February 2005 Archives

I have two bugs on my plate for over a week, and I'm really lagging on them. Stupid other things to do. DBMail 2.0.3 needs a bug fix for users who are over quota. Right now it bounces the message with a temporary failure. This leads to the MTA trying to deliver again. Temporary failure. Again. Temporary failure. Eventually the queue gets pretty blocked up. Not so good. And TWIG 2.8.1 needs a fix for the FindHTML function that gets called to process the To, From, CC, BCC headers for possible HTML in email addresses. Better handled by the imap_rfc822_parse_address function provided by the imap c-client. On a 40,000 address test corpus I ran, imap_rfc822 took 1.6 seconds to parse those 40k addresses. FindHTML took an hour before I killed the process. Not so good.

So instead I'm working on some homework and distracting myself with the TWIG website. Two years ago I had the idea to write the TWIG website in TWIG. So I hacked up a version to do that. And today I had an epiphany for how I can do it a lot smarter from within the TWIG 3 framework I've began 8 months ago. Can't wait to have time to get this really cooking!

Wow, my first comment! Thanks to David, the author of WiClear for noticing me! Well, and that I was ripping on WiClear... or more specifically, the WikiRenderer engine used by WiClear.

It's true that I didn't do any sort of big comparison between DokuWiki and WiClear, but I noted that the syntax and engine of WiClear didn't seem like much. David says otherwise, and that it's all pretty customizable anyways. So, definitely worth a second look. The one toughie is that my lack of French makes it fairly difficult to dig into the websites for WiClear (mostly translated, though) or WikiRenderer (not translated much at all). When I have more time next week I'll look into the WikiRenderer code and see if it's worth jumping back to WiClear instead of DokuWiki. If it actually does have enough of the syntax needed to support the basics of my site, I can write whatever little bits I need to make the details work out.

So the raging debate on the TWIG mailing list seems to come down to this: Should CSS become an intrinsic part of our menu generation, or should there be "static HTML" menus and CSS menus and the user gets to choose. I say scrap the crufty full-HTML menus. They're dinosaurs from HTML 3. We can describe them in lightweight, structural HTML and use CSS to make it pretty, and that's that. The user should not be choosing to use an HTML 3 menu or a CSS menu, and then their choice of stylesheets that may or may not affect the HTML 3 menu and that will make the CSS menu look good. I believe it will lead to balkanized, useless styles that nobody wants to write because of the horrible interaction testing that would be needed. (quoting myself) I have no problem defining 7 types of menus:

Style Defined Primary
Style Defined Secondary
Style Defined Tabs
Style Defined Vertical
Style Defined Dropdown List
Style Defined Icons with Text
Style Defined Icons without Text

And throw the rest away.

I've been searching out the perfect wiki engine lately, and while I have been lucky enough to have settled on DokuWiki because it's simple, pretty and works... except that it's really not all that pretty once you try putting anything other than technical documentation into it. I'm actually trying to run a whole website from within DokuWiki. It's working very well, has reduced my webmaster duties a lot because I can hand out user accounts and don't have to fiddle with repetitive HTML at all anymore... but it's really pissing off the form-before-function people. So I've found WiClear which is really good looking but has a pretty crappy wiki engine inside.

And so off to add templating to DokuWiki... Bug #104.

Sunday is projects day! So to spurn the upsettedness over TWIG, I committed some more work on TWIG3 -- it's been almost 8 months since my last commit. Shoot. One day TWIG3 will happen and it'll be awesome. Over on the DBMail front, I fixed a bug. Er, used someone else's fix to yet another person's well-researched bug. So basically I just typed a few things into CVS. But that's my responsibility just as much as fixing bugs myself. Good work without too much hassle. A job well done :-) And on the co-op-front, I need to finish up some attic wiring before the garage-dwellers string me up by my ankles.

This week a former maintainer of TWIG came out of the woodwork to complain about some of the changes in TWIG 2.8.1. It was entirely out of the blue, and although he posted well to the mailing list and seemed to ask for input from the current maintainer group, he also dug up his old CVS account and started throwing things into CVS according to his preferences. I am more than a little bit dismayed. One simply does not "look up my old password" three years later and start changing things just because, three years ago, he used to run the project. Most of his code has been good, and had he at least had the courtesy to ask if anyone would mind him going straight to CVS I wouldn't be so peeved. But he didn't, and thus I am quite peeved.