Chris’ Blog

How does one go about making a RSS feed from subversion change logs? I asked myself this very question earlier today, and set out to seek an answer. I found points of interest here, and here.

Eventually though I came across an XSLT stylesheet for the output of svn --log --xml which transforms it into RSS 2.0 bingo! I found the stylesheet from this blog.

I munged it all together into a PHP script and hey presto, I was laughing. For anyone that is interested here is the feed.

I needed to lighten my mood slightly today did the trick, damn unlittle-documented features.

I have been doing some work on Minerva, still slowly building components for the new uber powerful core up, some time in the future we need to apply the glue and get it all stuck together. The other week I wrote a fully featured cron layer, which is dead optimised and almost emulates Vixie cron, I would like to add support for some of the predefined time settings. That should be a piece of cake though. Anyone nerdy enough (no insult fellow nerds) may look at the code, its all free, and stored on our Subversion server (hosted by me.)

Those who read this or know me, may know that I am a PHP developer writing Minerva. Minerva is based upon phpBB the developers there are gearing up to release their latest (and greatest) offering, which is 5 years in the making. The number of “When will it be ready?” questions on the forums is immense, but eventually people can see that progress is being made.

So, on Sunday they opened up their bug tracker to accept bugs for the developmental code. Never one to pass on the opportunity to find a bug or two, I went hunting I have now claimed 8 bugs. These are: #1205, #1206, #1208, #1230, #1231, #1232, #1233, #1234.

Well, I thought I would start placing some funny quotes I collect, primarily from IM and IRC on my blog. So, to start off.

[Chris] how does it handle divide by zero?
[DavidMJ] .calc 1000000*7/0
* U1 has kicked DavidMJ from #minerva-dev (Don’t try and break me dumbass!)

Nice to see the developers thought about that one

Another …

14:20:54) Me: *mount on fire*
(14:20:57) Me: hmmf
(14:21:03) Ian: mount?
(14:21:30) Me: *mouth
(14:21:59) Ian: oooh
(14:22:29) Me: mum is like gotta eat this salsa up
(14:22:37) Me: so I was leik chucking the stuff on
(14:22:58) Ian: ah so on fire as in ur fault, not on fire as in foot and mouth
(14:23:18) Me: xD
(14:23:24) Me: which ever
(14:23:32) Me: couldn’t careless
(14:23:41) Ian: i had foot and mouth when i was younger, bloody painful
(14:23:54) Me: don’t cows get that?
(14:24:04) Ian: farm animals yes
(14:24:14) Me: Your a farm animal xD
(14:24:18) Ian: moo
(14:24:26) Me: bastard
(14:24:54) Me: I just coughed chocolate everywhere
(14:24:58) Dave: o_O
(14:25:03) Dave: sup ma hommies?
(14:25:12) Ian: wondered when u would wake upo
(14:27:02) Ian: what are we all doing today then?
(14:27:28) Me: licking chocolate off my monitor
(14:27:36) Dave:
(14:27:48) Me: I had a whole mars bar in my mouth
(14:28:01) Ian: when i went moo?
(14:28:02) Dave: apenkinde imo
(14:28:04) Me: uhuh
(14:28:37) Ian: so not only do u knock my farm heritage, u spray my produce all over your room?!!

Past three days has been a bugfixorama where Minerva is concerned, I managed to tackle several nasties and inject the CVS with the corrected code

Bugs fixed include …

• Unread posts tracking
• Groups Management
• Search with global announcements
• Blocks updated to work with new caching changes
• Little wriggly bits that I created

Off to watch some TV or maybe play some Quake 4 … later.

Due to a developer ‘reshuffle’ I have now become the Project Leader for Minerva . So, what’s the cause of all this?

Dave has been invited to join the phpBB development team to work on phpBB3, this in a way is good news for us. It means that our parent product will be developed faster hopefully speeding up the development process. It also means our development slows down, but he has been busy with his phpBB mini-project for a long time now and has not done much for Minerva over the last couple of months.

My overall analysis of the situation: meh; but good luck to Dave *poke bring us phpBB 3 faster*

I have exams soon so my Minerva activity is going to be baseline for a while, once the exams are over it is my birthday w00t . I am rambling on a bit too much now so, until next time bye.

Playing:

I am going to be rather lacking in Minerva work and online presence in the coming weeks due to exams and lots of crazy teachers demanding uber huge amounts of homework to be done within a day *sigh*.

Christmas holidays are going to be far too short, come back to school and then I have exams . Aww well at least I have Santa and presents (or in my case cheques) to look forward too.

For the weekends amusement I have some window colour sticker type thing set to play w/, I envision much messyness . On Monday a maths mock exam w00t, just what I wanted. I have started work on some revision materials (of the geeky variety ofc), anybody in my class, or just anybody, is free to pinch them when I upload them.

BBye for now …

BTW: A friend put another friend for sale on eBay … the result.

Playing:

I have moved from Jaws to WordPress, after using Wordpress for a day, it is just not right for me. Jaws is a much more solid platform that already does must of what I want, so for now it is hired. Of course as a Minerva developer I will be looking to switch to Minerva ASAP; so maybe a convertor will appear .

Any how the only real problem with Jaws was the ugly URI’s so I went about fixing that; the Blog gadget is fully modified for static looking URI’s. I wrote a .htaccess file to rewrite the URI’s to the correct dynamic ones. I then modified the code to use the new links.

My .htaccess file.

Playing: