I’ve been faffing with my weblog again today. Why, you ask? Because (like Mark Pilgrim I’m a markup wanker who won’t leave well enough alone. Not in the same league as Mark or Hixie perhaps, but at least I try. You don’t get to see any of the fruits of my work though, since I haven’t copied the changes over to the live website yet. I doubt anyone will notice any difference (in fact, that’s half the point). I’ve been changing pointless div’s to headers, but more importantly adding plenty of relationship links to the head section. Since Dan C was pestering yesterday, and Sam has been waiting since last summer, I’ve finally got round to producing a syndication feed. Most of the work has been in the backend though, and some of the stuff I’ve changed has made me cringe. Mainly involving the phrase "SELECT * FROM weblog", which is becoming increasingly stupid as the size of the table increases. Especially when I realised that for each of the three displays (front page, archive list and individual posts), absolutely everything in the weblog is fetched from the database server. Not exactly optimal, eh? That, and some funky object orientated stuff for setting page titles, stylesheets etc means that I’ll need to be careful when I update the main site. Not tonight then.

After a discussion with a friend, and remembering what a different friend got up to in halls a year ago, I thought I’d have a go at doing some packet sniffing on the home network. I got set back by our having a switch instead of a hub, and though I know what needs to be done to get round it (ARP shenanigans), actually doing so would be to move on from the play into the hard work catagory. If I thought it likely that I would find anything interesting then I would do it, but I’m more likely to just piss my housemates off by cocking it up.

Still, I’ve (re)learned loads of stuff about connections, and I finally understand the difference between IP and ethernet (I knew the difference before, now I understand it). It also gives me a cool way of seeing the http headers for the websites I’m working on. If only I was the gateway for my flat (or if I 0wned it, mwa ha ha ha), then I could could be one step further along the same thing we do every day, Pinky…