Not having the time nor will power to attempt to further document the internals of my web site, I have opened a few source directories for public access. Hopefully they may be of some use to others.

# nb --version
NanoBlogger 3.3 RC5

• NanoBlogger template directory: …/templates/.
• NanoBlogger configuration: …/blog.conf.
• Style sheets: …/css/.

Sadly, I believe that most personal finance software is as deserving of my faith (in its reliability) as the old copy of Windows 98 hiding somewhere in the closet. A quick look at a friend's current version of Quicken is enough to remind me that conventional consumer software—once considering bugs, backups, and presentation—can often feel more cumbersome than performing the same task with pen, paper, and mental concentration…

About the same time I was trying to settle between using GNU Cash and just creating a checkbook-like spread sheet in Emacs `ses-mode', I happened upon a command-line finance application that could actually meet the requirements of speed, simplicity, data integrity, and statistical power. Appropriately named `ledger', this seemingly modest application performs everything from checkbook balancing and stocks to forecasting and detailed graphs; all with plain text and the command-line, regular expressions included. Thank you John Wiegley for providing the world with a first quality, well designed, accounting program!

Now using `ledger' regularly, my only regret was losing the spread sheet-like “feel” of rapidly entering data into columns. So I created ledger-indent.el, a small Emacs library that supplements the current CVS version of ledger.el by providing some forced indentation, including a right-justified unitary amount column. Using this code, writing tidy ledger entries is further expedited by simple use of the TAB key.

The following files demonstrate some additional setup of `ledger' with Emacs, including prevention for a tiny cache bug I found in `ledger': …/ledgerrc, …/ledger.sh, …/set-ledger.el.

The plugin is only tested with Emacs 22.0.91 (cvs) and Muse 3.02.93, but should work with all Emacs versions supported by Muse. The Emacs Muse plugin for NanoBlogger is: .../muse.sh. You will need to read the comments and modify the file accordingly. Two scripts must be created within the nanoblogger installation directory, under plugins/.

For an example of a Muse-formatted blog entry, you can view the original data file for this page: 2006-12-26T22_26_15.txt. To then default to using the muse plugin in NanoBlogger, you can change your default authoring format in blog.conf:

ENTRY_FORMAT="muse"
ARTICLE_FORMAT="muse"

To configure Emacs to automatically enable muse-mode for editing NB entries, use something similar to the following lisp code:

(autoload 'muse-mode "muse-autoloads" nil t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist
             '("[0-9]*-[0-9]*-[0-9T]*_[0-9]*_[0-9]*\\.txt\\'" . muse-mode))

As visits to this site increase each month, I have been observing my SSH latency increasing to absurd levels, with RTT reaching into the minutes. I even experienced typing half of a document page—and waiting in dire suspense of losing the paragraphs to the Internet abyss.

The primary networking solution would be to configure traffic shaping in my Linux router—but most methods that I have tried in the past involved a harry mixture of custom packet tagging and queuing without much for high-level configuration. One example would be ultimate-tc which never worked correctly for me without considerably reducing my overall bandwidth.

Using shorewall’s more high-level configuration and some experimental networking measurements, I determined an over-specified set of rules to give dedicated precedence to SSH when competing with other traffic.

First, the available bandwidth of the external network interface is significantly over-estimated to prevent the router from ever limiting the network bandwidth.

#/etc/shorewall/tcdevices
#INTERFACE   IN-BANDWITH  OUT-BANDWIDTH
 $NET_IF     10000kbit    500kbit

My actual bandwidth is somewhere near:

#             7000kbit    400kbit

Second, high-frequency protocols are assigned Type of Service (ToS) tags to classify their desired network behavior. The catch-all source, destination, and dual port forms are deliberate as I wish for the rules to apply for any communication of a particular protocol, regardless of client/server or lan/Internet relationships.

#/etc/shorewall/tos
#SRC  DEST PROTO  SRC       DEST
          PORT      PORT      TOS

# max responsiveness (min latency)
 all  all  tcp    -         ssh       16
 all  all  tcp    ssh       -         16
 all  all  tcp    -         ssh-alt   16
 all  all  tcp    ssh-alt   -         16
 all  all  tcp    rsync     -         16
 all  all  tcp    -         rsync     16
 all  all  tcp    imaps     -         16
 all  all  tcp    -         imaps     16
# max reliability
 all  all  tcp    -         ftp       4
 all  all  tcp    ftp       -         4
 all  all  tcp    https     -         4
 all  all  tcp    -         https     4
# min cost / priority
 all  all  tcp    ftp-data  -         2
 all  all  tcp    -         ftp-data  2
 all  all  tcp    http      -         2
 all  all  tcp    -         http      2

In and of themselves, the ToS tags provide some noticeable network improvements when SSH'ing from friends' computers connecting to the same ISP. I assume the only explanation would be that my ISP's routers observe ToS to a limited extent, which is helpful, but not really adequate as I frequently connect across multiple ISP networks.

Third, to enforce ToS internally, I specify the dedicated and capping bandwidths for each ToS class, TCP ACK packets, and any unclassified traffic (‘default’). Shown previously, the download bandwidth was over-specified by a larger ratio than was the upload bandwidth; this prevents any limiting of the download bandwidth and loosens prioritization while downloading, but more tightly enforces upload priorities.

#/etc/shorewall/tcclasses
#INTERFACE  MARK  RATE      CEIL       PRIORITY  OPTIONS
 $NET_IF    1     full*2/3  full       1         tos=0x10/0x10
 $NET_IF    2     full/2    full       2         tos=0x04/0x04
 $NET_IF    3     full/4    full       3         tcp-ackn
 $NET_IF    4     full/5    full*8/10  4         default
 $NET_IF    5     full/10   full*6/10  5         tos=0x02/0x02

With these settings, download networking latency is slightly reduced and bandwidth is unaffected. The upload latency, the original problem, is drastically reduced. Upload bandwidth is rigidly prioritized between protocols, and SSH will steal up to ~60% of the network responsiveness and bandwidth from other protocols automatically. And when there is no competition, each protocol is still able to consume near 100% of the network upload bandwidth.

Now, quite happily, all of my remote sessions remain responsive, regardless of the number of people (or bots) browsing site content; and without noticeably reducing any portion of the network bandwidth.

;; Redefines "C-x o" to behave like 'other-window' while also
;; remembering the previously selected window.
(defun other-window-history  (&optional x)
  (interactive "P")
  (setq toggle-window-prev (selected-window))
  (if (equal x nil)
      (other-window '1)
    (other-window x)))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x o") 'other-window-history)


;; By calling other-window-toggle, two windows can be rapidly switched
;; between with a single key sequence, definied below.
(defun other-window-toggle (&optional x)
  (interactive "P")
  (if (not (boundp 'toggle-window-prev))
      (if (equal x nil)
          (other-window-history 1)
        (other-window-history x))
    (let ( (y toggle-window-prev) )
      (setq toggle-window-prev (selected-window))
      (if (equal toggle-window-prev y)
          (if (equal x nil)
              (other-window-history 1)
            (other-window-history x))
        (select-window y)))))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-o") 'other-window-toggle)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o") 'other-window-toggle)

The source also available at: conf-windows.el.

Other elisp code snippets available at: …/elisp-snippets/.

First, every document contains a pair of conditional comments to instruct Internet Explorer to load non-standard style sheets. This “invalid” styling provides compensating formating to “correct” IE's rendering blemishes. As these issues are similar in quantity, yet different, between IE versions 6 and 7, a style sheet is needed for each version.

<!--[if lte IE 6]><style type="text/css" media="all">
@import "/css/invalid_ie6.css";
</style><![endif]-->

<!--[if gte IE 7]><style type="text/css" media="all">
@import "/css/invalid_ie7.css";
</style><![endif]-->

Second, I duplicate each static XHTML 1.1 page and rewrite its DOCTYPE as XHTML 1.0. On my site I use the extension .html for files have that have XHTML 1.1 doctypes and .htm for files that have older doctypes.

sed 's!DTD XHTML 1.1!DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict!'$'\n'\
's!TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd!xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd!'$'\n'\
's![<][?]xml .*[?][>]!!' \
file.html > file.htm

Third, to force IE to use the .htm documents, I configure Apache's mod_rewrite to redirect IE browsers to the equivalent .htm document of each page. This rewriting applies to all static content, which is every page not found within the Blog at URI /blog/.

# set file extensions I like to the MIME types appropriate to their
# doctype content (as per the W3C specs), XHTML 1.0 serving as
# traditional HTML and XHTML 1.1 serving as XML.
AddType text/html .htm
AddType application/xhtml+xml .html

# Force all versions of MSIE, and only MSIE, to use the web pages with
# older doctypes. No other popular browsers seem to require this.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteOptions inherit
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml\+xml
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MSIE\ [123456789]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.{0,30}/blog/{0,70}$
RewriteRule ^(.{0,100})/$ $1/index.htm [R]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml\+xml
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MSIE\ [123456789]
RewriteRule ^(.{1,100})\.html$ $1.htm [R]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml\+xml
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MSIE\ [123456789]
RewriteRule ^$ /index.htm [R]

Fourth, I perform a combination of the above DOCTYPE and MIME adjustments with the following PHP code. This only applies to the PHP-enabled pages with extension .phtml—mainly the Blog pages which already use PHP for the commenting system.

<?php
$serv = isset($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"]) and isset($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]);
$cond0 = strlen( stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "MSIE ") ) > 0;
$cond1 = (! stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"], "application/xhtml+xml"));

if ( $serv and $cond0 and $cond1 ) {
  header("Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
  echo '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"'
   . '"http://www.w3.org/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">';
 }  else {
  header("Content-type: application/xhtml+xml");
  echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>';
  echo '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"'
   . '"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">';
 }
?>

It is quite unfortunate that all of this is needed just to support Internet Explorer. Were I only concerned with standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and Opera, I could have skipped the above and simply added this one line in Apache's configuration:

AddType application/xhtml+xml .html

For the curious, the minimalistic PHP software used to facilitate the commenting is blogkomm with some significant modifications, including support for valid XHTML 1.1.

Fortunately, xmlunicode provides a variety of Unicode entry methods that do not require numeric memorizations. With some quick coding, I bound the interactive input methods to familiar key strokes—similar to those used by Unibyte Editing. A minor mode is used to toggle automatic “word processing”-style punctuation, including smart quotes, ellipses, and em/en dashes.

My binding code in all of its simplicity:

(autoload 'unicode-character-insert "xmlunicode" "" t)
(autoload 'unicode-character-shortcut-insert "xmlunicode" "" t)
(autoload 'iso8879-character-insert "xmlunicode" "" t)

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x 9") 'unicode-character-shortcut-insert)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x 7") 'iso8879-character-insert)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c 9") 'unicode-character-insert)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c 7") 'smart-chars-mode)

(define-minor-mode smart-chars-mode
  "Toggle SmartChars unicode punctuation mode." nil " SmartChars"
  '(("\'" . unicode-smart-single-quote)
    ("\"" . unicode-smart-double-quote)
    ("\;" . unicode-smart-semicolon)
    ("\-" . unicode-smart-hyphen)
    ("\." . unicode-smart-period))
  (if (not (commandp 'unicode-smart-period)) (load "xmlunicode")))

The source also available at: smartchars.el.

Other elisp code snippets available at: …/elisp-snippets/.

The syntax is quite simple:

[p]  /bible  [option] <query>

Running diatheke lookups in WeeChat

       -c :  print output to channel, instead of local
  -n nick :  print output to channel, preceeded with nick
       -r :  repeat last query to channel (no new query)
  -r nick :  repeat last query to channel, preceded with nick
nick<:|,> :  print output to channel, preceded with nick     
  <query> :  JD BibleBot line, use 'help' to see what is available

More information and the code may be found at: …/diatheke4IRC/.