Solipsism Gradient

After the excitement of the MacWorld announcements (especially the Mac mini), and some debugging and organizing of the new site, things are looking good. So here’s a progress report.

I hadn’t realized how much my local copy of the site had fallen out of sync with the remote copy. Part of this was due to my trying out several FTP applications and not really settling on a definite one. In the beginning (this was in the Mac OS 9 days) I’d tried Interarchy, when it still was called Anarchie, but the folder synchronizing feature was still unreliable, and when they went full commercial I decided it wasn’t worth the price. I wrote the main pages in DreamWeaver but found I had to watch and correct the HTML code all the time, and the site administration tools didn’t mesh with my style either.

So I sort of limped along, not touching the actual source files for months at a time – since most of the updates were done through the forum software – or checking out several FTP apps as they came out. In the end I stayed, mostly out of inertia, with RBrowser Lite, which is free and worked reasonably, if slowly. Editing individual files was made easy by using BBEdit‘s FTP option, which works very well.

Just how slowly RBrowser Lite was I realized only when I tested FTPeel a couple of weeks ago. There’s no comparison. Listings come up 10 to 20 times faster, and uploading a whole folder of small files has a similar ratio; it seems that RBrowser Lite simply stops for several seconds between every FTP command. On the other hand, FTPeel has several serious deficiencies; you can’t sort columns alphabetically, for instance, and uploading folders with lots of files sometimes left several files out; and the lack of sorting makes this very hard to find. Fortunately DreamHost stats are very comprehensive and after some head-banging I was able to find out which files were missing from the error reports. By the way, the FTPeel folks tell me they’re starting work on a completely recoded version which will fix my complaints; so stay tuned.

Still, in the meantime, I’m without a satisfactory FTP/site administration app, so there still may be some missing or misplaced files. Bug reports are welcome…

…and I don’t mean this one.

From Ole Eichhorn’s Critical Section comes this gem:

A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest NEW chemical element yet known to science.  The new element has been tentatively named Governmentium.

Governmentium has 1 neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.  These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.  Since Governmentium does not have electrons, it is therefore inert.  However, it normally can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.  Governmentium has a normal half-life of 4 years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.  In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since any reorganization will cause some morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.  This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration.  This hypothetical quantity is referred to as “critical morass”.

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Amiable nonsense

“It’s Sunday, you sod!” my flatmate grey wolf protested.

The source code page is up, with version 1.0 of RBSplitView as the first item. I’ve also opened up a support forum for source code. Enjoy!

After some very tense days, I’m up and running on the new hosting provider: DreamHost. Prices are good, support seems to be fast and quite good, and there’s lots of options. More if you buy before year’s end; if you do so, be sure to mention my domain name as the referrer, or click through from the link above; I’ll get a modest commission.

The Santy worm, now apparently renamed Spyki, is still pounding the servers in ever-new combinations. Still, the security hole remains closed and I have added some new stuff to avoid having the server respond to the worm, which should ease the load quite a bit. If you have seen the site responding very slowly or even not at all during the last two days, it was a hardware problem and should be fixed by now.

Some other things are still shaking out but everything should return to normal on January 1st. In particular, Bill Bumgarner has tested RBSplitView and made some interesting suggestions; so have several other developers. It seems I should put up a new “source code” page with that and other goodies, so that will be my first priority.

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

… In particular, Bill Bumgarner has tested RBSplitView and made some interesting suggestions; so have several other developers. It seems I should put up a new “source code” page with that and other goodies, so that will be my first priority.

While I’m working on the source code page, Erik Barzeski of Freshly Squeezed Software wrote on his NSLog() that they’ll be using RBSplitView in their new version of PulpFiction:

Total time to convert from our hacked up NSSplitView (which can be collapsed, stores sizes, has minimum sizes before collapsing, etc.) to RBSplitView and to add the feature I just mentioned: about ten hours. Coded, bug fixed, and tested.

Now that’s the sort of thing I like to read…

Also, Steve Gehrman, the mastermind behind CocoaTech, will be using RBSplitView in the forthcoming version of Path Finder. My thanks to all who’ve helped with suggestions and debugging!

Meanwhile, I’ve belatedly noticed that my last post below was #1000, and that this weblog’s second anniversary has passed unnoticed on last Sept. 21st. Not bad…

Rafael Fischmann wrote:

It’s not that strange, Rainer… you have changed your phpBB settings to redirect to this weblog page whenever a user access your viewtopic.php page, something that doesn’t happen when you access viewtopic.php in a default phpBB installation.

That’s not what I did; I just made my weblog topic the default topic. Since 99% of accesses to my forums are to my weblog page, that should make little difference – at least in terms of traffic. Then again, Google doesn’t measure traffic.

Anyway, since the topic argument is not a part of the URL proper, but of the arguments (the part after the ‘?’), Google shouldn’t consider that for relevance either…

Posted by Rafael Fischmann:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Interestingly, this worm used Google as a tool to detect vulnerable websites. That specific search is now supposed to be blocked. Still, I tried some searches and found that I’m third from the top when searching for “viewtopic.php” – one of the search strings perhaps used by the worm – among about 7,910,000. Very strange.

It’s not that strange, Rainer… you have changed your phpBB settings to redirect to this weblog page whenever a user access your viewtopic.php page, something that doesn’t happen when you access viewtopic.php in a default phpBB installation. That’s why your weblog is on the top of Google’s list when you search for viewtopic.php.