bodom_lx blog and things|

As I promised about 4 hours ago, here is my introduction to Hyper Text Transfer Protocol in form of a mind map.
It is to be intended as a really short introduction to this protocol. Like the previous one about computer networks, the mindmap summarizes materials copyrighted by Tanenbaum and also material taken from Wikipedia.

The topics covered are:

• Scope of the protocol
• HTTP connection
  • HTTP/1.0
  • HTTP/1.1
• HTTP request methods:
  • GET
  • HEAD
  • PUT
  • POST
  • DELETE
  • TRACE
  • CONNECT
  • OPTIONS
• Message Headers
  • Request Headers - all
  • Response Headers - all
• Status Codes:
  • 1xx Information
  • 2xx Success
  • 3xx Redirection
  • 4xx Client error
  • 5xx Server Error
• Sessions:
  • Cookies
  • Server-Side sessions
• Secure HTTP - HTTPS:
  • By URI scheme
  • HTTP Upgrade Header
  • SSL/TLS

You can browse an HTML version online.

You can download:

• Mindmap source file (Freemind)
• An export in PDF format
• An export in PNG format

As always, you are free and encouraged to contact me in case of errors or anything else.
Hope you like it!

For job purposes I had to learn a lot of JavaScript, including AJAX related stuffs. Like every lazy (but intelligent) developer, I looked around for frameworks that could help me doing my work. I knew that prototype existed, but I never looked at it because of lack of interest. Well it's great, it's really great! Nowadays everybody should use frameworks, as their abstraction permits a rapid development without worrying about things like platform compatibility, in our case browsers. Prototype also has a very nice and clean syntax that overtakes functions not compatible with every browser.

In this post I'm going to report a very nice function I implemented for limiting Form input fields, like textarea and input of type text. You have to call it via onkeyup and onkeydown events. The function accepts 3 parameters: field, limit and counterDesired.
The first is the field object, you should use the keyword this for a value.
The second parameter is a limit value, the number of characters that the field should contain at maximum.
The third parameter is optional, false as default. It permits to add a visual counter after the field, like the one you see on YouTube, for example. You can either tell to the function to add the counter for you (put inside a <span> block) or to put it inside another block you've already defined. In the second case, the block must have an id of the form 'fieldID_counter'

This is the compact version, see below for some examples and the expanded, explained version:

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I've never been a big fan of rpm-based Gnu/Linux distributions, since I've always preferred the stability of Debian and Debian based distros, with their great dpkg system.
The problem with Debian on Macbooks is that I do not see both the stability and performance anymore, as I have to use Lenny/Sid. Etch is too old and I don't have the time (*sic*) to play with it to make it work well. Lenny should be next to be released but I don't feel the very famous stability AND lightness of Debian distributions on this release, like I was accustomed in the past years. Is this because I own a Macbook? Maybe, but a Macbook Santa Rosa is nothing more than an Intel-powered notebook with some strange input devices and a strange non-bios system

Regarding Ubuntu, I believe that this distribution has become naff and really slow. See this Slashdot discussion on this topic.

Yesterday I stumbled to Scientechie review of Fedora 10, which convinced me to try it out.
The software shipped with Fedora 10 is aligned with the one provided with the other distributions: Gnome 2.24.0, kernel 2.6.27.5, NetworkManager 0.7.0 (svn) and so on. Read the release notes for more information.

Fedora 10 really surprises me, as it is the first Gnu/Linux distribution in many, many years that makes me feel again the great stability and performance of the Penguin. Therefore I'm writing this review that is also a how-to, as it contains some fixes for Fedora 10 and Macbooks.

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It's a very long time since I abandoned Ubuntu, 1 year and 9 months being precise, although I continued to use Ubuntu derived distros.
I decided today to give Ubuntu 8.10 beta a try. Obviously, every time I decide to try a Gnu/Linux distribution it happens that a new release comes out: I downloaded Alpha 6 yesterday, I fell into problems with it and a apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade brought me Ubuntu 8.10 beta, correcting some of them
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I began today to check my theme pages for passing W3C's Validator test against XHTML 1.0 Strict. There is still some work to be done before it will be ready but I would like to share with you a modified version of the very useful Expanding Text Plugin for Wordpress, which lets you to create blocks of text in posts or which either expand or collapse when clicked on. I really like the plugin, but I noticed that it does not produce valid XHTML tags. Here is a light modification of the plugin which outputs valid XHTML blocks: dd-expanding-text-valid-xhtml

As I promised, I would like to announce the start of a new BD-thing! I'm currently learning Django because of job needing and because of fun. The best way to learn a new language (even if a framework) is to apply it for solving a problem.
That's why I decided to start BD-incollo!
BD-incollo will be a kind of pastebin clone written in Django. Totally free. Free meant as free software. You may download the sourcecode and use it by your own.
Ok, what's difficult with this? I'm planning to release a decent usable version in less than a week.
This means, I want to release the sourcecode on Sunday, 2008-09-28 and also to launch the service on Monday, 2008-09-29.

I believe in Django and I know it will be possible to make it!