miahz » notes

Akismet 1000 Spam Barrier

Jeremiah — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 21:09:02 +0000

Sometime a few days ago Akismet intercepted the 1000th piece of blog spam before it could touch my site. I installed it about four months ago. There’s currently 169 comments in the 15 day cue. Seems to be high tide—it fluctuates down to around 60 or so. Still no false positives. I’ve had to moderate about 75 comments.

A Neat Little Kayak

Jeremiah — Tue, 02 May 2006 10:15:59 +0000

Just wanted to take a second to pimp Kayak.com. I had been making the rounds through the travel search usual suspects (Priceline.com, Orbitz, etc.). Orbitz (and cheaptickets.com which seems to be the exact same search engine) puts the brakes on my ancient computer with it’s huge, complex page layouts and floating options panel. So it was a relief to see the Google-ish minimal homepage at kayak.com, which i remembered reading about in the May issue of Cargo magazine.

But the best part about Kayak.com is there is no lame Playstation loading screen (ditto for Yahoo’s Farechase [via Barnako.com] which appears to be a clone of Kayak.com’s search engine, or vice versa). The results start loading immediately, and maybe even cooler is that you can filter the results on-the-fly with controls to add or remove airlines and airports, or narrow the arrival/departure time.

Having said all that, these search engines seem to poll the same sites, so the results are mostly the same. But if you can’t even see the results page, what’s the point? Kayak.com dynamically loads only the cheapest 10 fares into a fast, simple page design, and gives you options to instantly narrow or expand your search on top of that. Some of that “web 2.0″ fanciness making things a little nicer.

Mozilla Bug 235277: RESOLVED, FIXED

Jeremiah — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 18:55:13 +0000

It took two years almost to the day, but the small patch i submitted to make the Go button look like the other Firefox toolbarbuttons was checked in a few days ago.

status 20060212-0521

Jeremiah — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 10:55:31 +0000

It turns out that the new Options window was being held up by one line. I had the new preferences.css file in browser/preferences, but the window would be drawn transparent with only the section button/tabs at the top and the OK/Cancel dialog buttons on the bottom. It needed the prefwindow XUL element added to the global style definition in global/global.css as noted by ehume in the theme change forum thread (almost one year ago). So that works now. It’s not fully styled yet, but at least i can use it.

Also have the Software Update window (the one that pops up and alerts you that a new version of Firefox is available) has been just about finished for a few days now. It wasn’t working before because i had update.css in the mozapps directory but not updates.css, which i confused at a glance. I still need to give it the usual thorough scrubbing—adding and removing styles to cover all situations, and check for as many bugs as i can. I already stumbled on one just now—the updater couldn’t connect to the server and showed an error, which wasn’t styled as i’d like. It’s hard to know what all these selectors are for just by reading through the CSS; comments are sparse, and are more often than not dev notes about bugs rather than explaining what certain styles are for.

On 20060210 i noticed and copied tabDragIndicator.png to global/tabDragDrop from the default theme, but that alone didn’t fix the tab drag indicator. I haven’t looked into it any further.

Noticed a few days ago that there some weirdness in the Create in: menulist in the Add Bookmark dialog. The list items styles are a little off and the list popup has scrollbars, neither of which happened in previous versions of Firefox.

notes 20060204-1214

Jeremiah — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:40:40 +0000

The network error pages are naked, as they derive their styles from global/netError.css, which i haven’t set up yet. This brings up a usability sticking point because if i style the page in LCD fashion, it won’t look like the standard error and may confuse people. On the other hand, i like to be complete, and don’t like to include non-original material in my theme. I did up a completely original stylesheet for the about:plugins page as well as for Help pages, so chances are slim i’ll stay with the default here.

I didn’t realize it at first, but the Update notifiation window is completely unstyled. With the recent push of the 1.5.0.1 update, a little window titlebar popped up out of nowhere, but was empty and couldn’t be resized. I figured it was some stray popup ad, but later realized what it was after seeing the real deal on a machine using the default theme. I already tried to start patching that up by copying over the styles in mozapps/update/updates.css, but it didn’t make any visible changes. I’ll have to scrape the theme updates thread for all the necessary changes.

Also a little annoyed with the unstyled feed button in the Location Bar. It’s taking up a good bit of width, and i end up clicking it accidentally. I’ll have to tie that one up soon.

WordPress 2.0.1 Released, As Predicted

Jeremiah — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 03:40:17 +0000

I called it. A little less than one day after i surmised that 2.0.1 would come soon, the release announcement was made on the WordPress Dev Blog [via the Dashboard]. Not that it was any big secret—i’m sure tons of people knew. It was just interesting that i happened to peep the 2.0.1 roadmap when i did. I’ll probably lay back a day or so and read up on any fallout before diving in.

MySpace DB Outtage

Jeremiah — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 05:46:14 +0000

And now MySpace is down with DB problems:

Login is temporarily disabled while we fix some database problems. We’ll be back shortly. 1/31/2006

Ugh. Now what am i supposed to do?

Another mysql.pendrell Outtage

Jeremiah — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 05:35:13 +0000

Well, mysql.pendrell is down again. Odd. Status reports the server was down and restarted several hours ago. But only now is the DB acting retarded. Getting the same Error #1040 – Too many connections.

WordPress 2.0.1 Soon?

Jeremiah — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 04:23:32 +0000

Just took a look at the WordPress 2.0.1 roadmap, and 99% of the issues flagged for 2.0.1 are resolved with only one remaining [via Ryan on WordPress]. So hopefully we’ll have a bugfix after not too long. I’ve been wanting to move up, but jumping onto a point-zero release can be sketchy sometimes.

technorati tags: WordPress, WordPress 2.0, upgrade, blogging

TextDrive Outtage – Pendrell MySQL

Jeremiah — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 17:04:28 +0000

Well, apparently, Pendrell went down some time last night, which i didn’t notice. But i did notice that mysql.pendrell.textdrive.com was down for a bit an hour or so after that reported outtage. I logged in to my WordPress Dashboard, and when i hit the Write link, i got the Error connecting to database page. I checked mysql.pendrell.textdrive.com directly, and got a “too many connections” error when trying to log in to phpMyAdmin. It cleared up after 30 minutes or so, but looking at the Status Blog is a little disconcerting. Several issues. Every day. I never noticed the service before moving to TextDrive. It was invisible—just there—just working. Which has me wondering if this was a worthwhile investment.

technorati tags: miahz.com, TextDrive, WordPress, web hosting