The LambCutlet Disorganisation

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

Yours truly announced just a few moments ago:

The last year or so, phpBB have continued in our long slog in conquering “Olympus”, so to celebrate the recent opening of the bug-tracker and the forthcoming Beta1 of “phpBB Olympus”, we’ve decided to release a special edition of Bertie Bear!

There shall only be 100 and you can pre-order them now, though if for some strange reason they are all pre-ordered before the end or March 2006 or before phpBB “Olympus” Beta1 is released (whichever is sooner), we’ll make available a further 100 phpBB “Conquering Olympus” Bertie Bears.

Hopefully, everyone that wanted to get their furry paws on a Bertie after bearing with us in taking such a long time in developing the next phpBB, shall not be disappointed! ;)

Want one to keep you warm whilst debugging that developmental phpBB3 MOD you’ve been slaving over? Perhaps a gift to the girlfriend whom just doesn’t quite understand how you can spend 14 hours each day on a computer administrating/moderating some “phpBB” forum? Maybe you don’t even care who we phpBB are, yet know Bertie Bear kicks some serious arse and now in urgent need to adopt one?

Well… you better go get before they are gone forever! :D

I know I’ve joined in on this fun literally one month late (give or take a day), however I’m not exactly glued to the Internet right now (Susanne insists otherwise) so I have my excuses. Anyway, the little analysis would be ace if it were true as I would have been able to have travelled for the last 5 months (it’s really been that fucking long?) effectively for free! :D

I guess I do live in hope once I’ve got the 4610 (and counting!) photographs of my trip online, the extra traffic this site will get shall bring a few more pennies rolling in. ;) In other news, I’m actually still in Wien, Österreich having decided to extend my stay with Susanne and her boyfriend Phong… Two and a bit days was all a bit too fleeting really as the three and a bit days in Berlin were rather hectic as it was!

So the new date to Frankfurt am Main is now the 28th of November, plus changed my mind to make that a three day stop too, as opposed to the “original” overnight resting stop. This now puts my new “return” date to olde Blighty on the 1st of December, less I decide to add a few more things here and there. ;)

I guess I am secretly hoping to just keep travelling until I make it back to 香港 (Hong Kong) in late January 2006 (for Chinese New Year at the very least though a permanent move would be the ideal), though some things need my attention before I can do so and that stuff requires doing in the Empire which the Sun never sets… Oh well!

Feels rather strange to be back in Old Europe already as I certainly didn’t miss the public places which have their distinctive aroma… mostly constituting of urine, stale beer and vomit. I do conceed that Asia replaces that with open storm drains which in summer can smell “interesting”, add to that the general aroma of dried foodstuff & street-side cooking stalls where items consist of things Westerners wouldn’t consider edible (assuming they even have the slightest idea what it was in the first place). ;) As the old say goes: One man’s meat is another man’s cabbage. Still, I didn’t even mention about the cold European weather… wait, I just did! :P

In the wee hours of yesterday evening the new look Gurn.net launched, a site run by a couple of personal friends (Meza & Rowan) also living in good old Northamption, which has shared this very server for the last 2 and bit years. Aside from me being the “Linux Admin” for the old site, I was asked for my input as they were keen to move to the site design to something more CSS orientated, it appears the comment I put in the top of the mock-up page containing various XHTML elements all brightly coloured, annotated and placed pretty much as per the PhotoShop reference I had has survived to this day!

<!--
	
	This page is new Gurn.net by Gurn.net Ltd, thanks to
	Richard Deighton and Jonathan Stanley
	Page tests ok in:
	* Mozilla 1.7b
	* Firebird 0.7
	* Firefox 1.0 Win / OSX
	* Opera 7.54 Win / OSX
	* Internet Explorer (Win) 6.0
	* Internet Explorer (Win) 5.5 SP2
	* Internet Explorer (Win) 5.01 SP2
	* Safari 1.2.4 (v125.11) OSX
	
	The page however does get killed by Netscape 4.x, IE4.x and
	MAC IE5 but people who use those should really upgrade
	their browser to something modern.
	http://www.getfirefox.com
	
-->

There are some additions obviously as back when I made the page. Firefox didn’t exist for one as it was still Firebird, not to mention I personally didn’t have any OSX platform to test said mock-up page on. Also as the development site was worked on, “Structuralist Draconianism” I would have gone for gave way to something a little more pragmatic. Still, the results are impressive as the mark-up is much more readable and more or less validates and such remaining issues, if they wish to be tackled are actually quite trivial to fix.

So all in all, pretty impressive work consider that the lads had no experience with this CSS and structural XHTML lark not exactly that long ago plus they had to build the new site’s back-end system from scratch along the way… The things the two lads do for the British night-clubbing and DJ-ing crowd!

I can also give myself a pat on the back in setting up their new server which has handled the launch with their not exactly small community of 12 000 members and 2.4 million posts barely using any CPU cycles! ;)

19:34:11 up 10 days,  4:33,  2 users,  load average: 0.33, 0.30, 0.22
74 processes: 73 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:   3.3% user,   1.3% system,   0.0% nice,  95.4% idle
Mem:   1550684K total,  1504780K used,    45904K free,    53020K buffers
Swap:  2097136K total,        0K used,  2097136K free,   684728K cached

As the old site says… “Gurn is dead, long live Gurn!”. :D

With myself recently installing the former module because of certain annoying Internet scum, it was aparent to me that some of the latter’s pages weren’t being handled in some curious cases. After fiddling with module loading order, I eventually isolated it to the fact I had the mod_security’s directive set to SecFilterEngine DynamicOnly as when it was set to SecFilterEngine On, which would filter every request, everything worked as it should though at the expense of greater CPU time.

So reverting things back to the way they were and digging around in mod_security’s documentation, it turns out that by default PHP isn’t explicitly set as a dynamic page and only implicitly made dynamic by virtue that most Apache installations are set up to choose a module, which in our case is PHP, based on it’s MIME-type. Here’s the little fix for your httpd.conf by finding:

# Extensions that are parsed as PHP
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml
# Extensions that are parsed as PHP source
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

… and replace with:

# Extensions that are parsed as PHP
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml
# Extensions that are parsed as PHP source
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Restart Apache and those filters that “occassionally don’t work for PHP” should be a thing of the past! :D