yoIT

This is an article for a blog carnival started by Aaron, the starter post can be found here. If you don’t know exactly what a blog carnival is, read the wikipedia article about it.

I think that blogs, in their form as personal blogs from individuals, mostly enrich the internet by giving their oppinions about various topics. Their oppinions are the core of blogs, but people also blog howto’s, ideas and real stories. This things are often connected in one post and this gives a fine mixture.

People benefit from blogs in a various ways. People looking for specific informations (like howto’s) often get very personalized but still usefull things back. For people who are investigating a specific topic, blogs offer a source of different (and often very profound) opinions about things. A downside of blogging is often the lack of pure facts. Blogs mainly don’t offer definitions or neutral explanations of stuff

This was my opinion about “who benefits from blogs?”. If you blog yourself, consider writing also about this topic and link back to the original or my article here

From an article of smashingmagazine.com I got the idea of starting to program PHP with using the framework CodeIgniter. CodeIgniter (CI) should make it very easy to develop applications.

Actually I don’t have any real ideas what I could do, but I will simply work along the documentation/tutorial and maybe create a blog system or something like that. The only real idea is a blog system where articles are saved as simply text files, which can be both simply viewed as files or are integrated in some sort of blog or template.

I have set up a subdomain, so I can put working applications there. Currently only a index.html lies there, but this should change really soon.

For a short overview I will present my currently used widgets and plugins, maybe it will help someone.

Plugins

Advanced Category Excluder

Advanced Category Excluder is a plugin which excludes posts in specific categories from various things. I use it to keep my microblogging category out of the general RSS feed.

Login LockDown

Login LockDown got installed after my site has been hacked (which, by the way, was the fault of my provider I think now). It locks the login page after you enter the password wrong for 3 times. This can be disabled by simply deleting the plugin via FTP.

No Self Pings

No Self Ping is a very small plugin without configuration, but it effectively prevents pingbacks to your own posts, if you link to your own posts. The pingbacks can also be prevented by using relative URLs, like this: href=”?p=187″

StatPress Reloaded

StatPress Reloaded is my plugin for gathering and displaying statistics about my page, in special visitor counters and so.

Subscribe to Comments

Update:

Subscribe to Comments is a little plugins, that adds an button to your comment section, so that commenters can receive emails of follow-up comments.

Widgets

List Drafts Widget

List Drafts Widget simply lists the titles of the current drafts. It is a preview for visitors, to motivate them to visit again.

Advanced Category Excluder Widgets

These are some widgets to list categories, so you can organize the categories that are displayed in the listening. This enables you to exclude categories from listing or recent comments

I just received news of a really cool device. The TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington had the idea of a very cheap, low end tablet which boots right into a browser. This alone seems awesome, but it also is open source which makes it even more awesome. The device I am talking about is actually the second prototype of his idea. I am glad to show you the TechCrunch Tablet Prototype B.

It really is bare bone. On the outside, which is 1,3″ (=3.3cm) it consists of a 12inch display with a 4:3 ratio, featuring a resolution of 1024×768, which is really enough for just web browsing (I just realized that this is the same size my ThinkPad X61s is). Above the screen is a little web cam. The plugs include a USB, a VGA, an Ethernet and power port. The only button is the power button on the top side of the device. The prototype is held entirely in white, so it looks clean and minimalistic. The weight is a little less than the 10″ eeePC

On the inside, the specifications are held cheap. The TechCrunch tablet Prototype B features a Via Nano processor (performing like the Intel Atom), 1 GB of RAM (which is quite enough for merly more than a webbrowser) and 4GB of flash space for the OS (a modified Ubuntu) and cache. Somewhere it also seems to have integrated speakers.

It currently runs an full Ubuntu installation, because the main software work has been focused on drivers and the virtual keyboard.

The estimated price for the prototype was around 200$ (=152,10€), because of the poor screen. TechCrunch says the price will be around 300$ (=228.15€) when it features a better LCD display.

The future of the device is currently debated by the team, but consumer interest and (even more important nowadays) investment interest is there. I really hope this device will make it into production and on the market. With the open source approach it can easily be refitted to something else than webbrowsing.

The looking of a desktop was never covered till now. One of openbox’ features is it to be able use themes. Themes can be found in the internet or be self created, links for aggretations of themes will be found at the bottom of the article. As the openbox theme applies only to the border of the windows, you have to use GTK-themes for the inner lookings of the windows. GTK themes exist in an even greater number than openbox themes.

Openbox theme

I will begin with setting the openbox theme. After you downloaded your theme from own of the sites listed at the end of the article, you have to extract them and copy them to your ~/.themes folder. If you have ‘obconf‘ installed you can just run it and choose the theme.

If you don’t want to install obconf, you can set the theme in the ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml file. Search for the <theme> tag and replace the value between the <name> tag with the directory name of the theme in ~/.themes. So that it might look something like this:

<name>someThemeName</name>

You have to reload the configuration by right-clicking on the desktop and run “OpenBox3 system -> Reconfigure”. Another way to reload the configuration from the command line. Simply run following command from a shell or so:

openbox --reconfigure

GTK theme

The GTK theme is responsible for the inner drawings of GTK applications. It should harmony with you openbox theme in some way. To use some themes from the internet, you need the suitable theme-engine. A bunch of engines are in the portage tree, just search for ‘gtk-engine’ and you should get the most of them. You have to install one of them, this will also influence the lookings. This installs the standard gtk engines (& themes):

emerge -av x11-themes/gtk-engines

For setting the GTK theme there are a graphical approach and a manuan approach. The graphical approach includes installing a gtk theme changer (’gtk-chtheme’):

emerge -av x11-themes/gtk-chtheme

You have to place the themes into the ~/.themes folder (for system wide availability place the themes in /usr/share/themes). After you placed them there, they should be available in gtk-chtheme.

gtk-chtheme changes the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file. Surely you can do that by hand. Simply extract the theme somewhere and add to the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file:

echo "include \"/path/to/the/themes/gtkrc\"" >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

This should set the GTK theme. If it doesn’t use the theme instantly, you have to restart openbox or so. Here are some links to theme sites.

GTK

openbox

In times where I was bound to the bigger ‘Desktop Enviroments’(DE), like KDE, GNOME or Xfce, I always thought that a file manager had to be tightly integrated into the DE. As I began my journey looking for a lighter desktop, I realized that there are very independent file managers too. But back then only very specialised/different file managers, like ‘Midnight Manager’, which was very(too) unfamiliar to me, were found by me. This changed as I found PCMan File Manager(pcmanfm).

PCManFM is a very lightweight file manager, but nonetheless it includes very handy features. The feature list includes: tabbed browsing(something that even KDE and GNOME’s FM lacked some time ago), volume managment(automounting of USB/CDROM/Memory Cards volumes through HAL), drag&drop support(even over multiple tabs), a find utility(it’s just a front-end for find/grep and on my laptop it doesn’t work right know), UTF-8 support and many more. Now lets talk action: Unmask and install pcmanfm on gentoo:

echo "=x11-misc/pcmanfm-0.5 ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge -av pcmanfm

You can now run pcmanfm, but you are very likely to receive a warning with following content:GTK+ icon theme is not properly set. The warning even includes an explanation and a solution. You have to set an icon theme for GTK, which normally is done by GNOME/Xfce services. For the standard “Tango”-theme, simply echo following command into the GTK-configuration file (~/.gtkrc-2.0).

echo "gtk-icon-theme-name=\"Tango\"" >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

After you started pcmanfm, you can modify a few settings under “Edit - Preferences”, like icon size. The second tab under preferences is about the Desktop. It is possible with pcmanfm to set a background image and place icons (the Desktop folder in your home directory gets displayed on the desktop). For openbox it may be necessary to activate Show menus provided by WM when desktop is clicked. Everything else should be pretty clear, don’t forget to activate Manage the desktop and show file icons. This may interfere with other background setting applications (like feh). I will use ‘idesk’ to place icons on the desktop, not pcmanfm.

The configuration file for pcmanfm lies at ~/.config/pcmanfm/main. But there isn’t much to modify there, which you can’t modify with the preferences dialog.

Now you have a lightning fast file manager filled with many features. The next part will be about setting the GTK-theme.

Yesterday, the 14.01.2009, my site got blocked in Firefox: Google suspected it of distributing links to malware. The specific article which caused it to think was just a link list to some sites about ‘civial service’ in austria. The sites were mostly government sites and no site was suspected by google.

I signed up for ‘Google Webmasters Tools’ to request a review of my site after I removed the specific article from the public view, but first it didn’t work and second it still isn’t unblocked. I am pretty sure that this was a false alarm, as the source code of the site contains no harmful code (at least from my point of view). I hope it will be unblocked in the next days.

One thing this showed to me was, that it seems that firefox sends every URL you open first to google for verification. This means google gets all the sites you visit connected with your IP. To turn this behavior off, look into the firefox preferences (Edit - Preferences) under the tab “Security” and the second and third option should be unchecked. You do this on your own responsibility, I only can say that I think my site is clean again. The function shouldn’t be necessary if you browse conscious and be aware of the risk from the internet (especially on a windows PC).

Update: Stupid I am! Stupid I am!! Stupid I am!!! My site actually was infected… There was a script at the end of the site, after the </html> tag. First I looked into the theme files, where nothing was suspicious. I found the script in the index.php file in the wordpress root folder, located at the bottom of the page. I simply deleted the <script%gt; part and now my site seems to be clean. I hope google now accepts my review request. I think I can now publish the article, which I stupid men thought was the cause for this problem. I hope no one suffered from this too much, if so I can only apologize deeply!

Hier sind nur ein paar Links zum Thema Stellung/Musterung und Zivildienst.

Although I had known the song before, I just got so inspired by it that I am now writing an short article about it. If you wonder, I am talking about “Ich muss gar nichts” von Großstadtgeflüster, which just got send to my be a friend.

The song is really becoming to me, because it just says what I think about authorities and orders. For the english people: The title gets translated to “I do not have to do anything!”. The essence, as I perceive it, is that, nearly nobody can force you to do something you don’t want to do. According there are just a few things you have to do: eat, sleep, drink and follow your own rules. This is so true! You can oppose yourself to nearly anything somebody wants from you, and basiclly others have to respect your opinion, because you are a human being, just as they are. Laws are only tolerated and not followed!

I just finished my computer science exercise. I had to program two applications, one miming a remote control, where if a button was pressed, the label should be printed to the standard output. The other one was about programming a number lock, where, if the code was right a green light should display otherwise a red light.

I provide my solution to this problem, so that someone looking for java examples can maybe use them.

Here it can be downloaded.