EWL Updates

July 26, 2000

I've been working on EWL a lot lately -- in fact giblet and richlowe have been helping too. Rather than go over all the details, I went ahead and modified my update script so it posts the ChangeLog. You can check that out here. If you want to try out the snapshot, _please_ read the ChangeLog -- it's the only accurate documentation that exists ATM, and it has a lot of useful tips (for example, running src/create_personal_preferences.sh so EWL doesn't SEGV on startup). No, there isn't any rendering yet, yes there is rudimentary theme support.

I moved all my screenshots from my old EFN page to the screenshots page, and I preserved the captions and added some updated commentary. There are still a lot of things strewn across various accounts that I'd like to move onto Pablotron, but that will have to wait until after a redesign (yes, it will happen eventually). It'll be SQL queries all over the place, and I'd like to make it themable, but we'll see what happens. I actually had a working themable PHP sample page, I don't think I'm going to go with that implementation after all.

Our cable modem got cut off last week. Apparenly I was $11 short on the bill or something. Anyways, I didn't realize that it was about to get cut off, and I payed the entire bill with a credit card within 12 hours of the service being shut off, but for some reason @Home told me it would take 72 hours to turn it back on. That's fine, except it took twice that long, and I had to call at least 5 times before I got a "priority ticket" or some crap. I could go on, but Sean wrote a really nice summary of what dealing with @Home customer service is like over on the 10k page. Unfortunately, they're problems still aren't resolved, so you can't reack 10k at the moment.

Kuro5hin, one of my favorite news pages (ie one of the few pages I read on a daily basis), was shut down because of DoS attacks on the anonymous story submission queue. This really sucks. It wasn't even a creative or complicated attack -- the non-computer analogy would be vandalizing a public restroom, only this is worse. The people running Kuro5hin were all volunteers who dedicated their time to the page because they enjoyed working on it, not because they were being payed. I liked the stories on kuro5hin better than "the other site" (how everyone on kuro5hin referred to Slashdot), and the comments were usually more interesting. Supposedly, they're going to take a break, remove the anonymous submission, and return after a month, but things like this are incredibly frustrating. DoS is stupid. It's not l33t, and you're not a cool computer h4x0r if you know how to run a smurf daemon on your grandma's iMac.

Finally, seeing as how I don't have any interesting photos to post (besides this picture of Gnea), I'll direct you towards Tom Gilbert's vacation photos. His sister is pretty good looking. :) Check her, um I mean his vacation photos, out here (I'm just kidding, Tom. Although I do wish everyone in #e had dressed up in monkey suits as a suprise when you got back).

Anyways, more later....