XEmacs sucks, evidently … PHP rocks, evidently … Ohne große Beziehung mit dem Leben 15th of April, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 08:21

(Warning, uncomfortably nerdy post, even by my standards!)

Things that are annoying me lately:

• Marcus Crestani’s incremental garbage collector patch for XEmacs is tying up my editor much more that its predecessor, which is in direct contradiction of the idea of the thing. Fuсk, I need either a) understand that and fix it or b) trust Marcus to do the latter, which, sharp intake of breath is not a given.
• There’s an XEmacs beta bug that manifests itself on Linux with ncurses; effectively typing fast, or pasting in something to a TTY frame, results in the first character passing through and then everything else getting lost. I’ve switched to a beta XEmacs for my (TTY-bound) mail client, and since my typing is pretty good and pretty fast, this is driving me slowly mad. Double plus ungood; I can’t reproduce it locally, evidently because I’m not running Linux, so I’ll have to go and debug it on the server, if I get to it.

Things that are cheering me up lately:

• I’ve moved this site to using the PEAR DB API, which means that I can switch to a grown-up database backend when and if I have the opportunity and energy to do so, as opposed to the previous state of affairs, where I was stuck with the most widely distributed alternative. In the process I came across bugs here and there, the fixing of which should speed the site up a little.
• I’ve fixed a few minor bugs independent of that; notably, now the links to the homepage of whoever wrote a comment make sense (the href= attribute gets stripped, if no home page was supplied) and I provide a syndication feed for the comments, which is much more for my convenience than for the rest of you; but anyway, it’s at http://​www.​parhasard.​net/​atom-feed/​comment/​ .

A diverting Hamburg (German, legal) judgement via BeLUG, available at Heise Online here:

»Das Bereithalten von Internetforen stelle eine Form unternehmerischen Betriebs dar. Der Betreiber müsse sein Unternehmen so einrichten, dass er mit seinen sachlichen und personellen Ressourcen in der Lage sei, diesen Geschäftsbetrieb zu beherrschen.

„Wenn die Zahl der Foren und die Zahl der Einträge so groß ist, dass die Antragsgegnerin nicht über genügend Personal oder genügend technische Mittel verfügt, um diese Einträge vor ihrer Freischaltung einer Prüfung auf ihre Rechtmäßigkeit zu unterziehen, dann muss sie entweder ihre Mittel vergrößern oder den Umfang ihres Betriebs [ ...] beschränken“, so das Landgericht Hamburg.«

This apparently isn’t representative of the previous legal position on internet fora, and will probably be struck down on appeal, but it does raise a bit of a spectre before German Usenet operators; there are quite definitely things posted to news.individual.net every single day that are in contravention of German law, and if the choice is between “stop providing the service” and “hire people to look at everything posted and cancel illegal articles,” I’ll have to go and look for another NNTP provider.

Word of the day: гӯсфанд is Tajik for “sheep.”