gsnedders

Last night I came across something I wrote just over a year ago: oh how times have changed. No longer do I feel as I did then about anyone mentioned in what I wrote. Indeed, if you were to look at some of the descriptions of people in it and compare with how they are now you'd think I was mad describing them like I did. How people change…

Even if I look at myself a year ago, the difference is amazing. I was, even on a really basic level, far less depressed than I am now. Looking deeper, I was finally starting to consider if I was well enough to ask anyone out (a point perhaps made irrelevant by my cowardliness).

Around six months ago, I was starting to give up all hope of ever asking her₁ out, knowing that after eleven months of reaming I was just too scared of the slightest thing going wrong. I knew I had move on beyond her₁, and that my best hope of doing so was probably to divert my mind to her₂, who I already had a slight crush on. It was also around this time that my mood swings started to become increasingly frequent: back then, they had happened once or so every three months — now it is closer to one every fortnight.

Then, a month later, in May, so much happened. So much that I'm not yet mentally to talk about fully. So much that I could write about endlessly.

After the hellish month of May, four months ago, the effects of May continued to change things in my life. I finally, after fancying her₁ for over a year, moved on, though it was near the end of the month before she was fully out of my mind — to quote Catullus (in translation): It is hard to lay aside a long lasting love/It is difficult, but it must be done by you in some way or other/it is the one safety, this must be conquered by you/Just do it! Whether it is possible or impossible. I behave so differently around her₂. No longer am I so shy. No longer am I so cowardly. So much is different, yet so much the same.

In HTTP/1.1, RFC 2616, there is a protocol parameter called "Entity Tags" (section 3.11), defined as follows:

entity-tag = [ weak ] opaque-tag
weak       = "W/"
opaque-tag = quoted-string

A

is defined as a string of text parsed as a single word surrounded by double-quotation marks.

Comparing these strings is done in accordance with "Weak and Strong Validators" (section 13.3.3), which defines two types of validators:

• The strong comparison function: in order to be considered equal, both validators MUST be identical in every way, and both MUST NOT be weak.
• The weak comparison function: in order to be considered equal, both validators MUST be identical in every way, but either or both of them MAY be tagged as "weak" without affecting the result.

This is interesting, as what does identical in every way actually mean? If a client sends something that matches

(i.e., a string without double quotation marks surrounding it), is it equivalent to the quoted-string?

I would logically expect it to be so, however, it is in neither IIS 6.0 nor Apache 2.0. If you argue that it is not, you end up asking yourself whether, e.g.,

is referring to a character set called

(i.e., including the quotation marks) or whether it is referring to one called

(i.e., excluding the quotation marks). For compatibility, you must exclude them.

So should we parse the quotes out to find out the value? This would, however, make

and

equivalent. Are these identical in every way? In this case I'd say no, as in the latter case the W/ is within quotation marks and therefore part of a strong identifier. This also gives the afore mentioned problem with

v.

. So what are we implementers meant to do? Anyone?

Love,

Do you know what pain you cause me? I doubt you can even imagine how much I think about you. What is it that you do to me, to make me so weak and powerless? Am I more submissive around you? I think not, but I know one or two people think I am. Oh love, what must I do? What use is there in making any move towards will? Will you just reject me? Or will you wrap your arms around me? Oh how I yearn to be in your arms…

What must I do to myself to make myself stronger? Must I stop my continuous thoughts of you? Must I talk to you more and more? As I look down to the beach on the Isle of Wight, I dream of being with you, so pure does the water look. Nothing seems more idealistic than being with you.

Oh love, take me. Oh love, be with me. Oh love, love me.

You have no idea how much anxiety you cause me. You have no idea what being with you alone would mean to me. Please, take me. Just one tiny little hour. It's all it takes. Let me confess to you how much I love you. I want nothing in the world more than you. Help me, oh love.

Lustfully yours,

Geoffrey.

WordPress

While I've had various things to do with the WordPress community back as far as 2003, it finally time to completely part ways: I have become less and less happy with the direction that WordPress has been taking over the past year, though the issues are really far deeper and go back, in some cases, to the very origins of the project.

Ever since the project started, Matt Mullenweg has progressively become more and more protective of the source base, especially since WordPress.com launched, making it progressively harder to get any code into the repository. For example, having discussed a bug at great length with a number of people including Matt, and written a patch for it, taking a great deal of my time, Matt then changed his mind and on his own decided that it wouldn't get committed. There have been plenty of occurrences of Matt single-handedly making decisions — if there is a secret cabal where decisions are really made can you at least stop claiming that the development community has any say in anything?

The entire project seems to now be run in such a way so that Automattic has software with as many features as possible to profit from, with little regard for any bugs or any features that are mostly invincible to the end-user.

It took over two years for WordPress to have Atom 1.0 support added. Why? Matt wasn't happy with the patches, despite there being plenty around for a long time which were bug-free. When Atom 1.0 support was added, for some reason or another, the comment feeds use a different pipeline (actually, they use a different set of string-concatenation strings) and was outputting absolute rubbish — |link|@content instead of @href; |link|@type contained the blog name, not a MIME type; |updated| and |published| contained RFC 822 dates, instead of RFC 3339 dates (which are totally and utterly different). Also, it is possible to get invalid bytes into the feeds, which under XML is a well-formness error, and must therefore cause a fatal error (luckily for WordPress, out of the major browsers, only IE/Win actually obeys this). So, when a patch finally gets committed it is too much effort to visit the Feed Validator before release? Why be so overly protective of the source base if you let such rubbish in anyway? Also, as one final note on the subject of Atom 1.0 support, Matt said, this is a enhancement, not a bug, despite Atom 0.3 being an obsolete I-D, a series made publicly available for comments before publication, and is liable to totally change. Any change of a draft is a bug in any older implementation.

While some may argue that the above is merely an enhancement, surely nobody would argue that a high priority critical bug that caused IRIs to be stripped should be fixed in a plugin? This really seems to be the case.

Furthermore, I have serious issues with WordPress's focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. If there is a focus on aesthetics, why is Kubrick the default theme, even though there are far better templates available? If there is a focus on web standards, why did I even write the above paragraph? Why does by default WordPress use a transitional DOCTYPE? Is WordPress still transitioning to standards? Why is WordPress.org served as it SHOULD NOT be (i.e., XHTML 1.1 served as text/html — even XHTML 1.0 would be better!)?

Lastly, the thing that finally made me think that I should totally get off WordPress (my blog had for a while been running the security-fixes-only 2.0 branch, to avoid the chaos and the insane bugginess of later releases) was that after having decided to have 120 day release cycles, including one month after a feature freeze, Matt went and commited what is one of the largest changes in several years to WordPress within the feature freeze, causing the entire release to be pushed back. This, IMO is the ultimate example of Matt focusing on maximising WordPress.com features and profits without caring about affects it might have to the open-source project.

Habari

So, where does the future lie? Habari. Habari is developed under the Apache meritocracy model, so it should be far harder for some benevolent person in a position of power turning against the wishes of the community as a whole. Also, Habari is developed for modern web hosting environments, and makes use of open standards, and is not afraid to go against the de-facto standards of the day, such as XHTML superseding HTML, provided reasoning is given. Due to Habari's design, using PDO prepared statements, and an XML serialiser for what XML is outputted, it is far less fragile than something patched together over the years everytime something breaks such as WordPress.

Also, due to Habari's organisation, it is possible for someone completely new to the community to step in and say something that will totally change the direction of the project (after, as with many things, it has been voted upon), something that cannot be done by people who have been around WordPress for a long time, yet alone someone who is completely new.

Many of the largest contributors to Habari were WordPress contributors previously — some of them well known within the community — who left WordPress often for reasons similar to the above. As far as I can see, since a number of them walked away from WordPress, WordPress has gotten progressively worse and buggier. These are people who experience with working with blogs. They know what past mistakes have been made. Above all, they are willing to change their opinions if you give them good reasoning.

Redesigned

For the first time since 2005 (when I got through three designs in ten months), my site has been redesigned. Unlike the earlier designs that were thrown together relatively quickly, this one has taken over a year: minimalism, when done properly, is no easier than something more visually complex. The colour scheme has changed around five times throughout the course of the design, and the number of images has varied from zero to two (yes, that's the most complex the design got).

More will eventually be posted about the design, and the inspiration behind yet. Alas, the future will hold different challenges to those in the past, and any future designs will therefore be different to what this is.

This is most likely not what you're meant to do in class when the teacher doesn't show up immediately, and when you're being semi-covered by another teacher in the department, but it only took me five minutes to do, so why not?

What use is life when it is surrounded by failure?
By death?
By suicide?

Are we meant to follow our peers example?
Is it purely a test of how mentally strong we are?
Everything is so fucking worthless.

Are we meant to be pushed to the limit?
By lust?
By death?

What are we meant for?
Is the plan in life for future?
Or just for death?

Why does lust exist?
To cause annoyance?
Or to give hope?

What does annoyance cause?
Death?
Suicide?

And the endless teasing pushes it further,
Pushes it over the edge,
Pushes you into the fall.