Tonight I set myself a challenge to redesign the look and feel of this blog without using any images. Lots of grey, lots of white space and all typography. And if you are viewing this on Linux it’s likely you’ll be treated to an eyeful of Deja Vu Sans+Serif Condensed – the sweetest open source font IMHO. Windows and Mac users get Helvetica, Arial and Trebuchet.
If you have direct access to your database you can change the number of recent comments that are displayed on your homepage in WordPress. I use phpMyAdmin to manage my database. Here’s what you need to do:
a:2:{s:5:"title";s:0:"";s:6:"number";i:5;}Of course, it’s quite likely that there is a setting for this in the admin panel that I’ve overlooked – I was unable to find it.
#! /usr/bin/python2.5
import os
mydir = "/path/to/directory"
mysearch = "text to find"
myreplace = "Text to replace"
def doReplace(filePath):
fin = open(filePath, "r")
s = fin.read()
fin.flush()
fin.close()
fout = open(filePath, "w")
s = s.replace(mysearch, myreplace)
fout.write(s)
fout.close()
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(mydir):
for f in files:
name, ext = os.path.splitext(f)
if ext == '.html':
doReplace(root + '/' + f)
Explanation: This will find all files ending in .html in the directory specified in mydir along with all matching files in any subfolders and will replace the text specified in mysearch with the text in myreplace. It’s only been tested on Linux but with a bit of tweaking will run on Windows and Mac.
Ever accidentally hit ‘send’ when composing an email before you’ve attached whatever file you were intending to send? And then you have to send a quick “DOH!” follow-up email with the forgotten attachment.
I do this all the time and it makes me look like a flaming eejit.
Well, a couple of weeks ago I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 and with it came an updated version of Evolution (the Linux equivalent of Outlook). They’ve added a feature that detects if you’ve typed the word ‘attached’ but not attached any files and gives you a warning. Brilliant!
For the last few months I have spent countless hours battling with the proprietary (and open source) drivers for my ATI Radeon X700 card under Ubuntu. Yesterday I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon and spent a good four hours trying to get my dual screen setup working again but without any luck.
So, this morning I decided to give NVidia a go and went and purchased a new Asus EN7200GS card for a miserly NZ$80. Success! Straight off the bat too. Well, almost. I plugged it in, enabled the restricted driver, restarted and enabled the second monitor and it’s all working perfectly apart from the fact that I can’t run the ge-whiz Compiz Fusion fancy interface. Everything else is nice though – I’m finally running Google Earth and Stellarium smoothly too.
ATI have been making noises for a while now that they are going to release open source drivers but I say too little too late. I won’t be going back to ATI for a loooooong time.
If you’re running Ubuntu, have two screens and don’t want to ever have to type sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf again then I recommend NVidia.
After experimenting with CakePHP, Zend, Ruby on Rails, Django, Turbogears, Pylons and DotNetNuke I have given up on lumbering MVC frameworks. The kind of work I do is either too small or too specialised and using a MVC framework is either massive overkill or I have to spend days trying to hack the code to join a database table in just the way I want it or connect to a webservice.
This kind of sweeping statement is not going to earn me a lot of friends. The people who are into these frameworks are devout to say the least.
Probably my biggest gripe is that the whole idea of a MVC framework is to have separation of Model, View and Controller but if you ever build a site using one of these frameworks and attempt to uncouple these components you’ll quickly see that the touted separation is not all it’s cracked up to be.
The idea of having a templating language is inspiring but the fact that there is no defined standard for templating means that Smarty only works with PHP, Kid only works with Python and so on. I take it back; XSLT is a standard but it’s got to be the ugliest, most convoluted language out there.
Defining your model is exciting when you’re starting a Hello World project from scratch but can be pretty tiring when you’ve had to make it fit an existing database that doesn’t conform to the pluralised, *_id-ised requirements of your particular framework. And on top of that you have to relearn your particular framework’s substitutions for the SQL you’ve already had to learn. “DRY” anyone?
Don’t get me wrong, the MVC way of working makes a lot of sense. I use mod_rewrite call a Controller file which in turn feeds data from my Model class to my View class. But I don’t make my Model speak anything other than SQL if I’m accessing a MySQL database and I use <?php ?> blocks in my templates if I’ve chosen PHP as my language du jour. Why learn two additional, less powerful languages?
I agree that there are many situations where you would be better off developing a large website using a traditional MVC framework but I would be under any illusion that it’ll be any more flexible a year down the track.
For me, redemption would come in the form of a standardised templating language and a standardised set of classes for models that easily integrate into existing databases as well as being able to generate new ones.
If you’re creating a small or a fiddly website then I would advise you separate your data from your logic from your presentation but steer clear of the lumbering behemoths that occupy the MVC space at the moment.
Nine months ago I downloaded the Live CD of Ubuntu 6.06 (aka Dapper Drake), burnt it to a CD, popped it into my CD drive, rebooted my PC and had my first experience with Linux.
My background is in graphic design. Originally in print but in the last seven years it’s been mostly new media and in the last two years I’ve moved almost exclusively to web development. I’d spent a little over a year working heavily in Visual Studio developing web applications and used Macromedia (now Adobe) Studio 8 Suite (especially Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash) for all things graphical.
I’ve always preferred Fireworks over Photoshop for web graphics. I like the ability to work with vectors and the amount of control you get for rendering them as images. I know plenty of other designers who love to use Photoshop for web graphics though and they seem to get on just fine with it.
For the times that I’d occasionally take on a bit of print work I’d use either Freehand or CorelDraw. Yes, yes, I realise that Corel doesn’t hold much esteem in the print design community but in my opinion it’s the best all-rounder for the PC. In my Mac days I used Quark and then later InDesign with Illustrator and Photoshop and while they’re a brilliant groups of products they’re not all they’re cracked up to be.
I became a registered Microsoft Partner a couple of years ago and benefited from the plethora of CDs with just about every Microsoft application. I used Project, Office, Visio, InfoPath, OneNote and Visual Studio on both XP and Vista. I also ran Virtual PC with various configurations of Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server.
I think what initially annoyed me about Microsoft was that I began to get into developing standards-based websites (X/HTML + CSS) and grew increasingly frustrated with Internet Explorer’s (and Visual Studio’s) blatant disregard for standards. If you’ve ever developed a website using standards-based CSS you’ll know exactly what I mean. This frustration pushed me towards the concepts of open source and before I knew it I had gone from being a strong Microsoft advocate to a rabid hater. And that was even before I discovered Slashdot!
So, back to Ubuntu.
After trying the Live CD (which I contend has got to be one of the greatest selling points – it embodies the open source ethic perfectly, you can give it a go and it won’t go messing up your entire system) I decided to install it onto a spare drive I had lying around. It was a rather steep learning curve and I came close to throwing the towel in on a number of occasions. I’ve worked with dual screens for years and there was no way I was going to even consider doing any productive work without them. I’ve got an ATI dual head card and had to quickly learn my way around gedit and vim with the xorg.conf file whilst looking for technical support on the web via my intact laptop.
On a positive note, I loved the way you could quickly download free software via the simple Add/Remove button on the menu and felt quite special when I learned to use the terminal and sudo apt-get install. I was generally impressed with the quality of much of the free software available but many of them weren’t quite as good as the applications I’d been using in Windows.
I trialled – and subsequentially purchased – VMware Workstation which I then built a nice, clean install of XP (is that an oxymoron?) plus all my favourite applications on. At least this felt safe. I could go back to the ‘old familiars’ any time I wanted and do away with my anti virus applications at the same time (that’s the beauty of snapshots!).
At first I tried to use gedit for hand-coding all my ASP.NET applications and continued to run and test them on an instance of Windows Server but after the unadulterated beauty that is Visual Studio’s Intellisense (I’m not kidding) this seemed a huge step backwards. I had had a little experience with Python and so tried a couple of frameworks like TurboGears, Django and Pylons using the excellent Wingware IDE but couldn’t find a reliable hosting company and lacked the knowledge to set up my own Python+Apache-based server. I then tried PHP and found that it was far better supported by the hosting companies. It’s an ugly, ugly language but it’s widely used and there are a ton of PHP-based apps out there. My first website in PHP was pretty horrid but it’s been reworked a couple of times now and I’m using Smarty templates and a nice MySQL class along with URL rewriting (which is a pain to get working in .NET if you’ve ever tried). Recently I’ve started using Eclipse rather than gedit for my PHP website too. Oh, and I’ve also used Texy for the family forum.
So, where am I at with Ubuntu these days? I’ve rebuilt my PC once and upgraded twice. I’ve overwritten my old XP hard drive and am using it as my work drive along with a separate partition for my home directory. I’m now only occasionally starting up my VMware instance of XP to use Macromedia Flash or Firework and I have an instance with all the versions of browsers for testing my websites. I’m occasionally using the Gimp in lieu of Photoshop but it’s still got a long way to go. I recently discovered Inkscape and used it to design a logo for a fairly substantial customer – it’s a very nice application and I look forward to the day it’s able to handle print-quality tasks and perhaps even the vector-to-bitmap tasks that I love so much in Fireworks.
I’m happy with Linux. I may try a different distribution when I’m a little more confident as well. My experience has been much better than I was anticipating but there are still a lot of areas that need improvement before I recommend it to anyone else who isn’t willing or able to edit configuration files.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that the Linux community is over-represented by bad logos and stupid application names (having a K on the front of every KDE app is lame and recursive acronyms will never, ever be cool). I guess that’s the price of freedom. There’s not the same pressure from the market to enforce the survival of the fittest in the open source community.
Long live open source and all the splendid mutations it spawns!
This is regarding the email application for Linux called Evolution, not some ethereal take on natural selection.
After hours of searching the web I found how to get spam filtering working properly in Evolution. First, make sure that the Spamassassin plugin is unchecked and that the Bogofilter plugin is checked. Now make sure you have bogofilter installed – go to the terminal and type sudo apt-get install bogofilter. You may have to restart Evolution for the new settings to take effect.
Now here’s the trick: Bogofilter needs to know what you define as spam and what you define as ham (not spam). I suggest you make a new folder and fill it with both real messages and spam messages. Mark all the genuine emails as important. Now select the all and hit Ctrl-J or mark them as junk. It’ll move them all to the junk folder and will remember that this is what you think spam is. Now you need to go to your junk folder and select all the ones you’ve marked as important (the ham emails) and hit Ctrl-Shift-J or mark them as not junk. It’ll now move all the good ones back.
I realise it’s really counter-intuitive but it’s the only way I’ve found to get it working. I’m not sure whether it’s OK to turn the Spamassassin plugin back on. If anyone has anything to add please let me know.
Create a website where people can post ideas and inventions with the sole purpose of putting them out in the public domain so that anyone can get on with making it happen. Apparently you can’t apply for a patent for an idea that has previously been published.
I reckon that the types of people who have ideas are not necessarily the types of people who will get off their arse to bring it to fruition.
Scenario 1. Ten people have ideas and each gets patented but only three of them manage to get their idea / product to market. Now each of them has to pay a premium for these products and seven of the products can never be used. Three people are partly winners because of the patent system but they also suffer from the same system by having to pay more for the other two’s products and by not having the other ideas / products available.
Scenario 2. Ten people have ideas but they release them all to the public domain. Six of the ideas are snaffled up by twenty different companies and competition brings the value of these ideas down to what they are really worth. The other four ideas don’t get used because they were not marketable in the first place. Now all ten people have access to the best ideas for a fair price. Everyone wins.
Patents bad. Sharing ideas good.
