the (un)real thoughts of realbt

Today it was announced that Bell will be buying my co-op employer, 360networks/Group Telecom for $270-million.

From a /. article pointing here, I took the tiredness quiz to figure out at what point in the day I am most tired. Now, the fact that this is actually selling some scary product worries me, but the quiz did determine that I am most tired at 15:45, which is completely true, and when I start to feel quite sluggish and useless in the afternoon.

Doing some work on quizmeBC over the last week or so, and I ran into a particularly annoying form bug in Mozilla/Gecko browsers. It seems that if form elements are place inside and outside of a table, it will cause Mozilla to refresh the form’s state incorrectly upon reload or browsing back in history. In my particular situation, each selected radio button would move up one option in the radio group upon every refresh, until nothing was select any longer.

The fix was to move a hidden form element that existed outside of the table into the table. This stopped this weird and very annoying behaviour. It was certainly hard to figure out, and a little tricky to find on Bugzilla too.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working on a nifty little project to get my old USR modem to read caller ID. Unfortunately I’ve been running into some tough issues. For some reason or another, Telus has some sort of wonky caller ID standard that doesn’t conform with that which I have read elsewhere. What’s particularly weird about Telus’ method, is that the phone number is sent as data word type 3, and doesn’t include a byte to indicate length — unless the phone number is longer than 10 digits, in which case it does send a length byte. It’s very odd, and doesn’t make raw parsing very easy.

It’s back. But in a highly modified form. You will notice that I have deleted 95% of my entries. Why? Well, this blog is going to be used for commentary on more specific, technical-ish topics. I might move my personal archive somewhere else, I haven’t decided yet. But for now, the technical stuff is back.

I’ve also disabled commenting and most user-interactive features of the blog. I’ve left trackback/pingback enabled because this is something I still want to use myself (and you can’t have one without the other..).