Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Platypus plugin for Mozilla Firefox

Platypus plugin must be one of the coolest plugins for Firefox that I’ve seen around. It allows the user to modify the appearence of the website and save the chages. Here is a small feature overview from plugin’s page:

Some of the things you can do with Platypus include:

  • Remove parts of the page you don’t wish to see.
  • Move a part of the page to a different location.
  • Change the style and format of page elements.
  • Modify all the links on the page using a regular expression.
  • Insert your own HTML code.

I’ve found it via this post.

Moblogging with WordPress and P800

Leonid in the park

One of the things that annoy me about technology is the amount of useless abbreviations and acronyms. Moblogging is one of them. Moblogging stands for mobile blogging, which was supposed to mean blogging from some mobile device, such as cell phone, smartphone, PDA, etc.

So here I am sitting in the park with my son and writing this post from my SonyEricsson P800. Does it matter? I think not. I can do all I want from here. All WordPress functionality is available to me. I can even take and post pictures, if I feel like it.

So, I wonder, why do we need yet another acronym, that adds or imoroves nothing?

Maxim in the park

Managing RSS subscriptions with Bloglines

While trying to convince the administrator of Cyprus Forum to add RSS feeds, I’ve wrote this rather long post that explains what is RSS, why one would want to use it, and how to use Bloglines to manage one’s RSS feeds.

Nothing new and fancy – just a simple explanation for RSS newcomers, with a screenshot of my Bloglines interface. You might find it useful. Or you might find it not. I’ll leave that up to you.

Fixing WordPress escaping

Most of my posts about WordPress were positive. Today I’ll mention one of the annoying features it has by default and how to fix it.

Escaping. By default, all text in the <pre>…</pre> block is passed through escaping subroutine. Most noticeble change happened to double quotes (“). They were escaped with the backslash (\). Needless to say that rendered many code bits useless.

The fix is very easy. One just have to install code-markup.php plugin. It has some additional functionality too, but for me all the value was in the unescaping routine.

I’ve installed the plugin for this site and the problem is gone now.

Perl obfuscations

The flexibility of Perl allows for extremely nicely looking code. On the other hand, the same flexibility allows people to do ugly things, which Perl is very well known for. Sometimes, though, I come across a piece of code which is both ugly and beautiful. Here is one example written by one of my collegues:

sub _uintvar {
    my ($v) = @_;
    $v = sprintf("%b",$v);
    $v = '0'x(-length($v)%7).$v;
    my @v = map {"1$_"} $v=~/(.{7})/g;
    substr($v[-1],0,1) = "0";
    $v = pack("B*",join('',@v));
}

This was found in the production system. It works. And it was tested.

Now imagine that the name of the subroutine would be different in some non-selfdescriptive way. Would you be able to parse it, understand it, and say what it does? How about fixing a bug in there?