If you have a project for which you would like to track feature suggestions easily and let people vote on them and make more suggestions, a new service, featurelist.org, has opened that does just this.

Anybody can register an account and create a new project to be listed. Then people, including the project author, can make feature suggestions and show their interest on them by either voting them up or down.

The features can be flagged as open, rejected, in progress and completed, making it easy to only list the features that have not been done yet or to see which features have already been implemented. This is good for both the author and the clients suggesting features.

It also allows you to watch whole projects or certain feature suggestions and you will get e-mailed automatically when a new suggestion or comment is added.

I already have four different coding projects there, makes it a lot easier to track down what I have thought about improving in them myself, and as a bonus I can get more ideas from other people.

Check it out: http://featurelist.org/

How it might sometimes look like I am wrong and you try to make it seem like so, you will be lying. I am not wrong, I am right. Always right.

That is, when it is me. For over a month now I have had kind of a health problem. Somehow I have difficulty getting normal amounts of oxygen circulated to my brains, making occasional bad feelings, causing also my thoughts to not be so clear always.

If you have seen me post something weird on forums lately (in the past month time), it might be just because of a momentary lack of functionality in my damn head. Don't worry, it is not because of you, I'll forgive you in case there happens to be some kind of negative comments toward me based on those weird posts.

Now, mind the subject and remember what I just wrote here. Read it again if needed, read it backwards. You what I am getting into?

So, W3C finally published the first version of HTML 5 specification working draft: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/

Despite all the information regarding syntax and elements themselves, you can also find pseudocode notations for most parsing algorithms one might need when creating a HTML parser. Nice!

There are some interesting parts in that document, though:

Quote

1.2.1. How to read this specification

This specification should be read like all other specifications. First, it should be read cover-to-cover, multiple times. Then, it should be read backwards at least once. Then it should be read by picking random sections from the contents list and following all the cross-references.

Ok, I might be able to do that cover-to-cover, once, but I am not going to read it backwards.

Quote

Conformance checkers must check that the input document conforms when scripting is disabled, and should also check that the input document conforms when scripting is enabled. (This is only a "SHOULD" and not a "MUST" requirement because it has been proven to be impossible. [HALTINGPROBLEM])

Exactly why the content should never be created with dynamic scripts. *cough* Xfire... *cough*

Quote

All authoring tools, whether WYSIWYG or not, should make a best effort attempt at enabling users to create well-structured, semantically rich, media-independent content.

What a brilliant idea! Too bad it proves to be left as an idealistic wish

Quote

XHTML documents (XML documents using elements from the HTML namespace) that use the new features described in this specification and that are served over the wire (e.g. by HTTP) must be sent using an XML MIME type such as application/xml or application/xhtml+xml and must not be served as text/html. [RFC3023]

I am just waiting for the day Internet Explorer knows what application/xhtml+xml is so I don't have to lie that my XHTML documents are text/html.

Quote

Such XML documents may contain a DOCTYPE if desired, but this is not required to conform to this specification.

...

So this morning I couldn't take my bike as I'd usually do since the rear brakes were stuck. The whole distance I would have needed to ride as if I was holding the brake handle.

Now I checked what was the matter with it and the outcome was that the metallic arm of a spring to keep it off the rim was broken.


Here's a close up shot. That metal arm on the table should have been where the red circle designates.

I guess I need to buy a new pair of brakes tomorrow. Just the question is, dare I take my bike without rear brakes working, especially since it is rather slippery out there? Maybe I will...

The normal fan on my little puter is rather noisy when it is active and even removing the bottom plate couldn't keep the Sempron cool enough. The fan started and stopped in about 30 second intervals, so it was pretty cool, but not enough for me to like the sound. So for tonight I put a Nexus Silent case fan on top of the CPU, powered by external IDE hard drive power cable (the same connector normal power supplies have for IDE drives).



A lot more silent and kept it cool whole night, the integrated fan (lower left in photo) never turned on automatically during the night. Now I wish my desktop computer was as silent...

So my birthday present arrived today. Well, actually yesterday, but today the mailman dispatched the note that I could pick it up from the post office.

It is Canon Digital Ixus 70, a 7.1 mega pixel digital camera, very compact. It cost me 199 € and I got leather holding bag and a 1 GB SD card with it as well as free shipping.

Compare it to my previous camera Digital Ixus i, it cost 349 €, had 4.0 mega pixels and no optical zoom. This is how the technology goes forward; in a few years the prices drop so much that technically in every aspect superior product is half as expensive as the previous one was.

Now if I could take photos with the camera of the camera itself, I would post them here, but since I do not have a mirror maze right here and the Ixus i does no longer do its job well enough, you have to go Google for images if you want to see how it looks like. Oh, this is the black model, by the way.

But for the next blog entry that would suffice a photo, I'll try to take one with this new toy.

Note: All the text files used here are included at the end of this blog entry.

Note2: It is recommended that you used either Visual C or GCC (MingW32 on Windows) to build your C Python modules. If you like LCC-Win32 as I do, and are interested in building your own Python modules with it, then keep on reading!


Before starting

You need to have Python installed on your Windows, http://www.python.org/

It is also recommended to have the latest version of LCC-Win32, available from http://www.q-software-solutions.de/downloaders/get_name

I also recommend that you install both Python and LCC to paths that do not have spaces in their names (for example, not under Prorgam Files).

If you want to follow up these steps as I have made them, create a new folder called dev under Python's installation path. All the new files mentioned hereafter are to be placed in this folder.


Before the first build

The library files included with Python are designed for Visual studio and are not directly usable. You need to first convert the Python25.lib (or whichever version your Python is) into LCC compatible format. You can do the conversion using Wedit program included with LCC-Win32, however, I have written a simple LIBCONV batch file that can be used from command line to convert any such library file to LCC format, find LIBCONV.BAT at the end of this post.

Open cmd.exe and navigate into the dev folder you created, and type in this:
Code:



You should end up having two new files in your dev folder, python25.lib and python25.lib.exp. You can copy the new python25.lib inside the lib folder of your lcc installation if you so want. The exp file can be deleted, if you don't want it (it was only used to create the lib file itself).

Now that you have a compatible library file, you can actually compile and link the C source file to work inside Python.


Building Python extension

The included batch files require that your C source file has the form of namemodule.c, where name is the name of the...

Another year of my life has started after 21 more or less boring years. Oh, by our calendar it is also the New Year's day, it's 2008 since the year that was normed to be year 0.

The cake was a lie. There was a cake, something they called a cake, but in my standards that was not a cake, it was more like a pie...

Birthday presents? Didn't get many, some chocolate stuff maybe and a promise that I'll get a soldering iron with me when I go back to Joensuu. I had set my eyes on Canon Digital Ixus 70 before coming here for the holidays. It cost 199 € on the store where I saw it.

So, on New Year's Eve I bought it. It cost 199 €, it will be delivered by mail, postage included in the price. BUT! The price was the same, but the contents were not. With this I also get 1 GB Secure Digital memory card (it has 32 MB by default) and a holding bag for the camera. And since this camera supports the macro photographing I loved in Ixus I, it was settled, I ordered it.

You may expect some photos in my coming blog entries now that I will have a brand new digital camera

As for everyone asking about New Year's resolutions, mine is 1024x768. Why are those two even using the same word?

I don't see it. There have been promising signs of some presents for me to get. I have given out my bank account number. I have been asked to create Amazon Gift List. Yet, I don't see a cake coming.

Will there be a cake for me?

It's the time of the year to wish everyone happy holidays. Though, the greeting "Happy Holidays" is new to me, I saw it first time last christmas and it seems to be one of those American inventions.



Since I live in Finland and we have only one official celebrations here, Christmas, my blog is titled to wish you Merry Christmas. If you do not celebrate that and do not appreciate the title, your loss, really.


There isn't much snow here, it seems to be not so white Christmas as most people here would have wanted to have. I don't see any snowman on our front yard as usually due to the lack of snow. So, I'm going to have a virtual snowman here:

I would love to have some kind of float alignment option for the images... gotta file a BBCode enhancement request.

We just got the tree in, my father and sisters brought it from our forest. I wonder if it will be my job again to hang the lights on it. By the law of nature, the wires will be chaos once again, I bet. In the end, our Christmas tree will be more colorful than this one:


I am not expecting lots of presents. I am not sending any either, if you don't count the stuff I bought for my little brother a week ago. I have a strong feeling some close relatives are going to give me some wearable soft gifts such as socks. I have not bought lots of sweet stuff lately as I am counting on the induction that I will get loads of chocolate.

Maybe wrapped in a box like this:

Despite the overuse of seasoned images, there is going to be one more. Xfire, please change the website theme for the holidays. To get you started, here is the RSS feed:


Merry Christmas everyone! Have peaceful holidays.