Category Archives: Web Site Stuff

Dropping Freshmeat.net … for now!

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I have to admit that I am going to drop freshmeat.net from my news
feeds … for now.  I am really disappointed about this. 
From people not familiar with Freshmeat.net, it is a great resource to tracking Open Source projects, and updates to those projects.

I have relied on the Freshmeat
RSS news feeds for years now to learn about what is going on out in the
Open Source world.  It has been a tremendous resource for me to
learn about new projects, and even some old projects.  The feed,
although it is high-volume, contained a brief entry each time a project
was updated.

A few months ago (or less) they did a major change to their RSS feed
… and it’s for the worse, IMHO.  With the old feed, each entry
was the name of the project and a short description … not more than a
few words.  The new feed is a huge paragraph of text, along with
images!  My news aggregator is now overwhelmed with a flood of
constant paragraphs … more than I could ever hope to read! 
Bummer.

I contacted Freshmeat, and they indicated they are going to fix this
… but it’s taking too long.  I’ll have to drop the feed for now,
and check back to see when they fix it.  I’m not sure what they
were thinking when they did this … anyone who tracked the volume
would know that it’s too much to see and/or read …

Fedora Core up2date e-mail notices

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Fedora Core up2date e-mail notices. A friend and I were talking about how to get notices when there are
updates available for Fedora Core.  I have thought about this, and
taken the first step … to get daily notices of up2date status.

I simply added a script to my /etc/cron.daily directory called up2date.cron.  The script in this file is:

#!/bin/sh
up2date –nox -l | mail -s “Up2date Check” root

The -l option will list the available updates, and then pipe the results to mail.

After I have got a series of these that tell me that there are no
updates, I’m going to update the script to only mail me when there are
updates found.  Also, if I wanted earlier warnings at that point I
could check more often … but daily is good enough for now.

Installing PHP v4 and v5 on the same machine

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I am in the process of installing PHP v5 on one of my Fedora
servers.  I started to wonder if I can install PHP v4 and v5 on
the same machine at the same time.  I did a quick query on the
#PHP IRC channel on freenode … and was directed to the php-general
news group.  Someone indicated a good conversation in teh last week.

I did a quick look back through the web archives, and found the conversation here.  This thread is about the question:  php 4 & php 5

I’m reading it now …

Pictures and Radio … duh!

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Ok … as of last night I found a quick way to get images and pictures
into my blog posts.  I am taking a lot of these with my cell
phone, which I then e-mail to my laptop.  I save the picture to my
Radio “images” directory and they are automatically copied up to my web
server.  I can then use the Radio UI to go to the Folder page, and
browse to the picture … there is an icon next to the name that is the
URI of the picture on the server.

I can then create an HTML IMG tag like this:

<img src=”http://the.inevitable.org/anism/images/SamSkiing1.jpg” align=”right” height=100 width=100>

Using
the Radio rich editor, I select to “View HTML Source” and can
copy the tag into the HTML!  Of course I have to say that it could
be much easier!  I’m surprised that Dave Winer didn’t add a button
to the toolbar, similar to the “Insert Link” button, that would be a
“Insert Image” button.  It could pop a dialog that would prompt
for the URI, and a couple of these other values, and then simply insert
the formatted tag at the cursor location.

By the way, this particular image is my son Sam on his first time out
skiing at Park City Ski Resort here in Utah.  I took him skiing in
January and he had a blast.  At this time is was not quite two and
half years old … and he loved it.  I can’t wait to get him out
skiing more next year!

Sendmail issues

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I hate this … I forgot to blog a solution to a problem that I had
months ago.  I have slowly been upgrading a whole series of Linux
servers from various versions of Redhat (7.3, 8.0, 9.0) to Fedora Core
1 and 2.  A while back, when I did an upgrade, everything went
smoothly, except for the fact that Sendmail would not work properly
afterwards.

I remember that it took days of searching Google before I found some
solution … I believe it involved user or group rights on files or
directories, or maybe even some config change.  I just can’t
remember … but I know that it was a relief to get it fixed.

Last night I did a similar upgrade … and ran into the same Sendmail
problem.  Bummer.  I have searched through my blog and my
notes … and I can’t find any notes on what I did to solve this. 
How stupid …

Google Maps Hacking

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I love the Internet.  Not only can you find almost anything …
it’s all because almost anything is generated by people on the
Internet!  Of course … silly me … once there is Google Maps, there has to be Google Maps Hacking!

It will be interesting to see how Google looks to capitalize on
this.  If they try to stop it … they loose.  If they fail
to capitalize … they loose.  They are pretty good at figuring
this out … take the best hacks and create new services.  Add the
web services APIs that allow people to extend maps.

Postnuke woes

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I have been playing with Postnuke for a few weeks now, and I have to
admit that I am disappointed.  It is a very cool product, and has
a lot of functionality, however there are a number of key features
(IMHO) that just aren’t baked.

I installed Postnuke for a new web site that I have been working
on.  One of the core features of this site is a calendar of events
that I’ll be maintaining … and yet I can’t yet find a rich calendar
module for Postnuke.  I installed the PostCalendar module, and it
is very powerful … but just not completely baked, and there are a
large number of outstanding bugs.

One of the most important features that I want to have is the ability
to publish repeating user group meetings, and then customize the
individual instances with the meeting details as they become
available.  PostCalendar will not allow me to do this …

I’m now back looking for a good, complete Content Management System.

Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast

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This morning I went to Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast
here in Utah.  I guess it’s kind of a variation on a Geek Dinner
that Scoble does.  I really have come to enjoy them … there is a
lot of good conversation and thinking.  It seems that we just
wander in conversation about technology and it’s social implications
… going from one tangent to the next … sharing the cool stuff that
we’ve stumbled on over the last weeks,

This morning we covered a lot of ground as usual … there were a couple of good things that I took away from the conversation.

  • Phil pointed out 43Things.com … a very cool site of collective visualization.  It displays the top things that people are saying
    they want to do with in their lives.  It’ll be interesting to see
    how the most popular ones change over time.  It might just be a
    good indicator of some fo the true aspects of human behavior.
  • I brought up my interest in the Windows Peer to Peer Networking
    project.  I heard about this recently, in depth, at the VSLive!
    conference that I attended, and I realize that Microsoft is serious
    about getting this out in volume with the next version of
    Windows.  The Windows Peer to Peer SDK
    is out there now to experiment with … and it only going get
    bigger.  I believe that this is going to revolutionize the way
    that people share and access information … it is going to drastically
    impact DNS.
  • We also talked about firewalls, and issues with installation and
    configuration of operating systems.  Someone commented that there
    were few simple tools to allow you to manage iptables … so that an
    average human could understand what they are doing.  One of the
    Ekstroms (Sorry … I remembered the joke about usually having more
    Ekstroms there, and I forgot the first name!) suggested looking at KMyFirewall … I’m going to grab a copy and take a look!
  • I also asked for suggestions on a GPL blogging application, as an
    alternative to MoveableType.  I really like MovableType, how I
    want “free as in beer.”  I think that Phill offered up WordPress,
    which is the old B2.  Wow … this really looks nice!  I
    downloaded it and am going to install in on one of my new servers.
  • I also told people about my new Utah Forums web site … http://UtahForums.org  I am slowly developing a place to aggregate many of the tech and entrepreneurial events going on in Utah.

I keep thinking that Phil is right … we’ve got to turn some of these into a podcast.  They are a pretty fun conversation.

More dynamic collage applications

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My friend Todd Dailey just sent me a link to more applications similar to 10×10.
I have to warn that this one is very cool, however there are sometimes
images with nudity that some people would find offensive. It’s
not that it is designed to include these images … it’s just designed
not to discriminate.

As long as you are ok with a wide range of possible images, then you can go and look at WebCollage … an application developed by Jamie Zawinski.
Unlike 10×10 where the images are grabbed from news services,
WebCollage grabs images by doing random searches on various search
engines, and then finding the images on the resulting pages.
These images are then combined into a collage that updates about once a
minute.

Unlike visual collages, there are also the written collages … like DadaDodo. This project is creating text based on other text, in a format that is designed to “Exterminate All Rational Thought”. To see a sample you can click here.
I see this as a variation, at a lower level, to the concepts of
“multidisciplinary exposure” … something alluded to in the recent
book Medici Effect – Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and
Cultures.

Lastly, Jamie also refers to DriftNet … something I really want to install and play with! A version of EtherPeg for UNIX/Linux.

Ten By Ten

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I always like various ways that information is rendered
graphically.  I am a very visual person, and love to see images
that reflect and represent information.

Quite a while ago, I loved hearing about the use of EtherPeg
and its use at various conferences.  EtherPeg would monitor the
local network, and detect the images from the web pages that people
were looking at.  In real time, EtherPeg would display these
images on the screen as a constantly evolving collage of of activity.

Now there is Ten By Ten (or 10×10?)
which is a very cool way to view the current events of our society …
based on the RSS news feeds of some top sources of current-event
news.  If you go and view the site, you’ll see a 10×10 grid of
images that have been grabbed form the various news services, based on
the popularity of the words detected in news.  Move your mouse
over the images, and you’ll see the list of words … click on an image
and see the articles that contributed to that word and image making the
“top 100” for the hour.

It is projects like this that blend technology, society, and art … in
a way that I really appreciate.  It is both an experiment in
science, and a piece of art being molded by society.