The LambCutlet Disorganisation

I shall briefly unlurk to announce the availability of the 2nd release milestone in the form of phpBB 3.0Beta2! It’s been a very long road of 4 years and 105 days (if I’ve done my Maths correctly) to get this far on the phpBB Teams’ collective baby.

Since Beta1’s release on the 17th of June 2006, the community have spotted ~267 bugs which have been fixed by the Development Team for this new release plus increasing compatibility with more esoteric server configurations out there in the wild.

For those advanced users that want to play with beta code are welcome to head over the to the Development page and grab Beta2 though be aware there is neither an upgrade from the previous Beta1 or the current stable line by the way of phpBB 2.0.21, where the latter is the only option for those requiring to create a new community now.

Aside from beta testing phpBB’s Next Big Thing™, you can support us (and a whole host of other Opensource projects) by participating in “Rackathon 2006” over at OSUOSL. ;)

I think I need a new hobby, preferably one that keeps me as far away as possible from a computer. Having already had the laptop hard-disk go kaputt back in October last year which then cost the best part of £750 to recover the data, Lady Luck appears to have a vendetta against me as the 400 GB hard-disk (in an external enclosure) I used for archiving has also gone south.

Considering there was some 6 to 7 years worth of data on there, I’m still rather numb from shell shock and now in the situation that my laptop is without access to basic backup facilities. Having had a gander on the Internet, even Netgear’s low-end NAS by the way of the toaster shaped SC101 plus a couple of 400 GB hard-disks so I could get a fault-tolerant mirror would set me back £300.

However, Netgear’s SC101 isn’t exactly a great performer which shifting large files so what I’d really like is an Infrant’s ReadyNAS NV as it can take a maximum of 4 disks and can be incrementally upgraded throughout its life, swapping out old disks for new larger ones and increasing the size of the array.

Problem is the bare-bones (hard-disk-less) costs just a little under £500… though it is possibly to get them from a reseller which bundles 3×250 GB hard-disks for 500 GB of storage for a psychologically more palatable £650.

Right now though… had I got £650 to hand, I’d much rather spend £250 on what it costs for a one-way ticket to fly back to 香港 (Hong Kong) with the remaining £400 roughly enough to see me through 1 month there and hopefully get myself out from the doldrums. That doesn’t even factor in the cost of what it’d take to recover the data from the now dead 400 GB hard-disk, which I’d guess it’d be at least another £750 to £1000 for possible services rendered. :(

Since the last donation drive netted a grand total of £0.00 and Google Adsense income barely even covers hosting costs, I think I’ll be stuck between a rock and a very hard place for some time to come yet. I did manage a little smile on further poking about Infrant’s site, as they appear to have chosen phpBB as the package of choice to power their community support forum. ;)

Still, the likelihood of them donating a shiny new ReadyNAS NV to yours truly are around zero… so between now and whenever, blogging will probably come to a complete stop. Feel free to browse the extensive gallery of everything, least not my “World Domination 2005” set which covers my travels last year from Blighty to Reykjavik and southern Iceland; British Columbia, Canada at Vancouver and Victoria; Hawaii; down-under in Brisbane, Melbourne and Northern Territory; Singapore and to date as far as 香港 (Hong Kong).

Would the rest ever make it online now? I really haven’t the foggiest idea as I’ve got no motivation to do anything on this laptop as things stand for fear of something else breaking…

Curiosity killed the cat… and set fire to the firefox. ;) Having read the extensive documentation on how to get Mozilla’s browser source from CVS, grab the various tools and applications then generally a lot of RTFMing plus a bit of trial an error, I finally compiled a working build for Windows from the “Reflow Refactoring” branch which passed WaSP’s Acid2 test:

If it wasn’t enough to see Mr. Smiley in perfect form, I was also curious to see how Mozilla bug #18333 which requests that the XML content sink be fixed and made incremental, just like the HTML so that most XML document types, such as XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml can benefit from being able to render incrementally.

Grabbing the latest source, applying the patch and spinning off a build (not without a minor hiccup), the improvement in apparent performance (as the browser no longer locks as it builds the content) on larger documents are clear to see (using anime.svg):

All this cool stuff is currently being hammered out under Gecko 1.9 and will form the basis of Firefox3 under the codename of “Gran Paradiso” with a pretty aggressive release schedule which should keep other browser vendors honest. According to Gran Paradiso Developement Schedule, Alpha 1 (Developer Preview 1) could land as early as October 2006 and Beta 1 (General Preview 1) just a few months later in February 2007, all culminating in a final release of Firefox3 in May 2007! ;)

Of course “Minefield”, which now appears to be the perpetual codename for Mozilla’s CVS HEAD code, will have by then moved on to the Next-Next-Next Big Thing™. :D