A changelog by Daniel Mettler

December 11, 2005

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

“failed To Open Stram” When Clicking On Comments” href=”http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t53967.html”>Movable Type Community Forum > “failed To Open Stram” When Clicking On Comments

The new features of MT 3.2 are very welcome of course.

December 11, 2005

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

November 25, 2005

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!

September 11, 2005

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).

September 11, 2005

SugarCRM – an open source CRM suite

SugarCRM

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.

September 9, 2005

Cool XML, XSLT, XPath, DTD, namespaces tutorials

ZVON.org hosts some very useful XML-related tutorials, among others:

XML Tutorial
Namespaces Tutorial
DTD Tutorial
XSLT Tutorial
XPath Tutorial

These are great tutorials if you like as-concise-as-possible, example-driven learning approaches (rather than reading dry and highly formal specifications) and need to quickly refresh your know-how about XML-related standards.

September 9, 2005

September 14, StartupDay – Tag des Jungunternehmens

START Up Day – Tag des Jungunternehmens

I probably won’t be able to attend the START up day festivities in Zurich that early in the evening. Nonetheless it’s cool and important that there is a day such as the StartUp day :)

September 3, 2005

Kami.ch, a nice t-shirt printing service in the Greater Zurich area

For the past X’05 Swiss marketing expo, I wanted to print some guerilla marketing promo t-shirts for us. First, I tried McShirt.ch in the Niederdorf in Zurich. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to import my professional-grade vector graphics file (in Adobe Illustrator format) into their plotting application. I had my TabletPC with me and even simplified my design and converted it to other well-known and standardized file formats (PDF, PostScript, SVG) in order to make it easier for them (Note that I spent more than an hour in their shop waiting for them to succeed). However, they just didn’t manage it – and that’s what I call an unprofessional service, despite of kind personnel. A bummer.

So I looked for an alternative – and surprisingly I found an excellent one! :) The very recommendable t-shirt printing company is named Kami Textildruck and is located a bit outside of Zurich, in Wallisellen. They were very professional right from the beginning, with kind and correct information given on the phone and by e-mail. They had no problem at all with my graphics file and they produced our custom t-shirts within only 1.5 days (half of the time it would have taken at McShirt) for just a slightly higher price. Further, Kami uses professional printing technology which results in a much better and more durable print than that of McShirt.

Hence my predicate for Kami: highly recommended! Thanks, Kami team!

August 22, 2005

Essential Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird Extensions (Part II)

Here’s the second, completed part of my list about Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird extensions and hints I find very useful for my daily work (and yours too, possibly ;):

Essential Mozilla Firefox extensions

Web Developer
ScrapBook
Flat Bookmark Editing
savegenpage
DictionarySearch
Duplicate Tab
Bookmarks Synchronizer
miniT (drag+indicator)
Copy Plain Text
undoclosetab (undoclosetab.xpi for FF 1.0.6)
Chinese-English-Japanese Character Hint Bar
Digger

Other hints for Mozilla Firefox:

Click with the middle mouse button to open a link on a new tab
Click with the middle mouse button on a tab to close it
Hit CTRL-p to print a page which is loaded in a new window without any menu or toolbar displayed
How to make Firefox silently display error pages (like in IE) instead of the error dialog boxes: Enter “about:config” in the URL field and change “browser.xul.error_pages.enabled” from “false” to “true” (just click on the entry to switch it)

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