Thu, 29 Nov 2007

Music and software in the evening

I listened to Richard Strauss's "Eine Alpensymphonie" tonight, which is a fairly powerful piece - but not as overwhelming as Schoenberg's "Pelleas und Melisande", which I listened to once more.

Meanwhile, Snort listened to traffic on our network for me. - I've started using lftp and also Nautilus (the file browser) for FTPing stuff to websites.

Posted on 29 Nov 2007 at 21:45 in /life. -- Permalink

Gmail POP works again

Apparently they fixed the problem - whatever it was. I hope it'll stay this way for some time. In the meantime, I changed my e-mail address for quite a number of newsletters, web accounts etc. to the e-mail account on my own server.

Posted on 29 Nov 2007 at 20:01 in /technology/e-mail. -- Permalink

Amity Newsletter online

With the latest issue already on the way to the printer (or so we hope!), I finally got round to posting the 3rd issue for this year. With the CMS we're still using for the ANL, posting articles and photos is always a terrible hassle. Very time-consuming, and it's all but impossible not to make any mistakes. The end product looks rather middling, too. Time to move on to something much better: Mambo? Plone?

Posted on 29 Nov 2007 at 12:43 in /work. -- Permalink

Password problem (3): Gmail

After configuring Thunderbird for Gmail IMAP, I receive a message saying that my "credentials" weren't correct. I guess that's IMAP slang for "authentication error" - the same problem. Gmail's help pages and Google Groups help group don't provide any clues either.

Best to get out of Gmail altogether, I guess.

Posted on 29 Nov 2007 at 10:35 in /technology/e-mail. -- Permalink

Password problem (2): Gmail and Thunderbird

Thunderbird, too, gets an authentication error message from the Gmail server when it tries to download e-mails. I still don't understand why this problem first appeared after I changed my Gmail password but it't pretty obvious now that something's wrong on Gmail's side.

Apparently the Gmail guys are having trouble enabling IMAP support for all users ("If the option to enable IMAP isn't available in your Google Mail account's 'Forwarding and POP' settings, you can enable IMAP for your account by simply enabling POP access. We're currently working hard to make enabling IMAP easier for all our users."). So maybe my problem is somehow related to that.

Posted on 29 Nov 2007 at 10:18 in /technology/e-mail. -- Permalink

Password problem: Gmail and Evolution

I changed my Gmail password, now Evolution Mail can't log on and download my e-mails anymore. That's extremely annoying and I've already spent more than an hour trying to solve this problem. I learned that in 2005 apparently there was a bug in Evolution which prevented the program from changing its saved passwords; I guess this has been fixed since. In any event, this is obviously not the cause of the problem I've encountered. I even changed my password back to what it was before; the error persists.

Is it a Gmail problem? Does Gmail's POP server return an authentication error although Evolution sends the correct username and password? Message forwarding to a different e-mail account isn't working either. But why would this problem start after I changed the password? Strangely, I can access my Gmail account on the web and Google Talk works fine, too.

Posted on 29 Nov 2007 at 00:00 in /technology/e-mail. -- Permalink

Wed, 28 Nov 2007

Lilies that fester

The flowers we were given 10 days ago are past their prime ... Lilies that fester ...

Posted on 28 Nov 2007 at 22:36 in /life. -- Permalink

Guide to intrusion detection etc.

A "compilation of resources that explain what intrusion detection and prevention are, how they work, troubleshooting, configurations and more", by SearchSecurity.com and SearchNetworking.com: Intrusion Detection and Prevention Learning Guide.

Also, 2 blogs which look promising: Conspicuous Chatter and TaoSecurity.

Posted on 28 Nov 2007 at 19:28 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

One-time-pad encryption

How to unbreakably encrypt a message using a "one time pad" and the Vernam algorithm - it's surprisingly simple, but there's one big drawback: since this isn't public-key encryption, how do you get the one time pad to the person who is supposed to decrypt your message? You have to make sure that nobody except this one person gets hold of the pad. Moreover, you have to use a different pad for every single message.

Posted on 28 Nov 2007 at 17:27 in /technology. -- Permalink

File upload - success

I got around the problem (whatever it may have been) by going back to the original files and folders and creating 2 separate .zip files from them instead of 1. The drawback of this solution is that it isn't foolproof: the person who is supposed to download and unzip the stuff may easily put them in 2 different places, which will wreck the whole thing. Foolproof or internet-proof, which do you prefer?

Posted on 28 Nov 2007 at 16:35 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Failed file upload (2)

Hmm ... Now, after 98%, I get a "Broken pipe" and "Remote site local filesystem disconnected" message. And I can't get over this point. What the heck is wrong here?

Posted on 28 Nov 2007 at 15:22 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Failed file upload

We tried to upload a file of about 110 MB to the server - and, at the office, got nowhere. The connection broke so often that we just had to give up after reconnecting to the server for several dozen times. In the end, the connection broke after just a few seconds and this didn't get any better. Was it a problem with FileZilla? With Windoze? A (probably temporary) problem with the internet connection at the office? At home now, I'm trying again - and it goes through without a hitch. 93% of the file are on the server already.

Posted on 28 Nov 2007 at 15:18 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Salt (2)

Two lovely introductions to the concept of salt etc.: one at hackerthreads.org, the other at ASPHeute.

Posted on 28 Nov 2007 at 13:53 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Tue, 27 Nov 2007

Salt

Salt is very closely related to the concept of nonce. I like Wikipedia. I also like the term "dictonary attack". I enjoyed reading an article about using Google for such an attack. Light Blue Touchpaper: another blog found on the way, and definitely one I'll go on reading. Hat tip to Schneier.

Oh, and the radio recording was OK.

Posted on 27 Nov 2007 at 17:31 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

FTP extension for Firefox

FireFTP works really well - and it's nice to be able to upload files to your server and see the results right away without ever leaving Firefox.

Posted on 27 Nov 2007 at 14:44 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

The elusive quest for productivity

Or should it be "quest for elusive productivity"? - I need neither boss nor staff meeting in order to get hardly anything done at work. Spent the whole morning putting up 4 links and making tiny changes to the stylesheet of the new Amity website.

(Boss and staff meetings do help though. It's difficult to bring down everything without them.)

In an hour, I'll start recording my radio thing.

Posted on 27 Nov 2007 at 14:34 in /work. -- Permalink

Mon, 26 Nov 2007

Creating RSS from HTML (2)

Been there, done the learning, got the T-shirt. I wrote a PHP script, part of which I adapted from something I found (so I didn't actually do all the learning ...), which reliably produces the XML data I need for an RSS feed. These data are the output of the script when it is called; additionally, the script writes this output to a separate file named "index.rss". Strangely, Firefox syntax highlighting (in source view) doesn't work for this latter file - although it does for the former, which is named "index.php". Firefox also displays both files correctly, the result looks just like what you get when you open any out-of-the-box feed in the browser.

Google Reader, however, doesn't like my 2 files - it recognises neither the feed title nor any items. What I get is a feed named "(title: unknown)" without items. The markup looks exactly like the markup of another feed I have which works perfectly fine with Google Reader.

Might there be anything the matter with file headers which I don't understand? I just don't get it at all!

Posted on 26 Nov 2007 at 20:30 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Creating an RSS feed from an HTML file

I was rather surprised to find that PHP does not offer ready-made functions for parsing HTML, something similar to simplexml etc. for XML. OK, it's not so difficult to read an HTML file and hack it to pieces with regular expressions. But still ...

First of all, in order to get something to display for all 6 boxes on my new feeds page, I wrote an RSS file by hand for my photo galleries. This does the trick - but of course it would be so much nicer if I didn't need to update more than one file when I add another photo gallery. A PHP script should take this one file and produce a corresponding XML file whenever it is called.

Obviously, the perfect solution would be a PHP script which looks at the photo galleries directory and produces both an RSS feed and an "index.html" file on the fly. PHP has nice file functions! Yet where would the title of each feed item come from? Anyhow, for now I still have plenty to learn from trying to extract the relevant information from an HTML file and embed it in an XML file.

Posted on 26 Nov 2007 at 16:29 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

My old laptop

That's an ancient Toshiba Satellite 1800, running SuSE 10. It served me well during our Gütersloh years (when we were proud owners of a 56k modem), and especially when we were teachers at Tai An (the Windows XP part of my dual boot system - with Knoppix - crashed on our very first day in China; I went for Linux only: Xandros, later Kanotix, finally SuSE). In Tai An we had our first broadband connection and our computers were our windows to the world. Skype was new in those days.

I went back briefly to Windoze XP because it was preinstalled on the ThinkPad I've used for a year now. Then that too crashed - good riddance. Ubuntu was what I could install on the machine without any hassles, so that's what I went for. Have been 99% happy with it ever since. Wireless internet became a problem at some point, that's the only drawback. Except for the lack of something like Quicksilver, of course. But Windows? On my own computer? Only over my dead body. It's bad enough I have to put up with it at work.

I don't actually use my old laptop anymore - well, yes, occasionally, just for fun. I do, however, keep SuSE updated. It doesn't seem right to stop feeding the old workhorse. After all these years.

Posted on 26 Nov 2007 at 12:23 in /life. -- Permalink

Sun, 25 Nov 2007

Creating a feeds page with PHP

Fed up with dysfunctional downloadable scripts, I sat down and wrote some code to fetch and display my feeds. No need to look at the K2 sidebar widget.

Turns out that PHP has all you need - and what you need is no more than one specialised function: simplexml_load_file(). Any object created with this function has properties which are the XML nodes, e.g. ->channel, ->channel->item->title or ->item->link (depending, of course, on the structure of the XML file in question). Throw in a few control structures (if, foreach) and string functions (strlen, substr) and you're done. Tweaking the stylesheet so the output of my script is displayed nicely took me more time than writing and testing the script. I found the relevant chapter of the PHP manual at PHPBuilder very useful.

Since del.icio.us publishes an RDF feed, not a "normal" RSS one, I had to come up with 2 different versions of my "fetchFeed" function. (In an RDF file, an "item" is a child of the document - in an RSS file, it's a child of a "channel", which in turn is a child of the document.) Adapting the function to Atom or whatever is probably easy, too.

Posted on 25 Nov 2007 at 15:59 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Sat, 24 Nov 2007

Tweaked the "blox" plugin ...

... so now it creates <br /> tags instead of <br>. I'm using the following as a test:

a line
another line
a third line

Posted on 24 Nov 2007 at 13:10 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Changing the date (etc.) of a file

Well, that was easy ... "touch -t 200711131100 filename" will change the date of this file to 2007 (year), 11 (month), 13 (day), 11 (hours), 00 (minutes). So, after correcting it, the relevant post goes back to where it came from. Nice to have shell access!

Posted on 24 Nov 2007 at 12:38 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Blosxom and W3C standards

I managed to tweak a few of my Blosxom files so that this blog is now "virtually" free of errors - it "almost" validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I learned that the "blox" plugin, which automatically inserts <p> and <br> tags so you don't have to type them all the time, doesn't work properly when a paragraph starts with a tag (e.g. an <a href= ...>) and inserts <br> tags instead of (XHTML-compliant) <br /> ones. Also, it's best to escape characters like &.

When I corrected some of my posts and put them on the server again, of course they ended up on top of the stack - were posted with today's date. That's not what I want. So now I'm looking for a way to manipulate file dates on the server.

Posted on 24 Nov 2007 at 12:24 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

New homepage

I rewrote the index.html of my website from scratch. No more picture (of an onion which looks like a pig ...) but a portal: links to my web pages, both on site and elsewhere, plus the inevitable link to Tor. (I got the idea for the look and structure of the new homepage here.)

Posted on 24 Nov 2007 at 11:41 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Fri, 23 Nov 2007

Creating a feeds page - stuck

After trying several free PHP scripts, I'm giving up - at least for the time being. These scripts either don't work at all (produce fatal errors) or create HTML code that's dysfunctional in a ridiculous way (most of the code comes after </body></html>). I really don't feel like repairing something so utterly rotten.

The next step might be to try and figure out how the RSS sidebar widget of K2 works. First problem: where in the K2 code is this?

Posted on 23 Nov 2007 at 19:09 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Creating a feeds page

I'm trying to create a web page which will display several of my RSS feeds, in neat boxes sitting next to each other. Creating the boxes is, of course, no big deal with CSS. In order to convert the XML feeds to HTML which can then be displayed in the boxes, I need a script (preferably written in PHP). I'm too lazy to write such a script from scratch - although I would no doubt learn a lot in the process. So I'm looking for a script to download, which I can then adapt to my needs.

Posted on 23 Nov 2007 at 17:28 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

First steps with Quicksilver

I spent several hours last night and some more time this morning configuring Quicksilver on B.'s computer. I already feel that Linux is a flawed system because it doesn't offer anything like it! It's enormously useful - so fast, so intuitive, so powerful. The only plugin I just can't get to work properly is the "Shelf" - which, some say, is even more useful than just about everything else. B. likes Quicksilver too, even though she still sometimes starts a program by clicking an icon.

Posted on 23 Nov 2007 at 13:00 in /technology. -- Permalink

Thu, 22 Nov 2007

Photo Matt

The blog of Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress.

Posted on 22 Nov 2007 at 13:56 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Making WordPress more secure

A whitepaper titled "How to create a secure WordPress install", and some criticism from Dougal Campbell (Geek Ramblings, a blog with a great header image).

Posted on 22 Nov 2007 at 13:55 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

An Irish photo blog

A blog full of (mostly) good digital photos, many of them taken in Ireland: In Photos dot org, by Donncha O Caoimh, a software developer.

Posted on 22 Nov 2007 at 12:13 in /technology/photography. -- Permalink

Growing up during the Cultural Revolution

A book review (in the Christian Science Monitor) of a young-adult novel about a girl growing up in China during the "Cultural Revolution": "Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party", by Ying Chang Compestine.

Posted on 22 Nov 2007 at 11:37 in /china. -- Permalink

Wed, 21 Nov 2007

Helpful CSS pages

Two of them: a CSS cheat sheet and a collection of elegant templates which you can simply copy & paste.

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 18:33 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

WP-SpamFree

Is this plugin for WordPress even better than Bad Behavior? For the time being, I'm really happy with the latter.

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 17:49 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

"What makes you happy?"

That's what tamba2 asks in the title of his blog. He seems to be an interesting guy - more interesting than you would think when you read only his blog entries, not his "About" page.

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 17:11 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

delicious bookmarks on my blog

I integrated my del.icio.us bookmarks into my "entries" blog, in the form of a "tag cloud". Also, I modified the "My other sites" page, adding screenshots and photos. My server is extremely slow - why?

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 17:03 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Cleaning up a delicious mess

I'm trying to get my del.icio.us bookmarks under control - there are so many which I will never need again, or which don't even work anymore. Above all, there are way too many tags: 140 or so!

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 14:59 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Writing my "Minutes" radio broadcast

I'm working on the "Minutes that Matter" broadcast, which I'm supposed to record in a few days. Rather unexpectedly, I'm actually getting somewhere. My text is slowly taking shape and if my inspiration stays with me for another couple of hours, I just might finish it today. It helps that the song I chose for the broadcast (Johnny Cash's "What on earth will you do") is short: just above 2 minutes. So I have enough time to say something which sort of makes sense.

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 13:44 in /life. -- Permalink

Tue, 20 Nov 2007

New look for this Blosxom blog

I couldn't keep my fingers off the stylesheet - now just about everything looks different here from before. Colours, fonts, sizes, boxes, backgrounds ... And it's still a simple "text only" blog. I like it this way.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 21:40 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Changed sidebar font size - success!

I came back to the problem of font size in the sidebars of the Amity website once more and finally figured out how to make the links to other (Amity-related) websites more prominent while leaving the fonts in all other parts of the sidebars just as small as I want them. An unexpected success! And this is a solution which I'm happy to live with.

.widget_links a { ... } did the trick. This selects only those links which are part of the division whose class is "widget_links". Once more, what would I ever do without the "CSS sidebar" of SelfHTML?

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 19:27 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Deezer (2)

After listening to a few songs, I'm somewhat underwhelmed by the sound quality on Deezer.com. Johnny Cash songs sound overamplified (but I guess it's just a low-quality sound file they're using). Also, the music gets interrupted quite often, which appears to be a server-side problem: my internet connection is really, really fast. These problems just might disappear if I created an account - but if they persisted, what would I want with one?

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 18:54 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink