In Switzerland most men who serve in military have a weapon and some ammunition in their home. Whenever the Swiss talk about those weapons, the consensus is, that those weapons cause far less dammage than you might think. Well, think again. As reported by the NZZ newspaper a study by Martin Killias of the University of Lausanne found that 300 people die a year because of those army weapons. I was not able to find the study on the UNIL web site unfortunately. ...
In the past few weeks I was mainly busy creating the new local.ch market. It’s actually in cooperation with Fundgrueb, a very well known and traditional classifieds newspaper in the German part of Switzerland. I created a longer posting on the local.ch blog which also contains some information about what’s different from other such platforms. The nice upload is thanks to Chregu’s Upload Progress Meter PECL extension by the way (forgot to mention that on the local.ch blog post). ...
The new version of Firebug is now available. It’s the 1.0 beta release. It contains some great new features and I’d advise you to try it out if you develop web sites. Joe was pondering to make the new version a commercial release. Instead he has now decided to leave it Open Source but asks for donations.
For the next phase of local.ch E-Mail processes will play a central role. So I wanted to include those processes in our Selenium tests. It’s actually quite easy to do. First create an account where test mails can go to. That account should be accessible by one of your scripts. I use a normal IMAP account for that. Then write a script which always outputs the newest mail on that account. I include some of the important headers plus the body (body parts for multi-part mails). I also made that page refresh itself every two seconds. ...
As a web developer I often have to debug HTTP problems. At local.ch we also do the frontend/backend communication using the HTTP protocol, so sometimes I also have to debug that. So over the whole time I’ve been doing that, some tips have accumulated. LiveHTTPHeaders LiveHTTPHeaders is a Firefox extension that allows to see the headers exchanged between the browser and server. It adds a “Headers” tab in the page information. This window can be accessed with Apple+I on the Mac or Ctrl+I on Linux and Windows. The headers tab shows a list of the headers that Firefox sent to the server and a separate list of the response headers sent by the server. ...
The last few weeks I was on vacation - in Peru again. That explains the absence of posts during that time. I uploaded a few (very few) pictures on Flickr. I’ll add many more during the next days once I have time to catalog and label all of the pictures taken.
Shinzo Abe is now the new prime minister of Japan. His first policy speech sounds reasonable enough though there is one thing that worries me. Abe wants to change the pacifist constitution and allow military operations in other countries. This started under Koizumi who sent self-defence forces to Iraq. Those similar to the Swiss troops in eastern Europe are only allowed to defend themselves - the Swiss troops are not even allowed to do that. ...
Management summary of this article: turn off Norton Ad Blocking as installed by Norton Personal Firewall. It sucks. If you are interested in details or you develop AJAX sites for the broad market, read on. Some users were not able to navigate to page two, three, etc. on the result lists of local.ch. As that functionality is implemented with AJAX I first suspected a general XMLHTTPRequest problem. But funnily enough people were still able to submit feedback - which is also submitted to our server with an AJAX call. After seeing some of the raised JavaScript exceptions by our users I noticed that there was a function called SymOnLoad in the output. As we don’t have any function by that name I started investigating and found a connection to the Norton Personal Firewall. ...
A lot of people don’t know one of the nicest features about Firefox: quick search. In Firefox you can turn any bookmark into a search action. For that just create a new bookmark and add the following properties: Name: Whatever you like Location: URL of the search but with %s where the query is supposed to be Keyword: The shortcut you want for this search So for example in the screenshot the keyword is tel. Now you can enter “tel kay in basel” to find all Kay’s in Basel. A few shortcuts I have configures are. ...
This morning in the train I finally came around to fix a few issues with list.blogug.ch that had prevented a release for a while. The big change: search is now fast! the search uses a Ferret index with the acts_as_ferret module. Ferret is basically the Ruby version of Lucene. And the URLs are normalized when a new entry is added. This should leave us with far fewer duplicates than we now have. I find most of the duplicates when checking the new submissions but it still was an annoyance. ...