Too Far Afield

Dort ist nach Angaben von Allison Singh, System-Engineer und Manager [bei Novell Südafrika], bereits die Beta2-Version des zum Jahresende erwarteten Novell Linux Desktops auf allen Rechnern im Einsatz. »Es funktioniert«, stellt er fest und wagt sogar die Voraussage, daß Windows zu einem Nischensystem werden wird, das nur noch von Leuten benutzt wird, deren Applikationen auf keinem anderen System laufen. Für die meisten anderen werde Linux zum Standard-System.

Quoted from Pro-Linux: Novell Linux Technical Resource Kit wieder verfügbar.

At work we finally managed to convert our FAQ section for our webhosting plans from phpMyFAQ to WordPress. We used WordPress for various customer blogs for years now, but we never imagined that WordPress could drive our FAQ system, too. The problem with phpMyFAQ mainly lay in two areas.

First, the cutomization took ages and what we had archived did not really satisfy us in the end, because we had to hack deep into the application to get at least a bit of webstandards support. That was really an issue for us as it likely produced more cluttered code and the potential for security holes rose to extremes. Also, we like our standards at work, believe me!

Second, the installation and update processes took much time in phpMyFAQ, too. Not only because we had to custimize everything, but because the famous 5-minute-installation of WordPress takes us only 3 minutes as we are experienced developers: Set up a new database, execute the 2-steps install script and there you go. Update your stylesheet and important templates, run the 1-step upgrade script and there you go. You can’t provide much shorter and more to the point installation tools, can you?

phpMyFAQ is such a large and overwhelmingly complex application with so much features we don’t need. We don’t want unprofessional comments on our FAQ entries. We don’t want PDFs on the fly. We don’t want these Microsoft-style How did it suit you? ranking boxes, no really! phpMyFAQ was way to complex for us.

Because we like it simple and to the point we chose WordPress. Searching the wonderful wiki documentation we found a total post count hack and a display five newest hack. Then we needed a new category page that displayed only the titles. We found that one two. So we made the switch.

It took us one night instead of 2 nights and 3 days and: We got 100% XHTML compliance in the end. Thank you WordPress people, thank you so much!

Sometimes you see a writing like the one I used in the title for this post scratched into wooden things or painted with an Edding on naked stone of some sights of high public interest. Just now I thought of these inscriptions. When I read a post at London Leben – a blog I highly recommend to everyone who likes London and wants to get some insights into things and places of whose existence you would’ve otherwise never known – a few minutes ago I thought: I was (t)here! In Das Dorf, dass fuer England starb Konstantin talks about an aera in Dorset in which big wooden signs indicate if the roads are open or closed for passage. Visiting H. Esquire during my summer vacation a few weeks ago (it is only a few weeks ago, although it now seems that it was much longer ago), we drove to a hill amidst this military exercise aera. On our way to this point where you usually have a nice view over the countryside, we came across a lot of those big signs where locks secured interchangeable smaller tablets, on which was printed either a white CLOSED on red background or a white OPEN on green background for each of the roads going away into the land from the coresponding juction. I neither knew of the history of the military firing area nor how long it existed and why it was accounted for that purpose. Now I know it and it makes me sad somehow. I hope the people of Tyneham finally found their peace with what happened to their land. Tyneham itself is now a museum. When I visited H. Esq. we didn’t get there though, because the road we would have used to get there was closed at that time.

A note by the editor: There are books on Tyneham, the lost heritage. However Amazon has no image in stock for these books, so I featured a German book called London Low Cost (rough translation).

A second note: If you’re around Dorset, just get there (to Tyneham, I mean). Be sure to have a look at Corfe Castle and the like. H. Esq. liked to direct his car into rural roads wondering where they would take him, back in 1975. That way he managed to get to know many nice places. The hill with the nice view over the country is one of them.

Eamonn’s Back to school with blogs might proof interesting for Mrs. B. She’s my ex class-teacher and always drools over new technology she could use in her class. Maybe I’ll drop her a mail tomorrow.

Due to license incompatibility issues Debian is not allowed to distribute Mozilla Firefox including it’s original artwork. That means you’ll get a Firefox without the original artwork by Jon Hicks, if you install it using the official Debian package. You get a globe instead the Firefox icon and you get an about dialog box with a background that differs from the origial version.

While I’m not going to get into the license issue and comment on yesterdays news, I found myself in the position of having some spare time today so among other things I decided to get decent icons for Firefox, at last. I considered my options: I could either get an official binary that has to be unpacked manually every time a new version gets out our I could get some Firefox icons and simply change the window manager icons pointing to Firefox once. The latter would enable me to still use the official Debian packages along with any Debian specific bug fixes or adaptations. So I went with that option and downloaded the official German Firefox for Linux package from the German Firefox Localization Project‘s page. After unpacking the tar archive I found two perfect Linux icons for Firefox in the firefox/icons directory of the package. Now I’ve got the original artwork, at least for the icons. Changing the about dialog seems a bit much work and is also not really necessary as you could easily imagine yourself.

That said I could find myself switch to the unpacking effort in the near future as Debian always needs weeks to provide new packages after Firefox is officially released by Mozilla.org (Note: I’m referring to the German build here, otherwise I don’t have any clue as to how long it takes to get new Debian packages out.)

And in other news: I switched window managers and desktops yesterday night. From now on I use Gnome and waimea instead of XFCE4. Also I now use gdm instead of xdm. Let’s see how long it takes until I switch back … Actually I’m very pleased of the setup process and already made myself feeling at home. Configuration is a lot easier with Gnome. The only problem: Apps tend to load a bit slower now. That’s why I originaly choose XFCE4. It is relatively light wight and not as difficult to configure as Fluxbox. However it is not much longer so I can live with it for the sake a better user interface experience.

Those of you using Mozilla Firefox under Linux have probably noted a few glitches. Imagine you launch a new Firefox instance and surf through your blog roll comprising about 40 or so blogs. Suddenly you get a phone call from a coworker that needs some advice with a web application project you’ve both been working on for an important client for quite some time now. To get yourself an impression of the problem you click on the Firefox button in your window manager’s panel to fire up another Firefox window because you’re living to saying of not mixing up private stuff and work. Now you’ll get yourself a wonderful “Choose a profile, please … Sorry the selected profile is already in use” experience.

Another common problem is when websites use the mailto protocol. On most Linux systems, this protocol is not recongnized without further ado. So the links simply don’t work.

This sort of glitches that bugged you for years (O.K. for a month only, but I like to exaggerate) are adressed by the Waikato Linux Users Group Wiki’s Mozilla Firefox Notes. The tips provided are short and nothing special, they are simply good tips. Thanks guys, well done! For those of you who are curious: Waikato is a province in New Zealand.

In case you’ve got any important tips for Mozilla Firefox users on Linux, may I suggest that you add them over there?

Mozilla and Firefox are registered trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Yesterday I experienced some problems with my telephone system. When calling someone I could hear him answering the phone with his last name awaiting a response from the person disturbing the peace of his life. Unfortunately when I introduced myself to the person I was calling, he could not hear me. After testing from a number of different phones and extensions throughout my house I finally realized that the problem had to be burried deeper somewhere inside one part of my various telephone equipment. So I spent the rest of the day and almost one third of the night unraveling and triaging the most part of that equipment until I finally found the problem. It was a loose contact somewhere in the main house line connecting my telephone system with the rest of the world and our local telephone service provider respectively.

After getting everything back to work again I found myself in the total mess in which I had left my telephone system, ISDN-NTBA, ADSL-splitter, etc. about four years ago when I worked on it the last time. So I thought I could as well get myself a hoover and some cabel tie and clean everything up a bit. My “spring-cleaning” ended up with downloading drilling jigs for the various devices and getting everything mounted and tied up right at the back of my desk. Now everything looks like a charm.

Also, you never know what you will find when you search old packaging material for user and installation manuals of your telephone system. I discovered an old Western Digital Caviar 35100 IDE hard drive seizing roughly 51.6 GB. I wonder if it still works…

This post’s featured book:
Telefon, Fax & Co installieren und optimal nutzen by Tobias Phele

After the New York Times, the Washington Post is the second important newspaper to rethink it’s coverage [1] of Bush’s war on terrorism. Albeit their publishers preconceived opinion – which is also very popular in German society – that the American media coverage of the Bush administration is for the most part one-sided and that the German coverage is way more “objective” I doubt that any German newspaper would feature a story that contains that much of self-critisism. Hats off, guys!

This post’s featured book:
Now they tell us! – The American press and Iraq by Michael Massing

[1] Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn’t Make Front Page, registration required, quick hint: Bug Me Not!

This is just a test. Feel free to buy the book anyways.

WordPress Plugin “WP-Amazon” [via Jason Kottke (per Evolt)]

Synchronizing the time of your computer is common practice on Linux. However, most distributions tend to use the ntp daemon to synchronize the time of a client. This seems to be a bit much for most systems. On my clients I use ntpdate. ntpdate even works for most servers. If you use Debian, just get it with apt-get.

1. apt-get install ntpdate

The default is to synchronize the time at system boot. If you use a client that is restarted often enough this works perfectly for you. If you do not restart your client regularly or you run a server that does not need to provide time service to other clients you may as well set up a daily (or even hourly) cron-job.

1. #!/bin/sh
3. # /etc/cron.hourly/ntpdate
5. # launch ntpdate for two servers (in case one fails)
6. ntpdate ptbtime1.ptb.de
7. ntpdate ptbtime2.ptb.de

Make your cron-job file executable.

1. chmod u+x /etc/cron.hourly/ntpdate

That’s it. Now the time will be set to the time of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (Physical Technical Federal Institute), that is responsible for maintaining the correct legal time in Germany. They provide time service for most radio-controlled clocks throughout Germany and Europe, too.

Thanks to K. today will become “C-Day“. Hope you got something like Firefox or Safari to see what it means…

K. is someone who – albeit he does not seem to fear big brother as much as M. does – uses GnuPG or its derivatives extensively for his regular email communication. (Just a sidenote: No, this is not going to be one of these special brain-teasers where you got to find out who is finally the murderer of someone else you never knew.) Back to topic: So K. was the one to force me into C-Day. The last time I got an email from K. he was kind enough to send it unencrypted as I just switched to an other operating system setup and had not found time to install (or merely configuration was the problem, installation would have worked out O.K.) GnuPG and Enigmail for Thunderbird, yet. That said guess what happened when I – about 1/2 year later – got another encrypted mail from K.? You’re right. Of course I had not found the time to install and configure GnuPG in between. Albeit other things I needed (and still need) to do urgently, I felt unwell telling K. that I had not been able to get everything up by now so I thought: “Why not do it right away?”.

I know, I know, you are waiting for the big sentence. Here it comes: And that was a failure. A miserable failure. Unfortunately this has been written down only to ensure you that I know what you were just waiting for. I have to tell you: I just made it and everything was fine. Sounds unusual, but it finally worked out like a charm.

However: After I had set up all the things and decrypted the mail K. sent I was a bit surprised. Actually it was about some certificates we use for secure mail services on our servers that had unfortunately expired. As I told you: Thanks to K. today is “C-Day”. And I’m right in the middle of it. I’m getting through slowly, however.

Well, the upgrade of WordPress worked quite seamless. I never had a shorter process and a better user experience. Simply good usability. The only problem was, that my style sheet was deleted. Until I find the time to make some changes you’ll find yourself with a standard layout for the most part. I already made a few adjustments to the templates. Stay tuned.