Checksum Arcanius

The usual experience when submitting forms and recieving errors, is that one can click “Back” (or, as I most often do, hit my backspace key), and the just-submitted form will still have the info you just submitted entered in, so all you have to do is change the offending field, and resubmit. Take, for example, my comment spam protection idea – now implemented by several people. If a real human forgets to check the “I am human” checkbox, they see a rather blank looking page with the text “Error: You are inhuman scum!”

“How dare you insult me, Arcanius!” They wonder aloud, as they click back (or if they are cool, like me, they use their backspace key), to figure out why I am insulting them. But then – gasp – the 15 page comment they meticulously crafted in the small textarea box is gone – apparently forever.

I have lost more than one comment this way to wordpress. The question is, where does it go? Its not just a Firefox thing – IE looses the comment too. I suspect that it is related to the die() command, but I have no idea why. Or perhaps someone more skilled than I am in the behavior of WordPress, or Web Forms, or something or another, can inform me as to what is really going on here.

Some of you have undoubtedly noticed the rotating/random title image. Along with that, I have introduced a few other tweaks on the blog. First, I split the title banner up into three images, each with its own alt text. This allowed for the random graphic at the top, which I actaully had planned for a while, but just hadn’t gotten around to implementing. Next, I moved the “I am human” check box down so it is near the “Say it” button for comment posting. This is to, hopefully, prevent more real people from accidently seeing the “Die inhuman scum” message that awaits would-be comment spammers, and accidental non-humans. This move was inspired by Bernie, who has elegantly implemented the checkbox idea in his custom blog software. Whereas my implementation just calls the PHP die() function, which is pretty terrible (although, in my defense, WordPress does it elsewhere – for shame… something I have to fix, some day), Bernie’s takes you back to the page you attempted to comment on, and displays a nice looking message explaining why your post hasn’t appeared.

Add that to the list of things to do: To do. And no, that check box doesn’t do anything. Thanks for asking though.

Tim and I recently committed ourselves to revamping the wonderful but aging website of the Titan Robotics Club. The site won last year’s “Best Website” award at the Pacific Northwest Regional, and with good reason. Pedro, the webmaster of over two years, spun up a nice looking, feature-rich website. Sure, there’s a mondo security hole (I’ll disclose the nature of it later, when the site is no longer running), and there were a few incomplete or dubiously useful features, but the big things were all there an worked wel, and the site has been great so far.

However, a revamp is in order. So when Tim agreed to work on I site, I was overjoyed, and I, being the dolt I am, of course decided to pitch in as well. It was at this point that I remembered how long its been since I did any database-driven website design. When I started thinking about it again, I began to remember how hard it is to get the right balance of functionality and flexibility. I was struck by how amazing Pedro was for the websites he created. You can read the archives of (or even subscribe to) the TRC-web mailing list for more updates, although I will probably post more here as things get moving as well.

Ever since I read the article Cool URLs don’t change, I have wanted to try out extension-free URLs. However, the few times I attempted, my .var files, as outlined in Apache’s online documentation on the subject, didn’t seem to be working very well. So I finally read further down that page and came across an alternate method of achieving the same ends: Options MultiViews. I quickly wrote myself up a .htaccess file, and voila: you can access files without their extensions now, like http://arcanius.silverfir.net/wp/index. Apache automatically searches for matching files and serves the best one it finds.

The reason behind doing something like this is that, for example, one can change server technologies (although I’m not about to switch from PHP), without changing URLs. For example, the above link would point equally well to index.html, index.php, index.asp, index.jsp, index.InsertServerTechnologyHere, etc. Likewise, one can use a similar methods to automatically switch between image technologies, because checksum-arcanius-banner points equally well to a .png (which it is) or a .gif, or a .jpg, or any new image technology that might come along.

So, MultiViews is a good thing, in my View. Oh my goodness I’m hilarious!

I went to my doctor today, and heard this good news: its probably not too serious, but I’ll give you a call if I’m wrong. Yes, my heart isn’t going to be stopping suddenly anytime soon. This is good news for me, considering that I’m also on a streak of emotional stability that hasn’t had me in the dumps long enough to want it any other way. In other news, I get to be a drugie for another 3 months, my finger will probably heal on its own if I manage to keep the swelling down, and I’m going to keep my dependencies limited to a single substance for now (woohoo!).

Yesterday was arguably the biggest day of the year for the FIRST Robotics Competition – the Kickoff. Before the kickoff, only a handful of people in the world have any idea what the year’s game will be. During the kickoff, tens of thousands of people become aware, more or less simultaneously, of what the game is. Unless you live in or around Seattle, Washington. This is because the organizers of the Seattle Remote Kickoff decided to tape delay the most precious information available to any FIRST team – first by three hours:

In an effort to work with teams that need to travel to get to Seattle (not to mention those that hate 6AM wakes ups) We are planning on a tape delay of the kick off. We are planning on starting the Tape at 10:15-10:30 am at Roosevelt. This will allow a relaxed time for us to watch opening events and learn about the game. Expect tape to be done between 1 and 1:30.

Of course, they didn’t tell us this until five days before the event, after the TRC already had its entire day scheduled around a 7:00 am kickoff. Sure, the extra hours might be nice from a sleep standpoint, but from a “this is something special” standpoint, it was the wrong move. However, we were able to adjust to this unexpected event, and we rearranged the day, albeit shorted by 3 hours, around the new schedule. But then it got worse… On the day of the event, we recieved the following communication:

Not sure what it looks like out your window but I have snow in Belfair and in Tacoma. Just spoke with Eric Muhs. Rather than risk life and limb we thought a 12 noon start time would be better for all involved. So teh update is Kickoff (kit pick up) is at Noon Sat at Roosevelt.

Remember, this is the day of. We have made some significant stides in terms of communication among club members, but there is no way we could inform everyone who was planning on coming – much less know who exactly was planning on coming – of the new delay. Besides, the email seemed to say that the kickoff was now only “kit pick up” – as in, the video would not be shown. So, Amy met the arriving students at the school and told them to return at 2:00, when Brad would be around (he would have been around at noon, except for the initial delay at the start of the week). I made it there late, as I actually had some snow at my house. But according to a friend in Tacoma, there was none in Tacoma, and there was nothing significant lower down in Bellevue or in any of Seattle. In short, the delay was unneccesary as well as a terrible idea – last minute changes to events where more than 200 people are expected to attend – not such a good idea I think.

But, back to the story – I went to pick up the kit at noon – a process that went smoothly enough – but it turns out that they were showing the video. And all of our students weren’t scheduled to be anywhere until 2:00. So, we just picked up the kit of parts and high-tailed out of there, assembled a few things back in Larry’s garage, then headed to the School were we showed the kickoff to the students by way of a DVD Larry burned from his home theater recording of the kickoff. It was considerably better quality than the webcast I watched, which was nice.

After the movie, we began talking about strategy (as opposed to robot design, which is something else entirely). I think we will mostly be keeping our strategy to ourselves. As much as we love all the other FIRST teams, we tend to be kinda exclusive when it comes to these things. I don’t know why exactly, but it seems to be a tradition now… kinda fun actually :-).

From adot’s notblog via Bernie Zimmermann, I learned that Adobe had released Acrobat Reader 7. And everyone’s biggest complaint has been adressed: it is much faster. No longer do you have to dread accidentally clicking a pdf link. It was so bad with version 6 for me that I disabled the plugin version, so I wouldn’t have to face the frozen browser syndrome while the acrobat reader of death opened up. Now, I might switch back – its hard to tell, as I’ve gotten used to saving the things, or having more of my screen to see them with. But at least Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 is fast enough to make the decision possible again.

Anyway, to make it easy for you, here is a link to just acrobat reader, with no extra installtion junk attached (like Yahoo companion, etc).