Colin's Journal

Colin's Journal: A place for thoughts about politics, software, and daily life.

August 6th, 2003

PubTal plugins

I’m currently adding plugin support to PubTal, thanks to some feedback from Andrew Dalke. This means that I can add support for textile very easily using an optional plugin (although it’ll need at least Python 2.2 because that’s what is required by PyTextile). This will also allow people to develop their own plugins to add support for custom content while still working within the PubTal framework.

Another feature that I’m working on will allow Catalogues to treat their entries as content, which is rater hard to explain without an example. The feature will allow PubTal to generate a table of contents page as well as easily managable previous/next buttons for each sub-page.

Another feature being thought about would allow plugins to add extra context to existing content types, which will add a lot of extra flexibility. Hopefully I can do all this without making PubTal even harder to explain than it already is…

August 3rd, 2003

Exploring Toronto

Toronto is a city of many different neighbourhoods. If you want to buy computer parts then you go to Spadina and College, if you want Greek food you go to the Danforth. Today I went with Becky for an exploration of Little India and the Distillery District.Sorry for the inconvenience upgrading management.

We used to live fairly closely to Little India, but despite its proximity we had only visited a few times, and then only to visit one or two of its restaurants in the evening. This time it was a Sunday afternoon on a long weekend (long live Civic holidays!) when almost all of the shops were open. I picked up a garlic chutney that I’ve not seen in ages, and had an excellent snack/lunch from one of the outdoor vendors. It was during our wandering that I spotted this amusing sign in the window of a closed shop.

The Distillary District is a recently renovated area filled with art galleries, restaurants, and several outdoor stages. We plan to go back because we didn’t really have much time to look around, and there is easily a full days worth of things to see. The most impressive has to be the Sandra Ainsley Gallery which exhibits a collection of amazing glass work.

August 2nd, 2003

A clarification

I’ve had some thoughtful feedback regarding my previous posts on the war in Iraq. It made me realise that I’ve not written about the question of whether the intelligence used to justify the war was manufactured or altered for political reasons.

In my opinion the answer is certainly “no”. Too many people are involved, and the stakes are so high, that manufacturing or distortion of intelligence evidence is not a credible accusation. What I do think happened was that the government (or parts of it) decided to go to war, and then utilised the available evidence to justify the action. It is in this context that I make the assertion that the PM mislead the houses of parliament and the country.

The impression that many MPs were under, and which was perpetuated through the country’s media, was that Iraq posed the most serious threat to the national security of the UK. Intelligence evidence, suggesting that Iraq was trying to gain capabilities that would allow it to be a threat, existed but as the weapons inspectors demonstrated, there was little or no evidence that Iraq had made any progress in achieving this aim since the end of the last gulf war.

It’s my belief that the PM lead the country to war for strategic and political reasons. However, even if you believe he genuinely perceived Iraq to be such a serious threat, it is obvious by now that he was wrong: Iraq was not a serious threat at all. The weapons inspectors should have been allowed to finish their job (showing that no WMD existed), and we should not have gone to war on the basis of the threat that Iraq posed to the UK. An argument can be made that we were right to invade Iraq for humanitarian reasons, but this was not the argument that the PM promoted.

Either the PM mislead the country, or he was wrong. In either case we waged war on another country because of his actions, and he should be held accountable.

July 31st, 2003

Back again

I finished up my latest client trip last night, flying back home this morning. The latest VPN software that our company uses now works through a NAT firewall, which is great because I’ve now got connectivity at home that is almost as fast as at the office.

This optical illusion posted by Donald cheered me up – it’s nifty indeed. Which reminds me, I need to catch up on Sluggy….

July 26th, 2003

Going here, going there, but probably not

It’s been a week of travel and meetings this week. Overall things went fairly well, the hotel was pleasant enough, and we made some significant progress. Sunday was meant to be the start of a trip to Mexico, but I heard last night that I’m not going. I will probably be travelling at some point next week, but I don’t know when.

All this means that I haven’t done much outside of work, so I’m behind on email, and out of the loop on news. Last night we celebrated Shana’s birthday at Grappa with a group of our friends, coming back home for birthday cake and champagne. More breaking news as and when I find or make some…

July 20th, 2003

How to get Windows 2000 to use a CUPS printer over IPP

I’m doing a little bit of work this weekend from home, and I wanted to be able to print out a document that I’m working on. We have a small travel printer connected to my Linux machine, managed by CUPS. CUPS supports IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), which in theory Win2k also supports.

It took about an hour of configuration tweaking and ‘net searches before I finally got it working. There’s lots of information on how to do this via Samba, but I wanted to use IPP directly instead (less work I thought!). It works now, and to save anyone else similar pain I’ve noted down how I got it working. So if you want to do a similar thing read up on How to make Windows use CUPS IPP.

July 16th, 2003

Mozilla movement

AOL has finally decided to stop employing Mozilla developers, closing down (at least) the browser side of their business. On the bright side this happened at the point where we have a high quality free web browser already available.

Additionally there is a new foundation funding continued Mozilla development (in addition to all the unpaid work done by volunteers). With the huge importance of Mozilla to the open source world its safe to say that the project will carry on improving.

July 16th, 2003

Travelling again

Travel seems to come in clumps. I haven’t been travelling much for work recently, and I was starting to miss it. Now I’ve just come back from a quick trip to St. Louis, and I’ve already got another two trips lined up. It’s almost as though busses and travel have got something in common…

Talking about transport, the article in the BBC’s News Magazine about how to cool down the tube is pretty interesting. In the comments there are the inevitable silly suggestions on how to solve the problem, as well as some more plausible ones. Unfortunately I doubt the £100K prize is likely to be claimed any time soon as this type of problem requires a lot of detailed knowledge regarding the technical and financial restrictions. The London Underground’s FAQ on the subject indicates that some work is being done on the issue, but holds out little prospect for a full solution.

July 12th, 2003

Release 3.4 of SimpleTAL

Release 3.4 of SimpleTAL is now available for download. This release brings a slew of enhancements regarding the handling of XHTML. A DOCTYPE can now be provided for the resulting document, and XML singletons are maintained in the expanded template if they can be.

The unofficial, but useful, ?varname TALES syntax is now supported, the template cache should work under Win32, and the problem with DummyLogger is now fixed.

All of the changes made in this release are the result of people giving me feedback, so many thanks are due to those who sent in bug reports, provided patches, and tested out development versions.

July 10th, 2003

A rock and a hard place

According to the BBC the UK government is planning when to admit that there are, and were, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That this is happening is of no great surprise, after all if there really had been weapons present they would have been found by now.

At this point however I find myself stuck as to what my preferred outcome would be from this mess. On the one hand we have a PM that has mislead the houses of Parliament, and the country, into supporting a war on false pretences. On the other hand I’m not sure there is anyone who could put together a competent government that didn’t feature the tainted members of the current one, and the alternative of a change in governing party is equally unattractive.

To top it all off, I’m not actually against the outcome that has been achieved in Iraq, it’s the process by which we got there that I find worrying and distasteful. If the current leadership does survive this episode it will inevitably set a precedent for others to follow, and that is probably the most worrying aspect of all.

Copyright 2015 Colin Stewart

Email: colin at owlfish.com