Rainer Feike techblog

I’ve seen lots of sites publish their rss content on feedburner. So do I now under http://feeds.feedburner.com/anwaelte. but this is just a copy of my original feed at http://www.anwalt-seiten.de/rss/feed_all.rss.

So what is it for?

Since I am writing lot’s of Go code lately I have configured a syntax highlighting description file for gedit. I am pretty sure, that it is not only for gedit, but for all of the gtk apps in gnome. To install it, just copy the go.lang file to your /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/ directory.
Actually I have tested it only for a debian 5.04 installation - but I am pretty sure it will work on Ubuntu, too.

Download: go.lang

I f you don’t have a /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/ directory, check where your gnome is based and search for similar files like java.lang or c.lang. Then install go.lang and restart gedit - (more about this on gnome.org)

Please report any bugs here! Thanks.

NOTE: I am sure willing to contribute this file to the gnome base distribution, but don’t know how… so please feel free to do that - and please keep me informed. Thanks.

To have gedit detect automatically which highlighting to apply to go files, it is necessary to map a mime type. If go doesn’t yet have a mime type specified then you need to create a new one. It is good practice to also put the custom user mime types in a local user directory. For the mime type database this is: ~/.local/share/mime. You will need to add a new mime type specification file in the directory ~/.local/share/mime/packages (create it if it doesn’t exist yet). Add a file go.xml in that directory which looks like this:

<mime-info xmlns='http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info'>
  <mime-type type="text/x-go">
    <comment>Go Source</comment>
    <!-- more translated comment elements -->
    <glob pattern="*.go"/>
  </mime-type>
</mime-info>

Important here is to specify a type (text/x-go) and the glob pattern to match the file to the mime type. Once you’ve created the file, go to the directory ~/.local/share and run: update-mime-database mime. The mime types should now be registered and after a restart of gedit your language should automatically be mapped to the correct files.

One of the most watched topics webwide today - Google is changing their search algorithm. Over the last months one had the possibility to beta-test the new Google search (called caffeine). now it’s about to be deployed on the first data centers:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.
Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Time to set up your SERP tests for the next weeks!

Users told me they had problems with some online mail clients (like gmx and gmail) viewing mails sent with my MIMEMailxPHP4_V2 PHP class when cid (base64 coded inline) images are contained.
This bug is fixed now, you find the current (2.2) Version for download (it’s open source) here.

Testing before productive use is strongly recommended!

Actually I’ve lot’s of projects in my “web-queue” - but my favorite is EQUIRA. EQUIRA is a stock chart analyzer C++ software I wrote in 1999. It’s full of AI and FUZZY and GA (that’s Artificial Intelligence, Fuzzy Logic and Genetic Algorithms).
With the today available hosting technology and prices it’s ready for a public offering as webservice and a Drupal frontend for subscribers.

Stay tuned…

Today I read an article about IE8, the MS Internet Explorer that ships with Windows 7 (successor of Vista). The good news is, that it survives the ACID2 test, the bad news is, that it fails the ACID3 test embarrassing. While Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome meet about 70 to 80 of the necessary 100 goals, the IE8 meets 20/100.

So, the question is: Are Microsoft programmers lousy? Or is Microsoft still offending the Internet as far as possible? While I don’t think a great deal of them, I am sure they could do it better - BUT I am almost sure, that Ballmer is not willing to believe that times change. Fat client computing is dying, all what Microsoft does with their villainously products is delaying the agony.

They’re hurting the substantial progress of our society - just for their selfish vegetate. And they’re hurting us web developers by forcing us to support their crap.

Yesterday we went to public with another very complex Drupal 6 project. It’s kind of a “local collaboration” platform with classical news attributes.
Pretty much of the business is done in a self-developed module but we also use lot’s of contributed modules from Drupal.org:

cck - to create content types
checkbox_validate + legal - for registration issues
computed_field - for workflows and hidden attributes
content_taxonomy - for taxonomies in cck types
event - for events
fivestar - for content rating
flag - for flagging content for several reasons
flatcomments - to avoid comment-threading
image - for images
masquerade - for testing
mass_contact - for mailings
nice_menus - for some dropdowns as second level navigation
pathauto - for nice URLs
privatemsg - for user postboxes
quicktabs - for tabbed blocks in the sidebar
user_stats - for some forum enrichments
views - for customized views on cck types
votingapi - for fivestar
workflow - for workflows like published purchased content

… puh, that’s a lot - and there are still some modules missing.
Maybe you wanna take a look at isartal.info?

I’ve started to “refactor” my German IT consulting webpages with Drupal 6. Although the update frequency of V6 is still pretty annoying it’s a very stable system already. Most important contributed modules are at least in beta state.
I did a new theme from scratch and thereby got great support from the “devel” module and it’s “theme developer”.
The project runs on a multisite installation together with nine other D6 sites now.

Again I was using

• cck - for my project type and listings
• views - for views
• date - for cck date fields
• token and pathauto - for url naming
• image - for attached images

And as always I’ve written a supporting module to provide some data (like a month name array) and blocks.

Other famous people who already took the survey:
Eloy took it
Myles took it
Thomas took it
Ashwin took it
Adam took it

And you should, too!

What we need

I am missing a syntax to apply a common ancestor to a set of rules. As far as I know, there’s no such concept in CSS selector syntax.

With the increasing usage of CSS definitions to style HTML markup, CSS files grow bigger and bigger. With this it’s getting more and more complex to find rules that apply the a special element and/or to have one’s code structured properly. When ie8 will support the more sophisticated locators like adjacent siblings or attribute selectors the locators and files likely will continue to grow.
Also CSS gets used in situations where you import content from several providers to display it inside one “mashup” site or (like in iGoogle or the Vista desktop) as “snippet”. In this situation one needs to separate the CSS rules of the different providers from each other and from the mashup’s home style.

Basically I want to grab remote content then wrap the grabbed sourcecode into a i.e. a <div id=”#GG”> and integrate that code together with it’s CSS in my site (or fridge display or whatever).

How it could work

The solution to this would be a ancestor grouping concept, i.e.:

ancestor "#GG" {
a { color: black; }
p { margin-top: 3em; }
}

This syntax should then expand to:

#GG a { color: black; }
#GG p { margin-top: 3em; }

Far more added value would be provided by the following construction:
ancestor "#GG" { @import(google.com/styles.css); }

or inside the HTML markup:
<link rel="StyleSheet" href="http://google.com/style.css" type="text/css" ancestor="#GG">

I think the goal should be clear now. (more…)