As any student of computer science knows, line breaks are confusing. There are styles of line breaks unique to Unix, Mac and Windows - so what should a web renderer do when faced with a newline command? In HTML, it's simple, they should be ignored. But what when it is user generated text, not HTML? This was a problem I faced when trying to get Dabr to render the ASCII* art produced by Aral Balkan's Feathers App. Feathers uses line breaks to achieve images like... 〰❀❃ Introducing ❃❀〰 My new i…
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There are many reasons to love Open Source Software. It's free (as in you pay nothing), it's free (as in speech) and - perhaps my favourite reasons - it's free (as in liberating). By liberating, I mean that one isn't tied down to the product roadmap and release schedule of the developers. If I find a bug, not only can I report it, I can fix it myself. If I can't fix it myself, I can often find someone to fix it for me. Imagine writing to MicroSoft and saying "Please can you make this ch…
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I've decided to add a preview of YouTube videos into Dabr, the mobile Twitter service. The code is fairly simple - although I still suck at regular expressions. if (preg_match_all('#youtube.com/watch?v=([_-dw]+)#', $tmp, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER) > 0) { foreach ($matches[1] as $match) { $images[] = theme('external_link', "http://m.youtube.com/watch?v={$match}", "<img src='http://i.ytimg.com/vi/{$match}/1.jpg' class='twitpic' />"); } } Here's how it looks. A user writes a …
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There has been much discussion recently as to whether the BNP are becoming more acceptable to mainstream voters. Are people really happy to let the world know that they support the BNP and their policies? Will they publicly show their allegiance on a social networking site like twitter? Do you know how many of your twitter friends are racists? There are two ways to tell: Directly. You see them saying something racist. In which case, I'd hope you either call them on it or you block them. …
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