I have turned TrackBacks (more info) on to see if anyone thinks I’m interesting enough to link back to ;) If you’re weblog supports TrackBacks, be sure to ping me.

Mac OSX has a nifty feature along the lines of “Right/Apple-Click > Open Terminal Here” that I thought I’d like in GNOME. As usual, I put it to the back on my mind and carried on.

Today however linked off PlanetDebian was a cool article showing how you can integrate scripts into Nautilus, the default GNOME file manager. It also talks about gnome-open which is now aliased to o for me, so in a shell I can type o . and have a Nautilus window open in my working directory with all its funky, GUI goodness.

When we need to redirect users with PHP we can send headers to the browser, indicating where we’d like them to go instead.

I had a situation however where a client used to have their site hosted on IIS, and in some of their code they had hardlinks to an ASP page that used to be on their old site. I thought about it a bit; one option was to tell Apache to handle pages with ASP extensions with the PHP plugins, which would have worked, but I thought it was a dodgy hack and didn’t like the longevity of such a solution.

Instead, I investigated using Apache’s mod_rewrite. mod_rewrite is a module that can be plugged into Apache and used to change URLs. I use it on my Gallery installation, so you can go to http://lambie.org/gallery/mobile/ instead of gallery.php?blah=x&y=yoyo&iggy=pop. It can make URLs human-friendly.

What I ended up using the following in a .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^support_patches\.asp$ index.php?c=21 [R]
</IfModule>

Any calls to support_patches.asp gets redirected to index.php?c=21. The [R] bit means to send the redirect back to the browser, so that the URL actually changes. Without it, we just do an internal redirection, and the user would see the ASP page in their browser’s address bar.

For those of you that don’t know me, let me first explain that I’m a ten year old trapped in a twenty-something’s body. I am notorious for having child-like interests, including Lego, GI Joe, Transformers (well actually, any toys from the 80’s), Atari and vintage gaming consoles, and comics. Granted, I haven’t actually spent money on comics for some time, which is more than can be said about the other addictions hobbies.

With the internet being such a wonderful place, and the abundance of scanned comics, I thought I’d investigate computer-based comic book readers. My laptop has an awesome screen, and is very nice to read off.

Firstly, I visited SuprNova.org as they always have a few links at the bottom to comic books. I was in luck, because they had over two gigabytes of GI Joe comics in a single download! (The following day had 500MB of He-Man comics :) A short while later I’d downloaded the files, and found they were in CBZ format. This is a compressed file format, based around ZIP. CBR is another format, which I believe is based around RAR.

Then I checked Freshmeat, and found a link to Asparagino’s Comic Viewer, which is a Java application designed to run on Debian. Great!

I installed the required components (GNOME’s Java libraries) and was able to have it running in a few seconds. There’s no Java source, it’s all precompiled, which makes it easy for newbies.

All in all, I’m very happy with this little application, though I might attempt to build a simple two-page viewer, for further authenticity. Reading the comic one page at a time doesn’t seem right, I think you need two pages open at once.

Edit: 28/09/2004 - 3:09PM
CBView is what I now use for CBR files. I love choice.

In the mail today there was a Myer postcard advertising their online and customer loyalty programme, Myer One. It wasn’t a random postcard, this one was addressed to Miss Mei Kok.

I wonder if the people here had a sense of humour, or if that’s a real name?