yayo's blog ( ^^)ù

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Icculus attempt failed: bad choice

As time goes by I consider even more the idea of closing all my projects.

I tryed contacting the icculus.org website, to get information about their opensource software hosting service.
It sounded like a good option. I read about them being an elitarist community, highly selective, but I supposed this was proof of professionality.
It seems to be instead just the consequence of a whimsy nature which decides who is to be accepted and who is to be refused, according with self temper rather than with a logic of free software sharing usefulness, as it should be.

I sent them a 1st email trying to aquire more information about them, also being thankful in advance for the time spent for me in replying.

After almost a week without getting any reply, I sent another one saying that being them either too busy or simply too ill-bred to be unable to reply to me, they were probably not the right place for me. OF COURSE THEY REPLYED TO THE 2ND EMAIL IN JUST A FEW HOURS, apologising for having missed the first email, but adding that "they would have definitely not hosted my project in the chance the've turned out being to ill-bred for me".

Of course.

I call this sarcasm. I understand that they can feel hurted, but it's been their mistake missing my 1st email and I'm growing tired of trying to contact people who don't reply to me (see previous posts). What whould you do, being ignored again and again?

I never gained a cent sharing my little softwares, and even if it happens that people download them (and, I guess, also use them) almost daily, in the 99% of cases I never got a simple thanks.

Careful: not that I want people say me thanks for them. It's enough for me to see that someone find them useful. But it's right because there's nothing earned or gained except for satisfaction, that forbidding tools for sharing stuff for everyone's good, just because of personal issues or bad temper, is simply stupid and sad (and it's right for this reason that I'm so undecided about closing all: I feel I'm disappointed and embittered).

Icculus, of course, as any other service of the same kind, has the right to decide what to host and whatnot. But a discrimination like this one is disappointing and surely demotes the image of the service itself.

I'm in the meanwhile already browsing the sourceforge options (and it's a hard work since it's bloody slow as usual: I can't even logging in!) to search for a way to close all.

And by the way I'm also ill.
bleh, let's see what will happens..

y.

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will I stop sharing my little software codes?

Since two days now I'm browsing the web searching for a free hosting service for my little code projects, but with sad results...

After having fight one day more against sourceforge, which doesn't allow me to manage my stuff (web space and files) in an easy and direct way, I was pondering to move anything somewhere else, but it seems that it's very hard to find out something reliable without paying.
There are dozens of offerts around, but I can't find info enough to get a panorama of the pro and cons, nor to isolate the affordable services (and with affordable I means old ones, which are not going to disappear at the same speed they made themselves service provider)

Basically any offert has some umbelievable hole: a totally unknow provider, or maybe well know but people complaining about downtimes or even site suddenly closed with some excuse. Or they do have silly limitations...

Sadly altervista (which hosts this blog) doesn't allow me to use this space to host and share files, unles they're linked and clicked via pages still hosted here.

I'm seriously thinking at stopping sharing my software. They don't worth the hassle of paying something each year, just to have a little website to make them available.

What to do now? Closing all? uff.. >: 7

y.

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... and back (with the plugin code!).

I feel better now. It's still unclear what was the cause of my illness of the past days, but let's hope it's gone once and for all.

Anyway, I played a bit more with the code of that random quotations plugin I wrote for this blog some weeks ago.
I improved it quite a lot and I think its time to upload it here for everyone. : )

Warning: Because of many reasons I'm not planning to implement a way to automatically manage quotations by adding or deleting them directly via blog interface.
This means that to use this plugins it's required that you have at least a bit of PHP and HTML knowledge to understand how to manually add the quotations and perhaps also formatting them.
: /

I'm not sure I understood how script management works in simplephp blog. It's not clear to me if there's a way to automatically install/uninstall the plugins, so I installed mine manually.
I wrote to the author to ask him info about this point, but I'm still waiting a reply. So I decided to provide you, along with the plugin file, also the installing instructions, written according with the same steps I took to install mine.
You can find the same instructions online in this page (English): [1]

And the plugin itself is here: [2]

have fun, and let me know if you used it and found it useful. : )

Said this, I take the chance since we're in the middle of this chinese moment to repeat a foundamental concept:

FREE TIBET!

: P

y.


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recapitulation

ok. Abstract of the current situation:
my PYG ("progetto yayo-giapponario", =yayo-japanary project) is temporarily suspended since some weeks now for lack of working software tools. Nothing to worry about anyway. I just need to write a fast code to manage the kanji dictionary files. Being PHP the only programing language that I know (sorta), I'm forced to learn a new one (php is ok for websites, but about data management a three-toed sloths is faster).
After some days spent searching for info I decided to try with the "common lisp" (the other choice was forth, but lisp seems to be closer to php, and this will probably help me a lot). Lisp seems to be powerful, versatile and easy enough from my php-point of view (I'll know for sure only when I'll have played with it bit more). It can also be used for interpreted scripts as well as to compile executable files.
I admit I got some troubles finding an implementation of the language. There are many on the net, but a half of them are commercial and come in a demo version with reduced functionality, and only a few of the others are mature/stable versions. And nether commercial nor free considers people like me with an old computer/OS and with a crappy connection: all the implementation are elephants 8mb atleast big. In dialup with an average speed of 4,5Kb/sec (just because I use pc during the night, otherwise it'd be 3,5! :P) it takes round 45 minutes to download the archive. And once I get it, if it doesn't works with my OS or something, I have to restart from scratch. A friend on IRC sent me a scheme (=another lisp dialect) interpreter which is around 35Kb. How comes that common lisp requires at least 8mb? boh..
Anyway I finally found clisp which has anything I need. Well, having known that readline version of the executable doesn't work on my win98 --yes, I still use win98! why? is it a problem? :P-- I would have avoided to download it twice, but at least now also the developers know it! I'm sorry for having bothered them, but if they write on the sourceforge page that it's a mature/stable software working on all windows versions starting from win98, how can I know that on win98 readline doesn't work?! >xP). The interpreter without readline sucks but it works and it's enough (do I have other choices? >:P).

Sadly I'm also busy doing some other things, and this will delay PYG even more. :/ Anyway I finally managed to get a working kanji-dictionary page even without html tables, using all the power(aaahahahah! *cough*) of CSS(ucks).. (I know, I said I was resigned about this, but it was a personal question between me and the stylesheet: my PC must ALWAYS do what I want, not the opposite! :P)
And anyway there's not so more left to do to have the dictionary working, so once the map extractor software will be ready to manage the base dictionary file (knjidic2.xml), I'll be probably ready (for site upload).

Another reason for the delay is that this thursday I'm going to hospital for a little sorgery thing. Nothing to worry about (...they say. sadly I'm used to suffer and faint even for a blood exam.. I know, I'll die suffering the pain of hell.. sigh.. x' | ). I'll be knockout for a week at least..

Last note: why the heck the italian postal service keeps wasting time and resources selling stuff that I can buy in other places, instead of provide an affordable postal service? They're now also a mobile phone service provider with sim and all. It's not bad, ok, but it's a month yet I'm waiting a parcel from another country! And I got confirmation from their postal offices, that it leaved that country the 6th of november.. Where's my parcel? WHEREEES IT?!? Take care of my parcel instead of wasting time selling books and stuff, damnmn!! uff.. >x'/

y.

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