Happy New Year to all of you! As my public pledge for 2006 I hope for more diversity in thinking and doings again (which requires a deeper understanding of differences).
Windows Vista or The Holy Grail of Usability
Fine. After years (heck, even decades!) of staring into distorting, flickering, radiating and mirrorlike CRT screens we finally managed to banish those darn things from our desks and to use distortion-free, flicker-free, radiation-free, coated TFT screens instead. Time to put glares and reflections back into the GUI (just try to read the labels on the taskbar)! Hallelujah! ;)
(I bet Microsoft will get back to this once the dust has settled. Apple made a similar experience with Aqua’s transparency effect which was significantly reduced in later versions.)
SCode captcha enabled
I’ve now enabled a basic captcha system provided by a Movabletype plugin called SCode. In order to make it work I had to do a couple of things that are not mentioned in the official installation instructions:
1. make the mt-scode.cgi CGI script executable:
# chmod a+x mt-scode.cgi
2. make sure that SCode is enabled and configured both on a MT global level and on a per-weblog basis
3. Correct a bug in SCode.pl:
replace security code you see here\” src=\”$path/plugins/SCode/mt-scode.cgi by security code you see here\” src=\”$path”.”plugins/SCode/mt-scode.cgi
#3 is not essential, but a bug nonetheless.
Hopefully, the comment spam problem is now solved for a while by enabling this plugin. Trackback spamming is still possible, though.
Please contact me if you are visually impaired and would like to post a comment on this blog. Ideally, the captcha image should also be available as a sound file/stream, but I haven’t found the time yet to implement sth like this.
Keeping SSH sessions alive
Nice to know:
Keeping Your SSH Sessions Alive Through Pesky NAT Firewalls — Steve Kehlet’s Pages.
Putty has such a “keep alive” option too (in the “Connection” category). Had to set it to 100 seconds as the according proxy is very restrictive indeed.
Das Magazin: “Du bist der Staat”
The current issue of Das Magazin Nr. 49/10. Dez. 2005 provides some interesting outlooks on 2006 (in co-op with The Economist). Particularly noteworthy: “Du bist der Staat” by Philipp Sarasin.
A very provocative (and thus stimulating) article in the magazine is Lucy Kellaway’s “Outsourcing is out”. Her argumentation isn’t free of flaws, though.
Movabletype 3.2 upgrade experiences
I finally upgraded MT 3.1.x to MT 3.2. The upgrade process was much easier than expected. The only error I encountered was sth like:
main([path to install]/mt/php/extlib/smarty/libs/core/core.load_plugins.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory
which could be solved by simply rebuilding the whole site, as explained in
The new features of MT 3.2 are very welcome of course.
Gentoo: If ’emerge postfix-2.2.5′ fails..
..for a rather strange reason like
>>> md5 src_uri ;-) postfix-2.2.5.tar.gz
mind the following:
* You are upgrading from a incompatible version.
* You MUST stop postfix BEFORE install it to your system.
* If you want a minimal downtime, emerge postfix with:
* `FORCE_UPGRADE=1 emerge –buildpkgonly postfix`; then
* `/etc/init.d/postfix stop && emerge –usepkgonly postfix`
* run etc-update or dispatch-conf and merge the configuration files.
* Next /etc/init.d/postfix start
Quick notice
I really need to update Movabletype ASAP (and a couple of other things too). I’m pretty busy at the moment, though. Stay tuned!
PHP Gallery – CSS stylesheet names changed
There’s no more standalone_style.css in the most recent version of Gallery v1, as the names of the CSS stylesheets were changed, unnecessarily breaking existing systems in productive use. A good example of bad release engineering (note that Gallery v1 is supposed to be a stable version).
SugarCRM – an open source CRM suite
I’ve just installed it on this server. The installation procedure is very admin-friendly: 1.) Create a db 2.) Create a db user 3.) Point the browser to the SugarCRM directory. And it’s amazing how many features SugarCRM offers – probably enough for most SMEs.