Alden Bates' Weblog

It can already search for text within files on a disk, but it also needs to have an option to search in zip files... Though that would mean hunting down code to decode zip files. Hrm.

I did a quick Google for applications, which do this already, but they're not free. WinZip 9.0 doesn't appear to do it (Why not?! That would appear to be an invaluable tool!) and there isn't even an official add-on to do it.

I believe Window XP does that already, which might be why it's not in WinZip. But still, needs to be in Yikes, definitely.

My LiveJournal mood icons have turned up in yet another place: Allyn Gibson's WordPress blog. Perhaps I should just retitle them mood icons. :)

No doubt there's a plugin for Movable Type to use mood icons. I should hunt it down.

Textual @traction

What makes the film unique is that the audience does not actually get to see the messages on screen. Instead, by pre-registering, they receive the texts to their own phones at the same time as the characters on screen.

The chorus of text message beeps would be deafening.

Am about to turn 31 in about 25 minutes time. Gah.

I'm shamelessly ripping this idea off of Google Zeitgeist. :)

Popular DiscContinuity Guide entries

1. Creed of the Kromon
2. Living Legend
3. Scherzo
4. Zagreus
5. Davros

Popular albums

1. Era, The Mass
2. The Celtic Circle 2
3. Era, Era 2
4. The Celtic Circle
5. Enigma, Voyageur

Popular NZDWFC archive items

1. Web of Fear/Wheel in Space Clip press release
2. Who Killed Kennedy E-book
3. TSV 21 - I Exterminated JNT!
4. TSV 21 - Who's Who in Blake's 7
5. TSV 13 - Review: Build the TARDIS
6. TSV 58 - Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Dr. Who

Today's lesson: get the right tool for the job and the job will become much easier.

A long while ago now I opted to mirror Paul Harman's Web Guide to Doctor Who in order to avoid having to maintain my own directory of Doctor Who links. This didn't quite work for two reasons:

1. People still emailed me to ask me to add a link to their web site, despite the word "Mirror" in large letters and a link to the page for adding sites to the Web Guide, and
2. I ended up volunteering to assist Paul in maintaining the Web Guide.

The Web Guide has 21 sections and almost 700 sites listed in it. It's pretty kick ass and I don't think there's another comparable Doctor Who directory in existence. Most other sites mirroring the Guide would simply use a copy of the HTML-Version Paul sends out on a mailing list every update, but I had to be different and split the guide into sections, thus making my job slightly more difficult.

My first technique for doing the update was as follows:

1. Take the HTML web guide and...
2. Replace all the links to graphics to point to the same graphics on my server, avoiding the sticky issue of stealing bandwidth.
3. Copy and paste each section separately into the individual pages.
4. Process the pages into real HTML.
5. Upload all the pages.

But this took too long, and I decided to write a program to make things easier. The technique now became:

1. Copy and paste the HTML web guide into a file with my site format.
2. Feed the resulting page into my Windows-based program, which produces some CSV files to be used to generate the section pages dynamically on the site.
3. Copy and paste the compile date into the mirror index.html.
4. Copy and paste the changes into the changes.html page.
5. Process the pages into real HTML.
6. Upload the three pages and CSV files.

This resulted in a process which was not actually a hell of a lot faster than the first process. Tonight I wrote a completely new perl-based program to turn the process into the following:

1. Upload the HTML web guide.
2. Run the script to process it into all the separate files.

Leaving me more time to play Unreal Tournament 2004, swim the Amazon, invent cold fusion, achieve world peace, etc. Teh skillz.

Bruce Simpson writes a pretty good article on the current state of broadband in NZ. Telecom still had the market pretty much to itself and is making the most of it.

Ironically there was an item on TV1 news tonight about how Auckland University is offering streaming video of lectures over the internet so that students can attend lectures without leaving their home. In my experience, streaming video works very poorly over dial up. Are they suggesting students, many of whom have no other source of income, should borrow even more from the government in order to afford broadband?

From the Weekly World News: How to tell if your prostitute is an extraterrestrial - a classic.

Electoral Vote Predictor - all eyes are on the US for the upcoming election.

I spend some of this weekend getting TSV 26 ready to go online. There is some pretty good material this issue, including:

• The Comic Connection - an item examining the use of concepts from comic books in Doctor Who.
• Part 1 of Murder at Midnight, one of Jeff Stone's fanfics.
• Doctor Who in Advertising - the Prime Computer commercials.
• And an item on the making of Shada, the unfinished Doctor Who story.

In addition to a bunch of other cool stuff.

The Doctor's Dilemmas are difficult to do without them looking like just a bunch of paragraphs of text. I have bolded the first three sentences of the paragraphs in which a question is begun, but it still doesn't help much...

There is also the problem created where the article going online has been revised and no longer matches the description in the index (e.g. the Doctor Who in Advertising piece is described as containing the transcripts of two Prime Computer adverts, which is accurate for the copy which appears in the print issue, but the revised version has transcripts for all four adverts). I have opted to leave the descriptions as is, purely to keep it consistant with the rest of the index, but this leaves the description not quite matching the archived piece.

...And that completes the 1991 set of TSV issues, or Volume 5 as it is referred to in the front cover.

(Via Nostalgia) Lucas still can't leave Star Wars alone, so the new DVDs coming out have even more changes as shown here

Greedo still shoots first. Come on! With Han shooting first, it make him look like a rogue. When Greedo shoots first, it make Greedo look incompetant and makes Han slow on the draw.

Just don't mess with the classics, hey?

Nos' is right though, the fact they're fixing Jabba so he looks more realistic and less like a Playstation game character is good. Even though that scene is pointless and just covers the same one as the previous scene with Greedo.

A year or so ago now I moved the NZDWFC page from http://www.tetrap.com/ drwho/nzdwfc/ to nzdwfc.tetrap.com. To ease the transition, I placed a permanent 301 redirection from the old URL to the new one. Anyone going to the old URL gets bounced to the new URL without having to do anything.

Yahoo uses a spider called "Yahoo Slurp" to crawl the web looking for pages to add to the search index. Slurp hits http://www.tetrap.com/ drwho/nzdwfc/ and gets redirected to nzdwfc.tetrap.com like everyone else. Unfortunately Slurp has a bug in it, and adds the page to Yahoo's search index under the old URL.

Most of the NZDWFC page is indexed in Yahoo under the old URL, even pages I've added since the move (There are, in fact, only 5 pages in the Yahoo index for the nzdwfc.tetrap.com subdomain). This means that if the NZDWFC page comes up in a search and the user clicks on it, my server has to redirect them to the new page.

Last month the main domain www.tetrap.com got 4633 hits which resulted in redirects, a good number of those caused by people coming from Yahoo search results. Obviously I want to reduce this number so my web server has less work to do - the trouble is how to tell Yahoo Slurp not to index the old URL without breaking the redirection for users who surf in.

To do this I use Apache's rewrite engine like so:

This all goes in the .htaccess file which sits in my root directory. The lines work as follows:

1. Turns the rewrite engine on. Kinda essential.
2. Checks the user-agent of the bot for the string "help.yahoo.com". Slurp uses this in its user agent.
3. Matches any file they request in the /drwho/nzdwfc/ directory or below.
4. Tells Apache to send back a 410 response. 410 means "it's gone, matey, and it ain't coming back". Additionally the L indicates to Apache not to process any more Rewrite stuff because we're finished.

So put them together, and the server tells Slurp that the file it is requesting is gone, but lets anyone else through to hit the redirection. There are still a lot of redirections happening, but hopefully Yahoo will gradually drop the old URLs in favour of the new ones, and the redirections will decrease.

That's the theory, anyway. I'll update this weblog with the results in a few month's time, hopefully...

The Apache rewrite engine is a great and powerful thing, but also a dangerous thing.