Async.fi

Blogging activities migrated to Async.fi

Installing Wordpress and getting the basic settings straight was, all and all, a relatively painless experience. One downside of choosing this particular blogging platform is that I now have to run a MySQL server just for this purpose (I have no intention to use MySQL for anything else as I have actively tried to steer away from RDBMSs, even before this whole "NoSQL" thing became fashionable). I would've preferred to be able to run Wordpress on top of an SQLite backend, just because that would've kept things one step simpler, but I just could not get the "PDO (SQLite) For WordPress" adapter to work with a reasonable amount of work, so I gave up and went ahead with a MySQL server install. So it's a tradeoff (what isn't?) but with all these plugins and stuff and whatnot that this system supports I think it's a pretty good deal. I went through the old posts at sivuraide.blogspot.com and imported what I thought I might find useful at least to some extent. Unsurprisingly not too many of the old posts fall to this category. Then again, the old blog is titled Code Notebook. The old posts did not "just work" in all places, a quick eyeballing revealed some glitches that need to be ironed out. I installed the following plugins in addition to what was bundled:

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(Desktop) Safari & (W3C) Geolocation API

I don't know why this thing fails in desktop Safari. I'm using Modernizr (which is bundled with the highly recommended HTML5 Boilerplate) which reports that the Geolocation API is supported but I'm unable to even get any dialog asking the user for permission to geolocate (which is, if I read the draft correctly, REQUIRED to be implemented). Also, it seems that others (quite a few people actually) have had this same problem but I have been unable to find a solution yet. Below is a snippet from the code; in desktop Safari the PositionErrorCallback (the latter cb function) gets called after timeout but no luck with PositionCallback, no matter how long the timeout value is. Other tested browsers work as expected. Referenced in other places:

(Note to self: check if Google Gears, which is still installed, is causing this?)

[javascript] var position = null; $(document).ready(function() { if(!Modernizr.geolocation) { return; } navigator.geolocation.watchPosition( function(pos) { position = {}; position.lat = pos.coords.latitude; position.lng = pos.coords.longitude; position.allowed = true; init(); }, function(error) { position = {}; position.allowed = false; }, { enableHighAccuracy: false, timeout: 10000, maximumAge: 86400000 } ); checkposition(); }); function checkposition() { log("checkposition()"); if(!position) { setTimeout(function() { checkposition(); }, 1000); return; } else { if(position.allowed) { log("checkposition(): got position: " + position.lat + "," + position.lng); fetchephemeris(); } else { log("checkposition(): could not get a position, giving up"); $("#geolocate").hide(); } } } [/javascript]

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QUERY_STRING parsing in plain C

As far as I can tell (which, I'll be the first one to admit, doesn't count for that much) this code is so simple that there are no holes that could be exploited. 

  char * query = getenv("QUERY_STRING");
  char * pair;
  char * key;
  double value;

  if(query && strlen(query) > 0) {
    pair = strtok(query, "&");
    while(pair) {
      key = (char *)malloc(strlen(pair)+1);
      sscanf(pair, "%[^=]=%lf", key, &value;);
      if(!strcmp(key, "lat")) {
        lat = value;
      } else if(!strcmp(key, "lng")) {
        lng = value;
      }
      free(key);
      pair = strtok((char *)0, "&");
    }
  }

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