I’ve reclaimed top spot on the google ranking! Ha! Take that Adrian Sutton! (If you have no idea what I’m talking about see the front page and this entry.)

It seems WhereIs Australia is getting a face lift and much needed usability improvements. Gone are the six clicks to get your directions and cryptic instructions, now it’s replaced with a simple, enter start and end destination (on the one page no less – AND you don’t have to pick the street type from a drop down anymore) and bang you’ve got your results. No more “Did you really mean exactly what you just typed in or were you only joking” page. Better yet, the Wacky Mario Ramp feature has been turned off. For those of you not familiar with WhereIs.com.au and Brisbane’s roads – Brisbane has a lot of on and off ramps that go winding around at all kinds of weird angles and quite often one ramp leads onto another which leads to another. If you were unfortunate enough to have to navigate through such a section (like the rather central Riverside Expressway) using WhereIs instructions, you’d be trying to follow something like: (Straight) South East FreeWay (Straight) Riverside Express Way (Right) Ramp (Left) Ramp (Straight) Ramp (Left) Ramp (End) Destination Needless to say you had no chance whatsoever. Now however you’d get something more like: Turn left at CORONATION DR, BRISBANE Turn right at CORONATION DR [RAMP], BRISBANE Continue along BOOMERANG ST, BRISBANE Turn left at MILTON RD, BRISBANE Much nicer. Sadly, on this trip it leads me straight into a dentists chair. Perhaps getting lost would have been more pleasant.

I just had a phone call that went something like: Receptionist: Hello, Paddington medical centre Me: Hi, I’d like to make dental appointment with John McKenny. Receptionist: A dental appointment? Me: Yes. Receptionist: I’m sorry but John McKenny is a natropath who used to work here. We don’t have any dentists. Me: Hmmm, I think Medibank Private have stuffed up their records somehow then. I think it’s probably best if I don’t let Mr McKenny near my teeth. Receptionist: That’s probably a good idea.

Apparently, the ASF took delivery of a few new machines today. I just can’t get the image of Sam Ruby sitting around ASF head office and suddenly there’s a knock on the door and he finds a pile of orphaned servers wrapped in a blanket. Then again, I always was weird…

It appears the war of the Adrian Sutton’s is hotting up on Google. (Hint for those that just read the RSS feeds: take a look at the main page) The once unstoppable Professor Adrian Sutton who ruled supreme as number one search result for “Adrian Sutton” has dropped significantly down to third place, though he now has two entries in the top five with his surprise appearance in some meeting minutes. The new kid on the block Adrian Sutton has roared up the charts to take the number one spot just ahead of my own Randomness which held the top spot less than two days ago. I also hold the fifth spot with my appearance in a CVS commit message for FreeCard Stay tuned as this pathetically geeky race continues to unfold!

I have come to the conclusion that URL escaping is evil and must be banished from the face of the earth. I’ve got no idea how it manages to work at all – every implementation seems to be different and the support for different character sets is a major hit and miss affair. Take for instance the string: © Adrian Sutton It looks like a pretty simple string and all. It should be encoded as: %C2%A9%20Adrian%20Sutton assuming UTF-8 character encoding (and I literally mean assuming since there’s no possible way to know for sure). If however you were to use the javascript escape() function you could get any one of: %u00A9+Adrian+Sutton %C2%A9%20Adrian+Sutton %u00A9%29Adrian%20Sutton It’s impossible to tell if the + sign in the first two is an encoded space or an actual plus sign (there’s no requirement for + to be escaped in URIs so many implementations leave it as is). Then you have to deal with the rather odd %u00A9 syntax which seems to be half URI escaping, half HTML entity and finally you get to worry about which character set was in use. For the record, here’s what your browser makes of it:

Wow, what a fantastic day. MarchFest was yesterday and for those who didn’t make it, you missed a sensational day. While there’s always a few things that go wrong when you put on a big production like MarchFest is, things went exceptionally smoothly and all the reports coming back have been really positive. It was particularly good to see the number of people who offered to help out and did so with such talent and energy. We even had a few people email us completely out of the blue offering to help out. Anyway, I’m going to bed as I haven’t had much sleep this weekend and I spent most of my waking time either lugging around heavy staging, PA systems or lighting or running madly between the two venues to make sure that the next band at each venue got set up quickly with all the sound stuff they need. The life of a stage manager and sound engineer in one is never easy. Good fun though. Hopefully now I’ll have some more time to do some recording with Soul Purpose and finish writing my musical.

Nick Chalko talks about setting onsubmit dynamically. The solution he received from Alan Gutierrez which is good, but overly complicated. Since I work for a company that just so happens to do some amazingly funky stuff with JavaScript, here’s some fun you can have with it. Firstly, lets take the original solution:

<form name=&#39;CDiceComponent_0&#39; id=&#39;findApplication&#39;
    action=&#39;/cdiceWebApp/custom/component/bridge.jsp&#39; method=&#39;post&#39;>
<script>
  document.findApplication.onsubmit = function() {return checkForm();}
</script>

and simplify it to:

<form name=&#39;CDiceComponent_0&#39; id=&#39;findApplication&#39;
        action=&#39;/cdiceWebApp/custom/component/bridge.jsp&#39; method=&#39;post&#39;>
<script>
 &#160;document.findApplication.onsubmit = checkForm;
</script>

JavaScript functions are just string variables so you can pass them around by just dropping the () at the end. Here’s how you could store the existing onsubmit function:

The vote to start the motion of HttpClient out of jakarta-commons to become a fully fledged Jakarta sub-project has been declared passed. I’ve just done up an initial draft of the proposal that will need to be put to the Jakarta PMC to approve the move (they noted that it was coming and that it was most likely to pass at the meeting they just recently had). This is the first bit of Apache “politics” I’ve been involved in so I’ll be interested in the feedback. I’m just not sure if it’s considered politics when everyone agrees as they seem to do so often on the HttpClient list. It’s good to have a team that’s working so well together.

I discovered something really quite annoying today. The JDBC drivers for MySQL have been re-licensed from LGPL to GPL (happened quite a while back actually). Now while it’s their code and they can do with it as they please, that’s really, really annoying. I’ll be moving all my development away from MySQL in the future. Here’s the problem. I came up with a really cool new feature for a product I’m working on which involves interacting with a variety of databases and inevitably someone will want to use it with MySQL. This feature would be a small add-on to a much larger commercial product. In order to use the official MySQL drivers though I’d either have to pay MySQL or GPL my application. Neither of which is a realistic option considering how insignificant this one feature is in the overall product. So now I’m developing the prototype with Microsoft SQL Server and it’s going great. MySQL, there appears to be a bullet shaped hole in your foot.

Crazy Apple Rumors updated the look of their site today in what would have to be one of the most disastrous site overhauls I’ve seen. The all new forums were instantly filled with a whole bunch of people complaining about the new look of the site. Fortunately, Crazy Apple Rumors being as it is, the conversation rapidly turned to the joys of having Masako (the CARS web designer and rumored to be most attractive and feminine) poke you with a fork – apparently she does that kind of thing a lot. It does occur to me however that judging by the general accuracy of rumors at CARS, Masako could in fact be a fat middle aged balding man with no fork. I’m not sure if the thought of a large number of people lining up to be forked by a beautiful woman is more disturbing that them being turned away because the beautiful woman was neither beautiful or womanish. Actually, most disturbing is probably the fact that most of them would still line up for the forking by the fat middle aged balding man with no fork. Anyway, go read the comments, they’re quite funny with the CARS staff all getting involved.

I was going to comment on how good it was to see the Queensland Government trialling E-Petitions, until I noticed the 12 month trial started in 2002 and they just haven’t bothered to update the website since. Sigh. On the plus side, the E-Petitions are still up and there’s one that’s still current, so I guess the trial was considered a success. Good stuff. You can view the currently open petitions here.