Mon, 12 Nov 2007

Schizophrenic programmers

All of us are schizophrenic, as Binny V.A. points out. He should know! Yet I find myself in his post, too.

Posted on 12 Nov 2007 at 13:20 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

FTP client: sftp

I find I like the text-based sftp even better than the graphical gFTP. Austere? Perfect for me!

Posted on 12 Nov 2007 at 12:11 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Tor upgrade

I upgraded to Tor 0.1.2.18. Had to install libevent-devel and openssl-devel before the configure script ran all the way. Apart from that, a breeze.

Posted on 12 Nov 2007 at 12:05 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

A remarkable website

That's the website of a UK-based family business specialising in old music, above all recorders. The website is unusually well made, almost nerdy, and has a lot of links to interesting resources, e.g. a music dictionary or a collection of composers' biographies, but also unrelated stuff such as free software, online radio and a link to the UK national rail enquiries website. The world news section has links to news sites - and sudokus.

Weird. A webmaster's hobby-horse? Have a look yourself: www.dolmetsch.com.

Posted on 12 Nov 2007 at 10:29 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Sun, 11 Nov 2007

Updated the stylesheet again

I put more of the style info into the CSS file and made the name of the blog (at the top of the page) clickable - this makes it easy to go back "home" from wherever you are in this blog.

Posted on 11 Nov 2007 at 17:07 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Double slashes in RSS links

I just realised that I get those double slashes only in the RSS feed link on the main page, i.e. for the "root directory" - not in the RSS feed links for other directories (/technology/internet and the like). Seems strange to me!

Posted on 11 Nov 2007 at 17:02 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Picture gallery: yesterday's yacht tour

Photos we took yesterday are available here.

Posted on 11 Nov 2007 at 16:37 in /technology/photography. -- Permalink

Another blog I found on the way

That's Jason Clark's weblog, where I got the "moreentries" plugin for Blosxom.

Posted on 11 Nov 2007 at 15:04 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Website start page slightly changed

I made some changes to the start page of my site - mostly cosmetic, but I finally threw out the link to my Twitter page (which I've grown sick and tired of) and added some other links to make the page more usable. Above all, I added a link to this blog here.

Posted on 11 Nov 2007 at 13:56 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Sat, 10 Nov 2007

Activated my own e-mail account

I've activated an e-mail account, accessible by IMAP, on my own server. Step by step getting out of Google. I learned in the process that SpamAssassin is already installed on my server, I just had to click "Enable". Nice.

So from now on it's oliver dot engelen at tstigers dot net.

Posted on 10 Nov 2007 at 11:43 in /technology/e-mail. -- Permalink

An e-mail service provider

Probably very good, but definitely not cheap: US$ 11.34/month (1 GB, spam filter).

Posted on 10 Nov 2007 at 09:29 in /technology/e-mail. -- Permalink

Fri, 09 Nov 2007

Gmail supports IMAP?

Apparently it does! I have to explore this!

Posted on 09 Nov 2007 at 12:23 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

More about the Neo1973 phone

Details about that wonderphone are available at the OpenMoko wiki. I want that phone. Now!

Posted on 09 Nov 2007 at 11:29 in /technology/phone. -- Permalink

iPhone available in Germany

The iPhone is available in Germany from today - at a minimum monthly rate of 50 euros. Some love it, some hate it.

I'm waiting for the OpenMoko Neo 1973, which seems to be a much better deal.

Posted on 09 Nov 2007 at 11:10 in /technology/phone. -- Permalink

Thu, 08 Nov 2007

WordPress update

I updated the new English Amity website to the latest WordPress version. This took no longer than 20 minutes altogether - and this is without Subversion.

Posted on 08 Nov 2007 at 15:44 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

A pic

I somehow like this photo ...

Posted on 08 Nov 2007 at 15:06 in /technology/photography. -- Permalink

Creative lighting

Nils has pointed me to the so-called "Creative Lighting System": use your ultra-expensive digital camera as a remote control to fire lots of ultra-expensive strobes, which you have positioned all over the scene. Add some softboxes and reflectors to complicate things even further. No wires needed, and everything is measured in real time through the lens.

Yes, I know, putting a flash on your camera is evil ... Which is why I hardly ever use flash! I'm too lazy to carry a tripod, too, and call the result "available light photography".

Posted on 08 Nov 2007 at 14:04 in /technology/photography. -- Permalink

How to edit a file within WordPress

OK, that was easy again. Files in the folder of the theme which your WordPress blog is using will show up in the "Theme Editor" (in the "Presentation" section) if they have the file extension ".php". So I renamed the file "announcement" "announcement.php", changed the file which loads the announcement box accordingly - and that was it.

Posted on 08 Nov 2007 at 11:48 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

How can I edit a file within WordPress?

How can I get WordPress to display the file containing the Amity "announcement box" alongside the stylesheet, PHP files etc.? It would be nice to edit the announcement box from within WordPress, instead of downloading, editing and uploading it with FTP.

Posted on 08 Nov 2007 at 11:05 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Wed, 07 Nov 2007

Time zones (cont'd)

Two things that help with time zones:

• weltzeit.de, a website (in German)
• FoxClocks, a Firefox extension

(Cf. Time zones, on this blog.)

Posted on 07 Nov 2007 at 22:32 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Further fumbling with the stylesheet

I can't help it, the Linux standard "serif" font looks best to me for this. Which is why I changed the stylesheet in a probably unusual way, putting "serif" before some other fonts I like too. Don't know how much sense this makes - not very much, I guess, because browsers will just go for their standard "serif" font and ignore the rest.

Still, I'm not too happy with the rendering of Chinese characters in this setting. They were clearer when I used a sans-serif font.

Posted on 07 Nov 2007 at 22:26 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Blogs found on the way

I came across two potentially interesting blogs when I explored Blosxom:

• Todd Larason's Mt. Molelog
• Mark Ivey's Zovirl Industries

Posted on 07 Nov 2007 at 20:42 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Tue, 06 Nov 2007

Favicon

I stumbled over this "favicon.ico" file on my server, had a look at it, replaced it with my beloved moose ... Here we go (but you'll have to clean out your cache before you see any change).

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 17:49 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Added some style

I added a CSS file to this blog (whose only job, for the time being, is making the calendar a little smaller) and replaced "b" tags with "strong" tags for the title - in my ceaseless striving for web standards compliance. I guess with this Blosxom blog, there's still some way to go ...

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 17:35 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

WordPress blogging How-to - finished!

That didn't take long - just about 2 hours, and I already formatted my text using Word (blush ...) and printed it out. Which shows once again that WordPress is very well thought out and easy to use!

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 16:51 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Writing a WordPress blogging How-to

Since the new English Amity website is now up and running and I'm not the only person supposed to post articles there, I'm now in the process of writing a brief step-by-step manual:

• How to log in
• How to write an article
• How to save it as a draft and preview it
• How to publish an article
• How to upload pictures and integrate them into articles
• How to edit older articles
• How to edit the "announcement box"

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 14:24 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Subversion

Just in case I'll find out how to install it on my server, I put a link to the Subversion website here.

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 14:16 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Your subscription expired

My firewall and antivirus software subscription expired - 3 months ago, it seems ... so why do I get the order to renew it today? It's taking me hours to reactivate my account with the company (yes, I forgot my password, can you imagine!), renew the subscription, download the stuff (from a website which wants to run scripts from nine different sources!), install it, install the licence key ... The program which is supposed to download and install the thing doesn't work properly so I have to reboot the computer ...

After installing the software, I have to reboot again. Each time I reboot I get another reminder: Your subscription expired, please renew now. In the meantime, I have to make sure 4 times that they don't send me advertisements (spam, that is) in the future. Hey, this isn't even a free product! I'm paying for it! Finally the firewall and virus scanner are running again - and I'm informed that my registration is "pending". So I can't get updates, not even updated virus definitions. Great.

Finally, I can install the correct licence key and updates are downloaded. After that, I have to reboot for the third time.

Why on earth are we running Windoze at the office? Dreaming sweet Linux dreams ...

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 11:16 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Mon, 05 Nov 2007

RSS feeds don't quite work

Turns out it does matter that there are these double slashes. Firefox seems to ignore them and display the feeds all the same; Google Reader has a problem and can't subscribe me to such a defective feed.

Another problem: although the blog is now in UTF-8, the feeds aren't. Chinese characters aren't displayed properly in the feeds.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 18:49 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

RSS feeds seem to work

After quite a lot of "trial and error", the RSS feeds for this blog seem to work, too. See bottom of this page, or of any page here.

Strangely, sometimes there are double slashes in the actual link locations. I don't understand why they're there. They don't seem to matter though, clicking on an RSS feed link takes me to the feed alright. I don't understand this either.

It's great that Blosxom provides a separate feed for every category. Also, they're rather easy to get at (so you can add links pointing to them to a page) with the help of some variables.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 18:40 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

UTF - success!

Once again, that was easy. Simply putting a file named "content_type.html" into the Blosxom "data folder" on my server did the trick - this file makes sure that browsers recognise the character encoding as UTF-8. It contains just one line: "text/html; charset=UTF-8". A look at the FAQ and I got all the info I needed. 太好了！

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 18:18 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Aligning images with CSS

This is a very helpful page (part of SELFHTML).

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 17:26 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Serendipity

Yes, maybe I accidentally discovered something fortunate; but that's not what I'm talking about. What I mean is the content management system and blogging software named Serendipity (see the Wikipedia entry).

This just might be something for the remaining 3 Amity websites which haven't yet been redone - or, indeed, created: ANL, ANS and, "coming soon", the Hong Kong Chinese website (in traditional characters).

Other options are Plone (maybe too sophisticated?), Mambo and, alas, a commercial product.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 16:46 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Timestamps

Well, that was easy. There's the timestamp plugin - you download, unzip and put it into your plugins directory. This gives you access to quite a few variables, which you can then use e.g. in your "story" flavour file.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 14:31 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Time zones

Interesting. There's a Blosxom plugin which lets timestamps use a different timezone than the server. Configuring it for Hong Kong Time gave me a chance to learn a few things about time zones and POSIX (standards for UNIX systems).

So it seems our time zone here should be given as "HKT-8" because "HKT" is often used for "Hong Kong Time" and we're 8 hours ahead of GMT/UTC (Greenwich Meantime/Coordinated Universal Time).

Next step: how can I make sure that Blosxom actually displays timestamps?

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 14:07 in /technology. -- Permalink

Flavours and a calendar!

Well, in the meantime I found out how to use "flavours" in order to manipulate the look of a Blosxom blog.

Also, I found a plugin which creates a nice calendar (clicking on a day in the calendar takes visitors to the articles posted that day) and learned how to integrate it into the blog (you just need to put a line of code into one of your flavour files).

Once you've learned which files should go to which directories, it's really not that difficult anymore. And the combination of "lightweight" and "feature-packed" (to quote from the Blosxom homepage at Sourcefourge) is charming indeed. Simple as dirt and flexible as water!

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:57 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Fighting - cont'd ...

Quite a lot of the links to plugins from Blosxom's Sourceforge page are dead. Even though you can still find such plugins somewhere on the internet, it's not easy to get them to work.

For example, I just can't get Blosxom to encode its posts in UTF - which I need in order to display Chinese characters. With the relevant plugin, Blosxom returns a 500 page ("a server hiccup").

On the other hand, the "blox" plugin does a good job of inserting "paragraph" tags so I don't have to type them anymore. That's nice.

All in all, this whole Blosxom thing doesn't seem to be all that well maintained.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:53 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Fighting with Blosxom

Blosxom, described by its makers as "the zen of blogging", has a certain charme because it is so sparse.

Getting it to work properly, however, is far from easy - even though the documentation isn't all that bad.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:46 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Gnome Blog, Drivel, Deepest Sender

Gnome Blog still seems nice - works well, has a small "footprint", does what it's supposed to do and nothing else. Well, that's almost true: there are two things it should do but doesn't. First, it doesn't support editing (or deleting) older entries. (I could live with that.) Second, it doesn't support categories, so all entries posted using Gnome Blog get filed under "Uncategorized" and I have to use a browser in order to categorise them properly. Quite a pain! It seems to me that not using a browser is the whole point of using a blogging client.

Which is why I've tried Drivel. It has those two features, so that's fine. But how about multiple categories? If I want to file an entry under more than one category, it seems I still have to use a browser, log onto my blog and edit the relevant post. How much of an improvement over Gnome Blog is that, I wonder?

Moreover, when you edit a previous entry, the category setting will by default go back to "None" (which WordPress interprets as "Uncategorized") - something you have to remember every time you edit a post. That's stupid. Not to mention the name "Drivel", which is as repulsive as the photo which is displayed before you have logged on.

Deepest Sender, an add-on for Firefox, is the best client I've tried so far. It has a nice interface, which looks similar to the original WordPress "Write" and "Manage" pages, and yes! it has all the features I want. (Multiple categories don't work, however, when you edit a previous post! Grumble ...) Deepest Sender even lets you look at the HTML source of your entries.

OK, it's not a stand-alone blogging client. However, since it feels like one as long as Firefox is running (and on my computers it's running basically all the time), I'm willing to put up with that. So the only real drawback that I see is its weak support for images: apparently you have to upload a picture to your blog manually and then to type the path to it into a window in Deepest Sender. This is not good enough! But since I hardly ever post pictures ...

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:45 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink