for your plugin during the admin_init action:

In the example above, the value for my-option-name-1 will be filtered by absint before being saved to the options table. my-option-name-2 will be stripped of any HTML by wp_filter_nohtml_kses.

Then build a form like this prototype:

      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</div>

Easy.

 [1]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Migrating_Plugins_and_Themes_to_2.7#Plugins "Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7 « WordPress Codex"