..again.

I just can’t seem to get the energy to blog. I don’t know why. Yet I have the energy to post things to Twitter. Meh. I thought since I had a spare half-hour in my Data Communications and Security class I’d write some kind of half-arsed post, as it’s better than letting my blog stagnate, like a packet of crisps on the roof.

Things have been fairly average over the past … three months or so since I blogged last. The coursework has piled up. Data Structures and Patterns has been quite demanding, with a new assignment every week for the past five weeks. It’s interesting stuff though. However, it’d be good if we could do the interesting stuff that our lecturer does with the other C++ class, like looking at how Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression works. In Software Development Practices we had to design a software system, which could have been great but instead turned out to be tedious. Data Comms and Security has been pretty interesting, right now we’re building a stolen laptop tracker in Java, without having known Java previously. It kinda sucks that we have to pick up Java as we go, but it’s not too bad given the amount of sample code we have been given. Database Management Systems sucks, I regret choosing it now. I know it will probably be useful later, especially if I suddenly find myself developing enterprise applications, but the subject is just so droll and uninteresting … and this is combined with the frustration of working with Oracle Forms Builder. Blehh.

On a positive note, I’m turning 19 very soon, and to celebrate I decided to buy a keyboard. Why? Because, this is a perfectly valid thing for a true geek to buy. Considering I spend a good 8-hours or more each day on a keyboard, it makes sense for me to buy a decent keyboard. This means a keyboard with buckling springs. Most keyboards these days use either a rubber dome or a scissor switching mechanism, mainly because they’re cheap, quiet, durable-enough, and cheap. In the old days (20 years ago), IBM built their own keyboards, a class of keyboards called the Model M. These keyboards used a buckling spring for the switching mechanism, which made them very clacky but excellent to type on. In the mid-90’s, IBM decided to stop making their own keyboards and instead outsource the production to China. A few of the workers at the IBM plant bought all of the patents and manufacturing equipment and formed their own company, Unicomp, which is still making these really nice keyboards. Each keyboard is built by hand in Lexington, Kentucky. Their keyboards have received uniformly-positive reviews. They come at a fairly hefty price, since they’re not focused on making them cheaply, but from what I’ve heard they are definitely worth it. I’m looking forward to getting an email with the shipping details so I can start constantly refreshing the FedEx shipping page.

Apart from that, not a whole lot else is happening in my life. I’ve got a cold man flu. That’s about it.

–Ben

Well, I’m back in Melbourne to start my second year of Professional Software Development @ Swinburne. My first lecture is Data Communications and Security on Monday at 8.30am, which is quite a bastard considering it’s a 2-hour lecture, and it’s the only class for the day. As well as this, I can’t move this lecture to any other day or time, or move any of my other classes to Monday. Here’s a diagram which visually describes this interesting timetabling phenomenon:

The other classes I have are Data Structures and Patterns, which sounds like it will be very interesting (C++ and memory management and data structures, sounds geektastic), Software Development Practices which sounds a bit waffley but quite important, and Database Management Systems, which as far as I know is stored procedures in SQL and things like that. I’m also doing the compulsory Careers in the Curriculum unit, which by the sound of it is a glorified TAFE course on resume writing. Meh, best to get it over and done with than having it hanging over me when I go to graduate.

I’ve spent the last week or so settling back into Melbourne. This year I’m back at the Swinburne Residences. The first question I’m asked when I tell people this is “why didn’t you go into the apartments?” … well, I dunno really. The Res was pretty good last year. The apartments didn’t really phase me. UniLodge is amazingly expensive. Meh.

The Res hasn’t changed a whole lot since last year. Well, there’s new RAs, both of the TV rooms now have DVD players (one of them still had a VHS player … in 2008 … c’mon), and there’s now a lot more fines for things like forgetting your keys and removing the flyscreen from the window (which is a $100 fine .. what?!). Also, the cost of it has gone up $15/month. Apart from that, it’s about the same. There’s still an amazing sense that it isn’t good value for money, especially in comparison to residences at other universities. In fact, I think we have the most expensive residences out of nearly every university in Melbourne, given we don’t get a meal service or anything*, however I probably should go and do a bit of research before I say that. I’m just going by informal discussions with other friends who are at other universities.

This week I haven’t done much, apart from vegetate reclimatise to the wonderful world of Melbourne. It’s been a pretty lazy week. I did join the SwinDrinkClub though, so that should be good. The first event is next Thursday: The staff bar on level 3 of the UN building is reopening for SwinDrinkClub members, which is a great thing. Not that there’s any immediate shortage of watering holes around the Hawthorn area, but it’s nice to have one on campus.

Another good thing that happened this week was The Ama-swin Race, the orientation scavenger hunt exclusive to PSD students. While I missed the race, I caught up with everyone at the finish line, which this year was The Hawthorn. It was an enjoyable night.

Anyway, hopefully this second year of university is as good as the first, or even better!

–Ben

* – with regards to meal service, we get a “continental” breakfast which consists of toast, cereal, fruit, and terrible orange-flavoured juice (not orange juice, there’s an important distinction. Maybe this is just a by-product of growing up in a citrus-growing area where we had real orange juice all the time, I dunno.).

There’s an annoying issue with the latest version of WordPress. If you use the XML-RPC interface to post blog posts (anyone using Windows Live Writer, w.bloggar, or any other desktop blogging software) you’ll notice that < and > tags are stripped from the output. This means formatting in posts will be screwed up, and you’ll see bits of HTML tags everywhere. If your paragraphs suddenly end with /p, then this is probably the bug which is causing it.

The cause of the problem is libxml2 version 2.7.0 and newer, which for some reason changes the way that some bits of text are stripped. Libxml2 is used by PHP to handle XML parsing.

There are a few ways to fix this, wait for the new version of PHP (it’s fixed in 5.2.9), downgrade your copy of libxml2 to a version before 2.7.0, or hack WordPress so it won’t get libxml2 to parse angle brackets. The third option is the easiest.

This patch will fix your XMLRPC issues. The only thing is you will need to update the code to check for libxml version 2.7.3 as well. This can be done by adding || to the end of the lines ending with 2.7.2 and adding a line underneath, "LIBXML_DOTTED_VERSION == ‘2.7.3′ ". Re-upload the new class-ixr.php and rss.php and you’ll be good to go.

–Ben

Well, it’s a bit pathetic that it’s taken until nearly the start of February for a new post to appear here. Sorry about that, I guess I got kinda lazy.

Anyway, I’ve updated a few things on the site here. Firstly, I’m running a much newer version of WordPress which isn’t as exploitable as the version I was running before. Secondly, I’m now on new hosting (thanks Stubbers!). I also decided while I was upgrading WordPress to tidy a few things up, get rid of useless plugins and stale site content, and add a few things. New additions include social networking buttons for Digg and such at the bottom of each post, and Gravatars. Another addition is Feedburner, which will give me some nice stats on my readers, and what pages they both found interesting. You don’t need to update your RSS feeds, they will redirect to Feedburner automatically, but if you subscribe now it’ll go to Feedburner anyway.

Let me know if anything on the site is broken… also, I am definitely going to start blogging again as soon as I have something interesting to write about.

–Ben