Now that this site has been upgraded to Drupal 5, I have added the Spam module to try to deal with the large amounts of comment spam that I was receiving before I disabled comments.

This has allowed me to re-enable the posting of comments on the site. Additionally it now allows you to report spam comments when you spot them - please do so.

On another note, my apologies for the lack of recent updates. It is not from the lack of things to write about, in fact the complete opposite, so I hope to be posting quite a few articles in the near future catching up on some of the things that I’ve been looking at.

At first I thought it would be a trivial piece of code to write… parse a date/time string, put it into a Timestamp and store it in the Database, ensuring that the resulting value used the UTC Time zone (GMT if you like). After all, I knew all about the Date & Calendar classes (or thought I did), and so could see no reason why it should take more than a few minutes to implement.

Wrong! Every approach I tried, from the obvious through a whole set of permutations of timezone initialisations, kept coming up with the wrong answers.

This article describes how to do that, and also how to convert strings in user specific timezones to & from that standard time.

Recently the site has been buried in a deluge of comment spam - about 40 a day - which is way too much for me to deal with manually.

So, reluctantly, I have had to turn off the ability to leave comments against articles. As soon as I find time to deploy a spam-filter for comments, I will re-enable it.

In the meantime, if you want to leave a message, please contact me through the consultancy contact form.

One thing that has been particularly time consuming has been trying to build appropriate Eclipse development installations for Java development, Ajax development and Php development. Chasing around the loop of plugin compatibilities was a depressing and deeply unrewarding experience.

This is where the Easy Eclipse steps in. It provides pre-loaded versions of eclipse for various commonly-used developer requirements. It covers various mainstream Java developments, Java Serverside, Php, J2ME, Ruby on Rails, Python, each in a single install package.

James Snell has written a couple of useful articles about the Atom 1.0 syndication format. These cover the core feed syntax itself and a number of extensions to add features to meet specific requirements.

James has blogged on his work on syndication in the past, but to be honest I was rather sceptical of the merits of adding complexity to what was initially a simple concept. After all the original acronym ‘RSS’ was reputed to stand for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ - there is always a considerable risk when concepts grow, they can lose sight of their original objectives.

The other concern I had was that feature creep would be useful to the providers of the syndication feeds (particularly in terms of being able to generate revenue from the feeds) but not to the end-users. One of the initial attractions of using syndicated feeds as an information stream was its purity, with none of the clutter of banner ads, pop-ups and pop-unders that plague web browsing today.

The first version of the SNS Gateway project has now been released, with both sending and reception capabilities for the Clickatell HTTP service.

See the Drupal project page for more information.

If you have any comments or feedback for me about the SMS Gateway module, please feed them in below.

Technical Roles

Technical Architect - Since 1998;
Design Lead - Since 1994;
Component Lead - Since 1991;
Programmer - Since 1989

Development

Java - 7 years (since 1998);
C++ - 3 years (1994-1997);
C - 6 years (1989-1994);
Windows - 6 years (1991-1997)