Back online after a week's downtime

So we're back online again. The downtime was a result of moving the site from one server to another.

TYPHPIST: a type safe PHP class library for generating valid XHTML documents

I thought it would be nifty to have a way to generate XHTML documents and have PHP complain when I try to create invalid documents, to enforce standards compliance and ease debugging, so I wrote one. PHP may not be the cleanest or best language to implement this in, but it's definitely the one where it'll see the most use. Besides, the lack of a strict typing system in PHP makes something like this all the more necessary.

You can check it out over at my github repository.

fridomar-ng goes live!

Finally, the time has come to retire the old, tired fridomar codebase.

Behold, the glory of fridomar-ng!

Unfortunately, this has a few negative implications:

• Any accounts from the old site will need to have their passwords reset. If this applies to you, leave a comment and I'll see to it.

• You will need to update your bookmarks, live bookmarks and RSS feed readers to work with the new naming scheme.

Apart from this, there shouldn't be any other ill effects. Since we're running on compiled binaries, the site should be snappier than before. If you spot a bug, leave a comment and tell me!

CAPTCHAs: a necessary evil

As you've probably noticed, you now have to enter a CAPTCHA to make anonymous comments. I know it's evil and cumbersome, but the sheer amount of spam I've had to handle lately has made this the only option for now.

I'm working on a better way of doing this, but it's going to be a while before it gets implemented, if ever. Until then, please bear with me.

If the CAPTCHAs really bother you, please consider creating an account to post from. No CAPTCHAs for registered users.

Change of direction

So, since I'm no longer in Japan, reading about my everyday life is probably not all that exciting. Therefore, the blog/travel diary has been replaced by the new section as the site's main page. This change in focus will be followed by various extremely exciting (yeah, right) projects, such as translations and other stuff that might be interesting to other people than just myself.

Also, there is a completely new look and a completely revamped menu system. It'll probably be wonky and break every now and then. If that happens, report it. Pretty please?

Just a reminder: I'm not dead yet

As the topic says, I'm not dead yet; I'm just too lazy to update in a timely manner.

Finals are coming up, but I have some great content in the pipeline, possible the awesomest content ever to be posted here (not that anything posted so far has been particularly awesome though,) which I hope to be able to finish in the coming days. Before that though, there will be some more tourism information and possibly some academic stuff.

In other news, I'm getting a scholarship, just in time for summer. Yay. Unfortunately, it's only about 450 euros. Oh well, better than nothing.

Until next time, here's a fuzzy picture of my new Metallic-Rose NDS. Since the yen is weakening rapidly against the krona, it suddenly became viable to buy a new NDS and sell the old one on the second-hand market.
[picture removed; it died]

If it weren't for customs, I'd buy all kinds of crazy stuff to sell at home; at this time, investing my money in video games, doujinshi or tiny packs of Japanese candy would probably be a safer bet than keeping the yens.

New free host

Since PubHost likes changine their PHP config without notice every now and then, making just about everything break in the process, I've finally had it with their "service." Sure, you get what you're paying for, but since the purpose of their free accounts is convince me to buy a real hosting plan from them, demonstrating technical incompetence and indifference towards their users isn't exactly helping them.

So instead I moved to this other free host (I wish I could afford a real one T_T) by the name of 000webhost. I don't know what the catch is, but so far their service has been remarkably good. Far too good for a free host in fact, so I'm just waiting for some new disaster to strike. The only downside is that they don't support MIME type checking or the mysqli interface, but this can be easily worked around.

Thanks for keeping reading the site, in spite of all these problems. (If anyone still is. The lack of comments lately kind of indicates the opposite.) More and better content is on its way, so please be patient.

Source

EDIT, 2008-10-26: the source page has been moved to the Projects section.

Server problems

As you may have noticed, weeaboo.se has been offline for the past week. It turns out that the culprit was a dynamic IP change (curse you, consumer-level ISP:s,) which of course caused weeaboo.se to point to the wrong address. To avoid further problems of similar nature, a dynamic DNS updater will be installed as soon as I have some time. At least it wasn't a hardware issue as I had feared.

Since I haven't been able to post in a while, there is lots of material material in the pipeline. Look forward to posts about walking christmas trees in Harajuku, Love Hotel Hill in Shibuya, night buses, Engrish and squids.

Anonymous comments are now enabled.

See topic. I accidentally had anonymous comments turned off before.