My book is available online!
I checked the web last night, and it looks like "Sir Parsley and the Dragon" is now available from most online book retailers. Amazon have it, Play have it, Waterstones have it, WH Smith have it... hell, even Tesco have it. Going to any one of those and searching for "Sir Parsley" ought to find it. Much like Oriblog, it seems to have escaped from me now and be living a life of its own on the web servers of retail giants across the world. Cool!
Sunday July 01st, 2007 08:24 AM
More progress
It's now possible to generate a working GEDCOM file from Sequoia's internal database. It's no work of art, and it's in something of a haphazard order because of the way the data is stored, but it's correct and it imports into other packages fine. I need to integrate it with the GUI and make sure CONTs and CONCs are handled properly and then I'll have a real idea of how much better than the last one it is.
Wednesday February 14th, 2007 08:28 PM
New GEDCOM parser
I've finally got around to rewriting the GEDCOM parser for Sequoia. It's much more resilient than the original and much, much shorter and quicker. It needs some tweaking here and there, but it'll already read a complete GEDCOM file into memory, regardless of what tags are employed and whether the rest of the app can actually do anything with them yet. I've given the data a nice structure so that things like birth and death records are structured properly. Birth records are accessed via something like $db($myid,BIRT,DATE) for the date and $db($myid,BIRT,PLAC) for the place. Note that I've used the actual GEDCOM tags here. I think that's likely to be the best way to do it, as I can create records with arbitrary tags without rewriting anything. I could have a field that looked like $db($myid,FOO,BAR) for example, and the parser would read it. The app is unlikely to do anything with it, but the data from the file would be preserved regardless and would be written back to the file when exported. I don't want this thing to cause anyone to lose data, but at the same time I don't want to have to code for each and every ridiculous circumstance either. With this structure I ought to be able to rewrite the tree construction bit quite easily, and the edit forms will be a piece of piss. Hurrah!
Wednesday February 14th, 2007 04:14 PM
Well, let's see how that goes...
I've updated the comment posting scripts so that you have to enter a random code in order to get your comment posted. Hopefully it'll fox the spambots. Worth a try.
Tuesday November 14th, 2006 08:34 PM
New look
The new design is now live after much faffing about. I should have done this months ago, but I never seem to get around to anything these days. Even Sequoia is struggling to attract my interest at the moment, mostly because I've got to rewrite the parser and that's a hell of a job. Anyway, enjoy!
Sunday October 08th, 2006 01:34 PM
The march of technology
Well, it seems things never stay still too long these days. Last year I came away on holiday, knowing full well I'd be without internet access, because there were no wires to connect to, no wireless to sniff and no GPRS worth mentioning to piggyback. Now, I'm sitting in my mother's caravan in deepest Welsh Wales, with my laptop, my phone and a dinky little bluetooth adaptor and the web is my oyster. It will probably cost a tiny fortune, but at least I'm connected. It's an addiction. It does also mean I can keep writing and testing software from here, so it's not all about avoiding withdrawal symptoms, but still, coolness!
Monday August 14th, 2006 11:11 AM
Pear mail
The spam seems to be only coming to me now, which is better, but not brilliant, so I decided to try a slightly different solution. I've used the mime mail stuff in PEAR to send the mails instead. I'm hoping it'll cut the crap out altogether, but that might be a bit much to hope for. Anyway, it all seems to work fine, we'll just have to see what happens to the spam.
Saturday August 12th, 2006 09:53 PM
PHP mail() injection
I've noticed a lot of spam coming through my mail server recently, to the extent that it has brought the thing to its knees more than once. For ages I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. The server is categorically NOT an open relay. I've run all the tests I could find and the postfix setup is sound. I finally found the answer via google. It seems the comment forms on this website have been used to send emails by getting the PHP mail() function to do the dirty work. The www-data user is allowed to dump messages into the queue for postfix to pick up, all that's necessary is for the spammer to figure out a way of injecting replacement headers, so that the mail goes to a bunch of other people and has a different subject and content. This, as it turns out, is not too tricky. Following the instructions I found I haven't been able to reproduce the effect. For everything I've tried my scripts have actually done what they're supposed to, but I'm convinced that this is where the spam is coming from. For the time being I've prevented the comment forms from sending emails. I'll investigate other solutions and see what I can come up with. It would be very nice to be able to definitively reproduce this behaviour, just to make absolutely sure that I've solved the problem, but whatever is being done is somewhat sneakier than the trivial examples I've seen so far. I'll get to the bottom of it, but in the meantime, if you make a comment, I won't see it until I actually look at the page.
Wednesday August 09th, 2006 07:04 AM
A little hackery later...
And IE now renders the site pretty much like a real browser. Of course this involved an awful lot of lying to it and forcing other browsers to ignore the idiocy I was reserving for IE, but it works. The CSS is a little strange and could probably be tidied up a little bit, but it's not too bad. If you tried to view the new site in IE and it was messed up, feel free to try again. It should look almost identical in IE, Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, Epiphany, etc... It even renders pretty nicely in text only browsers.
Sunday August 06th, 2006 03:42 PM
New look
I've revamped the site somewhat. It's not live yet, but if you want to have a look, it's at http://www.affordable-wombles.org/new/test.php for now. It's just that one page, no links work or anything, and the post box is going to be a smidge wider, but that's the gist. I've finally got rid of all the tables that were littering the place. One word of warning, it might not look right in IE, but if you view it in a real browser you should be ok. I've tried to overcome IE's box model problems, but I've not had chance to test it yet.
Saturday August 05th, 2006 11:52 PM