Jeremy Visser

I thought I’d post a screenshot of the mangled menus in Dapper. When you use the “English (Australia)” language (you can choose this in the GDM menu by going to Actions → Select Language) the keyboard shortcuts will be mangled in most GNOME application menus.

Here is a screenshot of the File menu in the GNOME Terminal:

I’ve set up a WebDAV based SVN server on our internal server and am very impressed. I just love the fluidity of commiting changes on one computer and seeing them on another. I’ve been experimenting with tags and branches — I’m a bit disappointed that you need to manually set them up with a directory structure.

I don’t know what it was about CVS, but it never clicked with me. Setting up a pserver was a pain (and I never actually got it working) and I could never do anything useful with a local repository. SVN just worked when I set up the DAV and TortoiseSVN provides a nice graphical interface. I already feel comfortable in the command-line SVN as well though, which is what I’m using on Linux.

I’m writing this after completing my eigth grade AMEB bassoon exam. It’s a big relief – I get to have today off .

I don’t know whether this is effective or not, but I’ve just implemented an anti-spambot measure in my PHP Guestbook.

I noticed that spambots don’t actually crawl your site and access the page with the comment form in it. They only send out POSTs to sign.php (or whatever the comment submission script is). How they do that, I don’t know (I suspect they use the Google or Coral Cache). But, I’ve just set the guestbook code up so that any form submissions require a unique ID to be sent along with the comment.

Firstly, it works by generating a number between 0 and 100000. Then, to make it look cool in the HTML source, I do a SHA1 hash of it. It is placed into PHP’s $_SESSION array (caveat: requires cookies) and also placed into a hidden <input> in the comment submission form.

So, any comment spammers will need to first load up the index page in order to have their comment accepted. Is that a good idea? Or is it no better than CAPTCHA?

Aside: It’s really taking ages for me to get the guestbook alpha ready. It’s just taking time implementing silly things like an installer and a comment delete button and stuff like that. I’m also spending time setting up a WebDAV SVN repository which will really help me keep track of things.

In Ubuntu Dapper, I’ve been experiencing corrupted button widgets in GNOME applications while using the Human theme.

At first, I thought it was a specific issue with this laptop (or video card — it’s an ATI RADEON IGP 340M). But I noticed Dad was having the same problem on his (he’s got an ATI as well).

The issue doesn’t appear using the Clearlooks theme. Actually, it doesn’t happen with any themes except for Human.

Update: I have found a bug on Launchpad which relates to the problem. Apparently, adding "RenderAccel" "Off" fixes the problem for most. (Better still, switch to the better looking Clearlooks theme )