Web 0.2

A few hours ago (01/Jul/2008 ~16:00 UTC) I tried connecting to ICQ using pidgin. Pidgin failed to connect and displayed the following error message:

The client version you are using is too old. Please upgrade at http://pidgin.im/

http://pidgin.im is down at the moment, probably because of the traffic this message caused

So, apparently ICQ have just changed the protocol with no backward compatibility, or at least blocked nonstandard clients. Or maybe it’s just a temporary problem?

The only relevant post I’ve found so far is this Russian post.

I’ll update this post when I hear something. Does it happen with other clients as well?

Update: Seems like there’ll be a new version soon. From #pidgin at irc.freenode.net:

There are issues with ICQ - ignore the message to upgrade and wait || We know pidgin.im is having difficulties

Stoyan from Yahoo! presents some surprising facts.

As a sequel to this browser shortcuts post, here’re two new shortcuts that rocked my world (ok, almost..) :

1. F4: opens a select box. Seems like a standard for all UIs! (Windows/Linux at least)
2. Tick (’) key in FireFox: would switch to ’search’ mode just like slash (/), but would search for links only. Just type the beginning of the link’s name and hit Enter.

Do you know any other shocking keyboard shortcuts?

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On a completely other subject, I was fighting (along with a collegue) today with Apache httpd’s configuration. The web server seemed to “automatically guess” URLs in a weird fashion.

The cause is that we had the MultiViews feature enabled. With MultiViews, when a URL points to a nonexisting file, i.e. http://mydomain/my/file, apache tries to look for an existing file which looks similar to the directory (I won’t describe here the exact algorithm), i.e. http://mydomain/my.php. Then it loads it instead, and the user doesn’t get 404.

Maybe some people need it.. but it’s also weird and error-prone..

I felt like checking out Tucows (which apparently used to mean “The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software“): one of the famous download sites I used in the mid-late 90s.

They automatically recognized me as a Linux user and customized the contents accordingly. But something seemed not quite right in the “Linux Spotlight” section:

Some updates since the last post:

The “GTK dies on a keypress” bug

Good news: it was fixed by Matthias Clasen. It was solved in the SVN version, I guess that we’ll have to wait a while till it gets into the next version, Unless package maintainers would manually add it.

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Doing a good QA in the FOSS community

I’ve learned a quick lesson about good QA in the open source community, which I find very rare.

In this case the bug was reported for ~2 months with no activity (”it sometimes crashes” type of report). Until I’ve added my description, which, probably helped it to get closed.

I’ll try to sum up what I’ve learned:

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