Blog
From Charlie.Huggardlee.Net
As I write blog entries, the most recent 10 entries will show up here. You can find all blog entries here or in the Blog Archive. I've also posted some less developed random thoughts.
IE8 and Acid2
As it was claimed that Internet Explorer 8 passes Acid2, I decided to download the beta 1 today after it became public. Interestingly enough, when I try Acid2 on Webstandards.org it seems to pass. However when trying Acid2 from an alternate source or when trying it on a version I fetched using wget, or when using the alternate version without data: urls the eyes do not render properly. Is there something domain specific about Acid2 or is IE 8 Beta1 faking compliance? Admittedly IE8 does make a few things render more nicely than IE7 (such as the the tabs on my website), and some things render worse (such as the external link icons on my site) but that's another story.
Update: IE8 apparently does pass Acid2, under certain restrictions. Because of a line in the test, it is subjected to Cross-Domain Scripting restrictions. My copy of Acid2 was edited and now works. See [1] and [2] for more information. Thanks Nathan!
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--Charlie Huggard 20:22, 5 March 2008 (CST)
Rewrite stats
As it took me several weeks to get my Dreamhost stats to work with my mod_rewrite rules, and because several other people seem to be encountering similar issues, I thought I would post my solution to the problem here. Quite simply, in your .htaccess file immediately after turning on the RewriteEngine add the following line:RewriteRule ^(stats/|[Ff]ailed_auth\.html|doc/).*$ - [L]
And pouf! Your stats work again!
--Charlie Huggard 17:45, 18 February 2008 (CST)
Coding the Masters Project
As you may (or, more likely, may not) have noticed, I have disappeared from writing articles for the time being as I'm finishing the code and report for my Masters project (tentatively entitled A Framework for Eldercare Technology Monitoring). When finished, I hope to write some articles (more likely I'll copy them from my thesis report) on various neat tricks, design patterns, etc. that I came across in working on my project.
In other news, I've started my dad on the construction of his own personal site at http://art.huggardlee.net. Right now it only has resume and a few links, but over the next few months he plans to post some interesting articles about the work he's accomplished in many different industries (including biodiesel and information technology). If you have a chance, you should check it out.
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--Charlie Huggard 11:56, 6 February 2008 (CST)
Dynamic Site Cloaking and Redirecting
Of the many preparations for Tiffany and my big day coming up in June, we wanted to help our relatives and guests by providing them with a wedding website of useful information. Initially our wedding website consisted only of a wedding map so that using Dreamhost's subdomain cloaking option was sufficient. But as we had to add registry info, and potentially will be archiving additional information after the wedding (e.g. pictures), I needed a simple system to provide easily configurable path level cloaking. In this article I discuss the components of a system I developed for dynamic cloaking and redirections.
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--Charlie Huggard 21:08, 27 January 2008 (CST)
Multiple Mediawiki Installations on the Same Codebase
As I have progressed in my use of Mediawiki, I have found that I enjoy using Mediawiki as a framework to quickly install a website that is easy to create, edit, and maintain. As the number of independent websites grew, the number of code installations I was having to maintain also grew, becoming rather tedious to maintain. In this article, I present the methods I used to help my sanity at least a little bit.
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--Charlie Huggard 10:38, 27 January 2008 (CST)
Pondering PHP
Recently there has been an interesting discussion on Jim Wilson's Blog regarding the merits and demerits of PHP. I decided to write an entry with my personal thoughts on the matter.
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--Charlie Huggard 23:12, 25 January 2008 (CST)
Uncluttering Facebook using Greasemonkey
For a little bit of light problem solving getting back into the swing of computing, I've been toying with Greasemonkey again. This time I have developed 2 scripts to hopefully remove the clutter of applications that seems to have infected Facebook since the advent of the Facebook Platform. Custom Facebook View actually started 2 years ago, trying to mold facebook to my personal viewing preferences, clean up advertisements and the news feed. Within the past few days I updated it to include a method of preventing specifically blacklisted application boxes from displaying on profile pages. I recently changed the Namespace of this script so previous users (if there were any) would need to uninstall the old script before installing the current one.
For people who hate all of the new applications including the mini-feed, Basic Facebook Apps may be more appealing. As suggested by Charlie Holmes, this script takes the stance of white listing only the most basic applications, and removing the display of all others. As always, I'm interested in any feedback you may have on these toy scripts.
--Charlie Huggard 00:41, 25 January 2008 (CST)
Blog Test
This is simply a test of the blogging capabilities on the wiki, a real blog entry may come at some point, but many other things come first.
--Charlie Huggard 03:36, 12 January 2008 (CST)
