Online Books January 29, 2007
Posted by Drew in : Literature , add a commentThere are a number of sources online for free books, usually “classics” where the copyright has expired but more and more Creative Commons released titles. One of my favorite sites is readprint.com which has a good choice of titles, albeit due to the nature of these things they are in many cases the usual suspects.
What raises this site to the top of my list however is that as well as having the actual text to read, it also has a pen portrait of the author and a full text search to allow aspects of the work to be explored in more detail. This opens up the site to be a useful learning tool as well.
On the subject of online reading though it would be remiss of me not to mention The Daily Lit which is a service for those people who don’t fancy reading a whole text in one go. The service allows you to choose a book and get it sent to you via email, one part (called a fragment) at a time, over a number of days. The site allows you to set a number of aspects and each email has a link so that you can get the next fragment straight away or suspend the service if you are busy. I’ve been getting fragments for the last few days, can’t decide if I like it yet but I’ll comment more after giving it a thorough road test.
Better than bad it’s good!
Posted by Drew in : Funny , add a commentOver on Digg someone posted a link to a YouTube clip of Ren & Stimpy and it got me all dewy eyed and nostalgic for my youth. At one of my previous employers, a software developer, we had something of a Ren & Stimpy fanclub going on, especially as it annoyed one of our co-workers who never got it.
So, here are another couple of clips that make me smile 
WordPress redux January 28, 2007
Posted by Drew in : Technology , add a commentThe first post I made related to how easy the task of installing WordPress was. It would be fair to say that I am not always the most conscientious of bloggers and so it had been a couple of months since I’d posted anything. For those who don’t use WordPress, when you login you are taken to the Dashboard and this has not only links to various aspects of your installation but also a list of the latest updates.
When I came to write the entry before this there was a whole new version of WordPress available. So I decided to upgrade. A quick download of the new version and a read of the “5 steps to upgrade” and I was ready to go.
Except a couple of the steps related to backing up the MySQL database that runs the site and frankly, given the low number of posts I couldn’t be arsed. There were others that said which files needed to be kept and that the rest needed deleting so I followed those. And then run the upgrade.php file and……
Well, there we are. A new version of WordPress up and running with all the posts and categories etc. Even easier than the original install.
Any lessons learned? The first is that I had in fact made changes to some of my theme files and for the next upgrade I’ll make back those up. The second is that I should really post more often so that I wouldn’t forget such things!
my.name+tag@email.com is - I say again IS correct
Posted by Drew in : Rants, Technology , add a commentI’m a fan of Google Mail (that’s GMail for those of us in territories where the name was already taken) and route all of my email accounts through it, thereby giving me an instant backup of all my mail. One of the features that I’ve always liked is the ability to add the + sign to my address and tag emails.
I use this for two reasons. The first is that it makes adding a label and filtering my mail really easy. The second is that I can use websites that I’ve never used before and using a tag I will stand a reasonable chance of knowing if I get spam as a result of entering my email.
However, I’ve noticed that this doesn’t always work. I’ve had a few sites refuse to take an email with a + sign. It’s always riled me slightly. Then today I registered some software and to download the registered version I had to follow a link and enter my email. When I did this I got a page saying that I could only enter the registered address. So I contacted the site and the email that came back, while resolving the issue by providing an alternative link, stated that the reason was because I had used “a non standard character”.
So I began to wonder. Had Google made an error? Obviously the first place to start was with the RFCs. There are a number of pertinent documents including RFC 822, 2822 & 3696 and the one thing about all of them is that nowhere does it say that the + symbol isn’t valid. In fact quite the opposite. They list the small number of characters that are not valid in the local part of an email address and by inference all others are valid. This means that not only is the + valid, so is - and *.
So was it just a shoddy piece of web authoring that led people into this error? Well I did some more digging and to my surprise discovered that despite being part of the “standard” there are not only a number of high profile websites that don’t allow emails with these characters in them but neither does Hotmail!
Now it has to be said that there are a few things that get me annoyed and failure to comply with standards is one of them. So there are two things to take from this. The first is that if you ever have to do something that takes email addresses make sure you read the standard and accept valid addresses. The second is that if anyone ever tells you that your email isn’t valid as it has a non-standard character, it is your job to educate them.