Month: January 2008

OS X

Trying Mail.app again (it’s so very trying)

I am trying out Mail.app again – to see if some the issues I had in the past have been corrected in Leopard. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem to work right. I installed GPGMail (which is still beta for Leopard) and mostly got that working, except that for every key in my GPGKeyring it says that the key is invalid and there is no signing date (they all work fine in Enigmail…). Also, I set Mail.app to use the Trash folder for trash and the Sent folder for sent items, the Drafts folder for drafts and the Junk folder for junk mail. Seemed straightforward. Until I shut down Mail.app and reopened it. The trash and sent mail were still correctly mapped, but the Drafts folder was gone and no matter what I tried the Junk folder would not map to junk mail. Thankfully I didn’t have anything in the Drafts folder at the time! What a pain! So any junk mail I get is marked as junk (but I mostly have to do it myself – I am used to Thunderbird catching the majority of the stuff that spamassassin didn’t mark) but it stays in the inbox. That’s because Mail.app doesn’t know that the Junk folder is the junk folder. Even after I tried again (and again, and again) with the Mailbox > Use Folder As > Junk.

If I can get Mail.app to properly map the Drafts and Junk folders again I will likely try it on for a full week or two and see how I feel about it. If I can’t get it over that hurdle, however, forget it.

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HTML5

HTML 5 First Public Draft

I realize I am a bit late to the party on this one, but things like work take place while these things are happening. Such is life. Anyhow, on to the content …

The W3C released the first public draft of HTML 5 today. If you want to see the announcement it is a great document for playing buzzword bingo. Aside from links (and buzzword bingo), however, the press release doesn’t have much value to me. The links on the other hand …

The release links to the draft itself, a comprehensive list of differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5, and several process and working-group related informational pages. I say it is worth it just to peruse the links.

There are several new elements listed in HTML 5, many of them structural, (such as section, article, header, nav, footer) and many of them to extend the capabilities of HTML (such as audio, video, canvas [for drawing an image], datagrid, progress). What really stuck out was one element that was never an actual HTML element but was treated as one ‘back in the day’: embed. I find it interesting that it finally made it into the (working draft of) the standard.

There are several new input types like number, datetime and email and a long list of new attributes. A few elements have changed in meaning, while several more elements (and attributes) have been removed entirely. Hooray for CSS doing what CSS does, and double hooray for the end of frameset, frame and noframes!

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PHP

PHP File IO concurrency issues with Windows

A project that I am currently dealing with at work involves writing a large number of files to disk on Windows via PHP, and then pulling them into a database via a LOAD DATA INFILE call. The problem I am running into is that the file writes are backgrounded by the system while the PHP script keeps trucking along, pushing the PHP system resources through the roof while paging most of the running processes, further slowing down the disk IO. Finally, once the scripts have have started and backgrounded all these file writes, the next script can’t read in the files to load them into the database.

So far I haven’t found any hints on this anywhere yet. If any of my readers know of any file IO tricks for PHP on Windows please let me know! (I’m talking to both of you!)

Edit: It seems the issue was caused by having XDebug running while trying to write the files. I thought I had turned it off, but I hadn’t so it was writing cachegrind files while the scripts were trying to write their files, and well, it wasn’t pretty.

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Home

New Year, time to (finally) catch up (?)

As we start the new year I find that I am sadly fallen behind on things like this blog, social networking, reading and news aggregation, and generally anything unrelated to work or the daily functioning of the household. In other words, I have been working too much and relaxing too little. Well, that will have to change. Of course, that means I have to get back into a routine, which seems to be difficult when making major changes, such as, oh, starting a new job in a new town.