December 2006

It’s that time of the year again!

When people rush out to the nearest supermarket and buy enough food for a month when they only need two days worth. When people are flustered, irritated and easily annoyed. When it’s all elbows and fuck yous when you’re trying to navigate around the store. When the same four Christmas songs are played on the radio over and over again. When we wish for a white Christmas but the best we get is fog. When we watch Christmas films to try and invoke that elusive “Christmassy” feeling.

When you’re with your family and it’s all worthwhile.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

So, after posting my “MySpace” experiences (it sucks) I was inundated by literally three people telling me to join FaceBook.

I’m easily led, so I joined and it does not suck! It’s got a nice clean interface with plenty of javascript / ajax trickery to make things easier and it actually encourages you to upload ‘amusing’ photos and write ‘hilarious’ things in your notes.

I’ve amused myself by joining groups and uploading pictures of my lunch. Great fun!

Look, this is me.

I finally decided to see what all the MySpace buzz was about. Everyone and their dog has one and much like the unpopular kid at school, I didn’t want to be left out.

I excitedly skipped along to MySpace and tried to register an account. This was the first major stumbling block.

I clicked the ‘SignUp’ link (MySpace is way too cool for proper punctuation or spaces, apparently) and entered my details with increasing lasciviousness. Shaking with anticipation, I submitted the form and waitied.

“Sorry, an unexpected error occured”.

Attempt number two faired a little better. I got as far as the “Upload your photo!” screen when it quit with another unexpected error.

Never one to be undone with something as trivial as a fatal error, I tried again. I got as far as a screen asking for more profile information when I got another unexpected error. This was quite ironic as I fully expected it now.

I thought that by now, at least one of my three attempts would have created an account that I could log into and attempt to reconstruct. I navigated back to the home page and tried my log in details into the “Member Login” box. I clicked “LOGIN”. I was whisked to a page that said “YOU HAVE TO BE LOGGED IN TO DO THAT!”. I thought that was the whole point of logging in.

Meanwhile, I received three emails from MySpace asking me to validate my account before I could log in. I clicked the validation link.

“Sorry, an unexpected error occured”.

At this point I gave up and resigned myself to the fact that I could not achieve something that thousands of Goth loving 12 year olds had done: got a MySpace.

The next day began with optimism. I thought I try and log in again. With much surprise, I was able to log in. I took a quick sip of my green tea and started customizing my bad-ass MySpace.

I started with my main photo. I dug old my trusty “Hair Gel Shoegaze Pose” photo that I took when testing the camera on my new k800i phone.

“Sorry an unexpected error occured”.

I took no solace that “The development team have received an email” because, quite frankly, the frequency that these ‘unexpected’ errors occur must send tidal waves of email to /dev/null.

A few more attempts and the photo was uploaded. Flushed with success, I decided to upload a few more photos to my gallery. Amused with one photo, I thought I’d leave a witty comment.

“Sorry, only friends can comment on photos”.

But.. it’s me. I’m logged in and everything. All right. I know. I’ll foil this system by befriending myself.

“Sorry, you cannot add yourself to your friends list”.

Right. Of course.

To cheer myself up, I thought I’d add my school details. After spending most of my school life being treated by my peers as something one trod in after a walk in a park I thought it might be nice to gloat that I had a MySpace AND a Blog. After filling in the details, I went back to my homepage and noticed that the school details had disappeared. I went back and added it three times more until it ’stuck’.

It was about then that I’d had enough. I gave out the MySpace link to everyone on AIM even if they politely refused to click it. Most informed me that they got an error page or were told that I’d deleted my MySpace account.

Feel free to try it yourself. Please, leave a comment and add me to your friends list. I doubt I’ll be able to reciprocate because MySpace sucks.

$580 million? You got ripped off Rupert.

It’s true, proof is here.

I’m not so sure why 71% of women are so concerned with the size of my steaks, however.

We’re on a roll!

We’re a feature closer to that first public beta. This time, I get to cross “Content Versioning” off the list.

Content Versioning in IP.Dynamic is a fairly simplistic system so don’t expect multi-locking SVN merge facilities. It simply saves a snapshot of an item’s content just before it’s updated. I’ve written it as a totally modular system that allows developers to just drop a module and a configuration file into a folder (as well as add the required hooks in the code) to add versioning to their own code. As part of the process, I also rewrote a little bit of the ’show preview’ and ’show differences’ code to make it modular, too.

The movie below shows the interface as it is thus far. I anticipate it changing slightly before I’m fully satisfied. The movie will take you through a ‘normal’ work procedure. A content page is edited, the versioning repository checked to show the entry along with a preview of the stored revision and a differences output. The page is then deleted and restored from the versioning repository.

Enough babble, here’s the 9.6mb Quicktime Movie.