Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - Arantor
5566
Off-topic / Re: Doctor Who
« on November 4th, 2011, 07:29 PM »
(click to show/hide)
After series 3, she leaves but she won't forget what happened to her over the year that never was. After that, as evidenced in Torchwood series 2, she goes to work for UNIT, which comes back around in DW series 4, and he feels like he's ruined her life because of all that happened. Doesn't prevent what happens later in series 4, or before what happens before Ten regenerates, though that probably will explain it at the end...
5567
Off-topic / Re: jQuery 1.7
« on November 4th, 2011, 04:28 PM »
Quote
simplifying event delegation and shortening function names (on/off).
It looked to me as though it could actually complicate matters and make the code harder to follow later, and it seems to me that it might encourage some ambiguity over elements but as ever, we'll wait and see.
Quote
I don't understand why they removed a function on the basis that it generated errors in Chrome's console log
Being the number 2 or number 3 browser, depending on who you listen to, gives you more clout than being number 4 or number 5 depending on who you listen to.
Quote
There is no reason not to do that.
Yes there is, one very, very good reason. A number of the CDN links out there for Google refer to "the current stable version". By deprecating methods a version ahead of removing them, it gives people time to fix their code now that the replacements are available.
Quote
They could go ahead and integrate HTML5Shiv, couldn't they?
Not really. A lot of projects that use jQuery don't expressly use HTML5 elements and so don't really need the shiv, and it means it can be included or not included depending on need, rather than bloating it for everyone.
Quote
So what, "it's not a good thing to sniff browser versions"?
It's not, but IE is incredibly brain-dead at times, and as such we have to account for it, and usually the fastest way to do that is to sniff.
Quote
- well, it's a first iteration. Remember how the release of 1.6 went..? It was a mess. Let's wait...

Other than that... Having jQuery 1.6 in Wedge was a no-no, but v1.7 is a bit better in that respect. If only they could take bandwidth into account...
This is the thing. 1.7 might have some of the same issues as 1.6, bandwidth aside.
5568
Other software / Re: Once upon a time...
« on November 4th, 2011, 01:43 PM »
The package manager itself doesn't care what the id is, with the exception of having two packages with the same id for the purposes of using package upgrades. (So you can have 1.0 and 1.1 of a mod, install 1.0, then install 1.1 to update 1.0, though the entire process of how this is applied breaks if you ever want to uninstall things, unless you uninstall them in reverse order)

The real test for the id that I referred to is on the mod site; it won't let you upload a mod to the mod site if the id is different to the one listed for a given mod, which is set up at the time of first upload. The team can alter it so future uploads can use a different id.

If it isn't going on the mod site, you can stick whatever id in it you like :)
5569
Off-topic / Re: jQuery 1.7
« on November 4th, 2011, 10:50 AM »
Yeah, we knew about this but given that there were problems integrating 1.6 (not to mention bloat), that I think there needs to be something pretty special to encourage an upgrade.
5570
Features / Re: Thought system
« on November 3rd, 2011, 11:36 PM »
Quote
You probably missed the PS I added after my post
I did, yes.
Quote
The list? It's probably a good example of how a good idea (gathering similar data saving into a single array for easier maintenance) gets blown out of proportion and becomes totally unmaintainable because of silly validation functions etc. It's documentation in the comments is even more confusing. As if it was all written to be maintained only by its original writer...
It's a true SMF variable then.
Quote
Hmm alright...
It's not for nothing that vB and xF store their templates in the database...
Quote
Okay, going to bed early tonight. I'm tired... I think I've never spent so much time changelogging a feature. I must have re-re-re-reviewed the entire file list about 10 times in a few days...
Sleep well :)
5571
Features / Re: Thought system
« on November 3rd, 2011, 11:11 PM »
Quote
Some things like pm_prefs could be transferred, but they're set through a profile array that's pretty complicated and implies saving the variable to the members table itself... I'm not thrilled at the idea of tweaking that.
Yeah, that one's pretty mindblowing to understand.
Quote
passwd_flood may be a candidate. I'd like to invite you to look into it... Try a global search for it. In some situations, it's retrieved from the database, but never used later. Look inside Reminder.php for instance. My guess is that it was planned to be used in validatePassword() (again, I'd suggest looking through all occurrences of validatepassword.) This may be an actual SMF bug...
I will look at that, I never knew what the field did anyway.
Quote
secret_answer/question is a strong candidate too. It's used in a regular query, but it's always LIMIT 1 so it's worth doing an unserialize on it every time. Same problem as pm_prefs though, for saving.
It's created in one place, it's only used in one place, I'm not seeing what the problem is?
Quote
Even if it's running as www-data etc, I believe there are some ways to configure the server to make it work...
Yes... making files writable by default. Making an area of your space, that's going to be executable by live request, open to be modified by anyone else on the server.
5572
Plugins / Re: Plugin manager, phoning home and privacy
« on November 3rd, 2011, 09:31 PM »
Thanks for posting :)

OK, so, the listing of plugins looks more cluttered and full of stuff that doesn't really make sense to show off, IMO. For comparison the equivalent page in Wedge is:
Details

The plugin details page is interesting but I'm not sure all that is exactly needed. In our case the situation is a lot more complicated which was the purpose of this thread (and I really should split this because the point I raised earlier today that is very important has now been utterly buried)

I do imagine our page will be similar without so much clutter.

The search page is a bit nicer, and again the points raised earlier today have bearing on that.

As far as the last item is concerned, we've actually removed things like SMF's backup function because there are better third party tools to do the job.

All in all, it's comparable to what Wedge will have when I finish it all, because as you can probably tell, it's important to me, but there's honestly nothing new there that I either hadn't seen before or considered for implementation.

5573
Plugins / Re: Plugins I refuse to do
« on November 3rd, 2011, 09:16 PM »
I spent about that long doing a crude HTML to bbcode converter and post inserter script ;) I know that it helps that the phpBB password importer is the same as WP's ;)
5574
Plugins / Re: Plugin manager, phoning home and privacy
« on November 3rd, 2011, 08:48 PM »
Quote from jpb on November 3rd, 2011, 08:35 PM
I am just a user. The contao plugin-manger is very easy to use an very comfortable. That's it. I am not a developer,
It's obviously that easy to use, they don't feel like promoting its ease of use or even a screenshot which suggests either it isn't that easy to uses or they don't think it's that good.

Is it possible you could attach a screenshot here, please? Mind you, I have posted screenshots of what I've built, and I find it pretty easy to use...
5575
Other software / Re: So, SMF has declared the cold war...
« on November 3rd, 2011, 07:40 PM »
Quote from pgordemer on November 3rd, 2011, 07:33 PM
Nao, are you also planning on porting the changes to the 2.10 version for the ones that paid for it? I have a bunch of customers that fall into that category.
As stated earlier in this thread, Aeva Media (which includes 2.10) doesn't have the auto update, and it's been documented for months how to get the youtu.be update (which may have already been in 2.10 anyway)
Quote from AngelinaBelle on November 3rd, 2011, 07:37 PM
It's Friendly Competition time! Bring it on!
That's why I sent a post to a fellow team member expressing my concern at some of the plans about hook use in SMF 2.1 because they don't seem to take into account performance vs elegance (declaring it being a 'no brainer', which it certainly isn't) and don't allow for any safety net. In our case, hooks don't get added to the to-run list until the page starts, to verify the plugin is still present.
5576
Features / Re: Ideas from the oddest places
« on November 3rd, 2011, 07:37 PM »
Quote
Technically it is... But so are many others.
It is... because there's only a pure foundation there, and little *real* functionality. So you can do anything with it if you can build on top of it - but that's true of anything.
Quote
Yes, there is a great amount of WP fanboyism in .net, but it's not particularly because of a secret organization or something.
I'm not fussed as to why, I find the fact they're fawning over it like it is the Next Big Thing, Right Here Right Now so problematic.

I get that WP is extensible and can be shaped to whim. It doesn't change the fact that under the hood it's a steaming pile of shit. On my travels today I saw some guy talking about how badly it performs on Windows/IIS. Now, while PHP+IIS isn't my platform of choice, there is no arguing that Zend and MS have put some serious effort in to making it run better on Server 2k8, and it isn't the bear it used to be to run. That said, you can only imagine the rabid Windows Is Crap, Use Linux fanboyism - but most of those didn't notice the undertone of 'it's running 20 queries on the front page'. Doesn't matter what under-core you have, 20 queries is still 20 queries.

Then I heard about people who run with 100+ (or even 500 queries) per page, and apparently that doesn't matter provided the page is fast. I call BS; there's no need for 20 queries on such a minimalist front page. And staring at the code, it frightens me that it's so popular because it really is that bad under the hood.
Quote
But that's because a majority of web design agencies use these technologies in priority, and they simply discuss what people use -- because they need to sell.
I accept that they need to sell. But at the same time, there are other things out there that can perform as well as, or better than, those things for certain kinds of jobs. It'd be like a Search Engines Monthly magazine that only ever mentioned Google and couldn't praise them enough. Sure, it's the dominant one, but it's far from the only one, and spending a few pages talking about niche items would make it more balanced and less rabid-fanboy.
Quote
Web Design Magazine has the exact same scope, it talks mostly about WordPress, jQuery and PHP.
Over the summer my local store didn't have any .net magazines, but it did have Web Design Magazine. I wasn't sure if .net hadn't rebranded, so similar did they feel.
Quote
Heck, I'd say they're pretty transparent about it all. They published many a reader's letter about .net being biased, and they simply replied that they're trying to stay current.
Then they're a long way behind. They only talked about node.js recently except that it's a couple of years old by now. 'Trying to stay current' is an excuse, it's not a reason. Fawning over jQuery and WP is not staying current, it's playing it safe.
Quote
I'm more concerned about their biased towards ExpressionEngine. It's a paid-for CMS, not exactly cheap ($99 for the basic version), and half of their articles about CMSes discuss it. I don't see the point... I actually prefer seeing WP-related articles because at least it doesn't feel like they were paid to talk about it.
Haven't seen much in the way of EE coverage, so no comment.
5577
Other software / Re: So, SMF has declared the cold war...
« on November 3rd, 2011, 07:19 PM »
Oh, it runs so much deeper than that. I originally implemented add/remove hook as an extension to the existing packman code, months and months ago, but I realised that it wasn't how I wanted things to operate.

So I tore the rulebook up and designed a structure that really pushes and emphasises hooks. There's no version checking done, for example, unless file edits are done, because the plugin system works on the principle that the hook's existence is sufficient. You don't need to worry about version numbers etc. if the hooks are present and tests are done at install time to validate that the required hooks are available. On top of that, a plugin can indicate that it provides hooks of its own giving you an implicit dependency system.

On top of that, the plugin file also indicating things like settings means that the plugin manager can clean them up on uninstall. As I learned the hard way, authors don't generally do things thoroughly, and mods that do proper housekeeping to clean up after themselves are unfortunately rare - so I made sure to take as much away from that as possible.

Default values of settings are declared (though due to updateSettings()'s behaviour, default values of 0 aren't updated to the system) and so can be used to clean up on uninstall, plus it's possible to intimate language support - multi-language readmes were supported in SMF 2.0 RC2 onwards but I don't think anyone ever used them. But now, if multi-language readmes are given, they're firmly used (so it encourages people to use them)

Each element of the plugin manager was designed around things I observed as flaws with SMF's mods, and things I learned from doing SimpleDesk.[1] I'm not saying it will work for everyone but I feel like it's working for us. I've not found many problems in writing plugins and I find the way everything is held together to be more reliable in the long run.
 1. There are some serious low-level tweaks in there like modifying the language editor to list the mod language files.
5578
Off-topic / Re: Doctor Who
« on November 3rd, 2011, 06:15 PM »
Quote
I really, really enjoyed the last 6 episodes of Season 3 especially Blink.
Season 3 is awesome, and Blink is often considered - pretty rightly, IMHO - to be one of (if not *the*) finest episode since the reboot.

But there's still plenty more awesomeness to come :)
5579
Plugins / Re: Plugin manager, phoning home and privacy
« on November 3rd, 2011, 05:50 PM »
So what's so wonderful about it? The site gives me no screenshots, the demo shows no signs of a plugin system and after looking at a fairly typical baseline plugin (Google Analytics, it's usually sufficiently low-effort that you can get a feel for the rest of the architecture from it), I'm positively frightened by the thought of having something so monstrously complicated to develop with, that I don't even want to go near the admin panel.

(Also, please be aware that I have personally put hundreds of hours already into Wedge's plugin system, including writing plugins for it. I'm not exactly enthusiastic about rebuilding major parts of it.)
5580
Features / Re: Ideas from the oddest places
« on November 3rd, 2011, 05:22 PM »
Neither do most forums, but the argument stands. And remember, WP is The Platform You Can Do Anything With, so various magazines and sites tell me (the rabidity of fanboyism about WP as a CMS is why I won't subscribe to .net magazine)

It does its core job reasonably well, but not a lot else, which means you need to weigh it down with stuff to do anything more interesting.