Five Minutes

I’ve been looking at GitHub more and more of late. Initially, it was just because lots of people were using it, but since I’ve been using Git on my own server for my own projects for a while anyway, it started making sense to upload some bits and pieces to it to save me worrying quite so much about trivial things like backups. Plus, GitHub seems like a pretty good home for those random bits of code that you tend to churn out from time to time as a developer.

So, I’ve spent the last couple of days pushing a few things up. It’s not going to completely replace my need to have some Git repositories on my own server (there are things that aren’t open source or aren’t for public consumption, like my resume — although making that open source could be entertaining), but it’s definitely handy for other things.

Obviously, my user page is going to cover the full list of things at any given time, but the projects I’ve uploaded so far include:

• CineJS — the Javascript video processing library originally introduced at LCA 2010 and in an earlier blog post. There are a couple of releases probably coming for this in the next few months: an interim release to work around what looks like a bug in Mobile Safari on the iPad, and a more featureful release which will hopefully have the first steps towards WebGL support. I’ll probably get rid of the Google Code site for CineJS in the near future, since there’s no point having two issue trackers.
• Dubnium — long time readers will remember this as my Google Summer of Code project back in 2007, and it’s been neglected far too long. It is, in essence, a cross-platform GUI debugger for PHP code. It’s gotten a bit of love in the last few months and I really just need to spend a day or two cleaning it up for a release. Unfortunately, part of that process involves getting a Windows build environment set up, and that’s rather killed my motivation so far.
• A couple of little Gopher related things: the source tree for wp-gopher, my Python-driven Gopher interface to WordPress (which you can see in action on this very blog) and a Gopher stream wrapper for PHP that I knocked up on my lunch break today just for the hell of it, which I’m currently imaginatively calling php-gopher. Let’s face it: these are obviously Important Projects.

So, yay GitHub, helping me procrastinate from doing actual development work in my spare time for two days now. (Yay may not be the right word.)

Every time I release a version of wp-gopher I assume I’m done with it, since it’s a trivial little bit of Python that does one thing and does it well barely adequately. Neverthless, I got annoyed with the lack of character set support in it, so I’ve quickly hacked up a rudimentary fix — you can now define the character set in the configuration file and wp-gopher will insert an appropriate <meta> Content-Type tag to enforce it within blog posts (supporting non-Latin-1 text in the index would require character set support within the Gopher protocol, which doesn’t exist, as far as I know). The default is UTF-8, unsurprisingly.

To prove that it works, you can view this very blog post via Gopher (possibly even IPv6 Gopher, if you have IPv6 connectivity) and marvel at the following string of UTF-8 encoded Arabic, which Wikipedia claims is the Arabic name for Perth: بيرث.

A tarball is available: wp-gopher-0.2.1.tar.gz (SHA-1 sum: b9f9f1ced88464a1ff52cef5d088f2d046d7a20d), or you can git clone http://www.adamharvey.name/git/wp-gopher for the latest trunk.

I’ve just had to push out a DNS update (damn you, tunnel brokers), so it probably won’t work automagically for a little while, but my blog is available over IPv6, if people want some IPv6 action here at the conference (great work, network team!) and can’t be bothered looking for a site that’s actually useful.

It’s also available over IPv6 Gopher, should you feel the need. (Well, regular Gopher, too, but that’s boring.) Huzzah!

The (horrible, hacky) code that drives this has also been updated to a brand new version: 0.2! (It only took 18 months.) Grab a tarball (SHA-1 sum: 044b1c5bf1a6d5fa1bd2cad3f2029bc1b2549c38) and you too could join the IPv6-driven, WordPress Gopher blog revolution!

Addendum: Google Reader is mangling the links for some reason. The direct URL for the blog on IPv6 is http://[2001:5c0:1103:3300::1]/ or gopher://[2001:5c0:1103:3300::1]/.

Bit of a catch-all post today, as I need to head off shortly for tonight’s installment of the fun game called Let’s Shoot a Student Film!*

• Had a heart attack moment in Feature Film Scriptwriting this morning, as the first thing our lecturer/tutor said to me was so, Adam, where’s your assignment — which seems fairly normal for me nowadays, except that he was referring to the synopsis I’d handed in yesterday. I’m still not sure what happened to it, but he was happy enough to take a copy I printed out there and then, didn’t ping me for a (thoroughly deserved) late penalty, and promptly marked it in about fifteen minutes during the tutorial, complete with a page or so of notes. To top it all off, I even got a good mark. All’s well that ends well, I guess, but I really need to get better at estimating how long scriptwriting-related tasks will take — I seem to be prone to underestimating or overestimating severely.
• Nineteen people have downloaded the source code for the WordPress Gopher interface code I posted yesterday. That’s… mildly disturbing.
• I think the staff at the university’s café are actually starting to get concerned about the amount of coffee I’m going through this semester, judging by the look I got today when I went for a quick cup during a break in class. They may have a point.

* Fun not guaranteed. Please check the label before ingesting. Do not catch foot on extension cords for Gulliver lights.†
† Not that I would know anything about that last one. Ahem.

For your viewing pleasure, this blog is now available through the finest client-server protocol of 1991: Gopher! Yes, gopher://✎.net is now active.

The hacked-up bit of Python that powers this can be had under the MIT license: wp-gopher-0.1.tar.gz. Time will tell if there’s a 0.2, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. Send any bug reports or patches to the e-mail address in the README. (Preferably patches.)

In related news, I think complete madness has now set in due to the stress of uni. Hooray!

Addendum: This is also available via IPv6 at gopher://[2001:5c0:8fff:fffe::6f6b]/. Is this the only IPv6 Gopher server on the Internet, I wonder?