Vindication!

Felt totally vindicated today, when my choice of XML as a config language paid off, as people wanted to be able to view the config on-line.

So sprinkle a quick bit of xslt goodness and there you go!

Nice.

OpenLaszlo

There should be more of a buzz about this. OpenLaszlo (4) fscking rocks.

AJAX or Flash? How cool is that?

Plus you don't develop in language X (apart from the back-end, and then you can choose whichever you like).

Cool.

Windsor, Bugzilla, WebWork

Special Souvenir 500th Blog post! (Actually, there would be more but some were deleted for reasons I don't want to go into).

We went to Windsor at the weekend. Even in the rain it's a lovely place (and I'm not a monarchist). Lovely historic buildings, the railway station that's been turned into a posh shopping precinct, swans on the river. Very nice. We didn't go into the castle this time as it is £34.50 for a family. (Yow! I pay my taxes, etc.) We'll go another day.

Started porting Bugzilla to Oracle, and found out that Oracle themselves have nearly finished doing it anyway, after months of radio silence. Dear Oracle, next time, try "release early", so people might not think that you've given up... Oh well.

Played a bit with WebWork (and SiteMesh) and it's a hell of a lot nicer than Struts 1.x was. Still weird in some ways (Java frameworks are often too elegant for my meagre brain) but good.

Happy New Year - let the ranting commence!

Ah, New Year.

Let us not talk of that though. Let us moan about Linux and HP.

Dear HP, your expensive servers (Proliant ML/DL 300 series and above) are joys to behold. The 100 series however suck arse. You claim that the ML 150 G3 supports various distributions. Did you try?

1. 64-bit CentOS 4.4 - nope: kernel crashes in the installer
2. 64-bit Fedora Core 6 - Anaconda can't run in GUI mode (so no LVM...)
3. 64-bit RHEL 5 (beta 2) - Anaconda can't run in GUI mode (so no LVM...)
4. 64-bit Ubuntu 6.06 - yes, but Ubuntu's installer is still shit. Try doing software RAID and LVM in it. You will cry.
5. 32-bit CentOS 4.4 - yes, but it's 32-bit!!!

Plus HP, it is almost impossible to spec a server and get the right bits from you or your resellers.

Oh, and here's another moan. Yes, CentOS is free, and it's churlish to moan, but. Who let the KDE Nazis in? On a 64-bit server, it seems to have installed KDE without my asking. Fuck KDE! It's ugly and has no place on a RHEL clone. (Hint - all the system tools aren't written in Qt...)

While I'm at it, if you install SUSE expensive corporate edition (SLES 9), that also runs KDE. Bring up the Control Centre (or whatever they call it) and there's a really amateurish picture of a pineapple. WTF? At least have a professional looking picture of a pineapple, but preferably something else.

Another thing I hate about KDE: text alignment. Why does it print text in that crammed way? In fact the whole thing looks shonky. Get a graphic designer and usability expert in for god's sake.