Linux is easy or hard...

...it depends how much you know about it.

There is 100000 ways to do anything on Linux. Of those, only 3 ways
are doable by mere mortals, of which only 2 ways fit what you might
understand, and only 1 way is the way YOU WANT to do it.

Linux is really hard for people who don't have time (or a Linux-guru
friend to help them) to find those 2 ways. Linux is easy for those who
find their true path :D

Jaybird

I took this photo during my vacation on Corfu last summer. Of course,
it reminded me of Firebird JDBC driver, which is named Jaybird. Maybe
Roman (the main developer) was on the yacht, but I didn't take the
time to check it out.

Who says you can't make money off open source ;)

How to waste money on Facebook ads

I went to facebook today and have seen an interesting, "get rated" ad
on the right-hand size. I followed the link, and got this (screenshot
attached). Interesting, eh? "You must use the latest version of
Firefox, and 3.5 is not enough :)" LOL.

I guess people at get-rated.com really know how to spend their
marketing budget. But without functional product, the money is really
thrown out of the window.

Weird characters in restored MySQL database

mysql -p mydatabase
however, all the non-ISO8859_1 characters got busted and don't display
correctly. Solution is to supply the connection character set, so all
data is transferred as UTF-8:

mysql -p --default_character_set utf8 mydatabase < dump.sql

Facebook amateurs

I really surprises me that Facebook, which is supposed to be full of
smart developers, can allow themselves to have some simple things done
wrong. They never got the back button right. While browsing, all the
links open in same window, so when you are in the middle of the very
long "wall" page and click on some link, there's no easy way to get
back there - you need to scroll the whole page. So, you need to
remember to open all links in new tab or window.

The thing that prompted me to write this post is, however, a more serious issue. I was in a middle of a long "wall" page and clicked a link to join a group. Quite a common action, but it uses javascript so you cannot "open in a new tab". I joined the group, and group page opened. I read a little about it (on group's main page, without navigating anywhere) and clicked Back to go back to my "wall"

What a mistake that was: FB completely stuck my browser, switching
back and forth between 2 (or is it 3) pages. I could not press the
Stop button (I could, but it does not stop it), nor select another URL
from the toolbar. It simply entered an endless loop, and I had to kill
Firefox to make it stop.

Looks like all the story about FB developers doing it "cool" and "smart" is not really true once you scratch underneath the surface.

Firefox 3.5 faster?

But today, I just had enough. To state it plainly: Firefox 3.5 IS SLOW!

I installed Firefox 2.0 and it flies. It must be like 3 times faster
and 2 time less resource intensive. One of the things I also disliked
about 3.5 is that sometimes when I'm not doing anything, it would
start to do "something" that requires hard disk, so my disk would get
really busy.

I hope Firefox developers get their stuff together and makes the
browser better, not just more feature-full. Some of the features in
3.5 are really strange. For example, the + button to open new tab.
There has been a toolbar button to open a new tab since forever (I
always add it after installing). Instead of simply making that button
shown by default, they apparently decided to do copycat job of some
other browser's feature. That was very cheap move, esp. since I find
the toolbar much more useful because it is always at the same place on
the screen and I don't have to search for it.

Competition is moving forward (Chrome, Opera, ...) and it seems
Firefox is losing the direction. It there wasn't for great plugins, it
would lose market share quickly.

Yii PHP framework

I got a hold on to basic concepts, and first thing that made me stuck
for a while was doing the proper URL redirection to create SEO links
instead of index.php?r=controller/action. I set up .htaccess without
much trouble, but It turned out that default applicaiton generated by
Yii is missing this line in website/protected/config/main.php:

'urlManager'=>array( 'urlFormat'=>'path', 'showScriptName'=>false, ),

The line should be placed in 'components' section, at the same depth
as 'log' or 'user'.

Stay tuned for more Yii experiences as I move along with the project

Online whiteboard

I got this idea about a website with online whiteboard capability. I
went googling to find out if there is something good out there before
reinventing the wheel. Here are some experiences:

Skribl
http://www.skrbl.com/

Skribls looks very promising, but it does not deliver. It seems to
have some bugs: I cannot change the color when drawing lines and I
don't see any tool to erase. Also, I don't see any way to quickly
clear the board. Maybe the problem is in browser support, I don't
know. I'm using Firefox 3.5 which is really as standard as you can get
today.

Scriblink
http://www.scriblink.com/

Main drawback is that it requires Java, and if you don't have it
installed or enabled, it would just sit there with it's progress bar
running. I thought something was broken with their website after
nothing go loaded in 15 minutes. It turns out Java was disabled in my
browser. They could put a simple detection with "please enable Java"
message. Functionality isn't great either. Interface is well thought
off, but many things just don't work right. Drawing a free-hand line
is not as nearly as smooth as in Skribl, so what you really get is a
lot of short straight lines and corners. One big problem is also that
their code runs my CPU at 100% all the time - even when focus is not
on the browser window. Tool for erasing is easily accessible, but it
does not work well - trying to erase a single straight line can take
quite an effort.

Dabbleboard
http://dabbleboard.com/

So far, a clear winner. It uses Flash, and works very well. Freehand
drawing is pretty good, adding text is as simple as click&type.
Drawing shapes, adding images and files and integrated chat. What more
could one wish for. Also, the price for the features I need (i.e.
free) is hard to beat. I only used it a couple of minutes, but if we
assume there are no serious bugs hidden in it - this looks like The
Real Thing(tm).

Please add a comment if you know of another good online whiteboard
(esp. if it does not use Flash but DHTML - because not all computers
have flash installed).

Lenovo S10 IdeaPad

My wife has got this Lenovo S10 IdeaPad netbook and I sometimes
"borrow" it, esp. in the evenings when I turn off my computer. It's so
much easier to keep this small computer on the lap when lying in the
bed. Is got great wifi, much better than my HP530 notebook, so having
Internet access is great.

I really don't want and don't like to boot into Windows, so I just
select to go into that minimal Linux environment available at boot
time. It's great way to browse the web safely. Lenovo has a nice
Firefox ripoff named Splashtop Browser. One of the mail things I'm
missing in it, is the options menu. For example, you cannot change the
homepage, so whenever browser is started, it goes to Lenovo's website.
I guess they like to have stats - how many copies of Splashtop Browser
get started each day.

Another thing Lenovo did, is made sure Firefox makes no money from Google when using Lenovo netbooks. Money goes to Lenovo instead. Average user won't even notice it, but if you use the browser's search box in top-right corner, you can clearly see that search is "powered by google" and plugs into AdSense directly. Now, I don't mind where the money goes, but custom AdSense linked search lacks important features that are otherwise available. Most important being: "image" search. You simply cannot switch to search for images, you need to go to www.google.com yourself. That sux Lenovo!

Firefox does this much better: they made a deal with Google, so when you search from Firefox, all is ok, you get the full featured interface. On the other hand, it seems that Lenovo did not want to make deals with Google (or couldn't?), so they just opened an AdSense account and linked that into the browser. Who knows, maybe even Lenovo is unaware of this and some of their developers is getting hoards of money. Now, these are the issues I'd like to ask some Lenovo representative about if I even get a chance to have an interview once. But don't worry Lenovo, it's not like that going to happen, ever.

Another interesting thing is battery meter. Just a few minutes ago I
got a warning message saying something like: "battery running low, you
have one minute left". About 3 seconds later, system turned off. Nice
estimation Lenovo :)

If I was typing a lengthy e-mail these 3 seconds will probably not be
enough to scroll down and save it. So, once you see the battery going
red, get a hold on a power supply quickly.

One more thing I don't like about this minimal Linux environment is that integrated touchpad does not support advanced actions: drag&drop and scrolling (when moving a finger along the right edge). Those do work in Windows, so I assume Lenovo forgot to configure something. As there is no access to terminal, there's really no way to see "under the hood" or try to fix it.

Comparison of PHP wiki software

DokuWiki uses textual files to store content. There's always a
potential problem with setting up filesystem privileges in such case,
especially when you need to move the site. But, that's not such a big
deal. One of the things I was also scared of is that someone might
find an exploit and can ruin the rest of guacosoft.com website, which
would be really bad. But still, DokuWiki is great Wiki software, very
simple to use, and markup is really clean and straight forward.
Unfortunately, the latest version unpacks way to many files from the
archive. Try to upload these via FTP took ages, and I finally gave up.
Maybe it's cool when you run your own server, but on shared hosting
website it's really not usable. Maybe I should have gone in and copied
directories one by one, but I was too lazy for that.

So I started searching the web. One of the most promising seemed to be
phpwiki. Install was small, upload to the server when fine, but then
the troubles begun. PHPWiki is simply not good if you don't have your
own server. It wants to do some crazy things like writing to /tmp. I
also tried to set up MySQL as the storage, but for some reason this
did not work. In the end, all I managed to do is get 500 HTTP errors
(internal server error) from my web server. So, I gave up on it.

Next on the list were MediaWiki and TikiWiki. Looking at the feature
list this seemed too bloated for my needs. If you run a huge and
complex site, that is probably the right choice. But for 3 people
cooperating on internal project... overkill.

Looking at the "list of wiki software" on Wikipedia, I started trying
them all one-by-one...

NotePub is a great idea, but it seems their servers don't scale to
number of users. Website's response is way to slow. Too bad, as this
seemed like the simplest way to do it. Nothing to install on my
server, just log in and edit stuff.

TigerWiki is dead, forked into multiple other projects. Most of those
lack the same thing the original lacks - support for multiple users. I
really don't see a point in having a wiki for a single person, because
wikis are about collaborative editing. PumaWiki seems promising
though, kakwiki has added users, but it's still at development at this
stage. I really did not want to be someone's beta tester in this case.
I needed something that Works(tm).

And now we come to WakkaWiki, which is not longer developed or
maintain, but there are number of forks. And here we find our winner:

WikkaWiki

Install was simple and painless. Once files are copied, you open the
page in the browser and wizard leads your through the settings. At the
end, all I had to do is to allow a single config file to be written by
the server and that's it. It uses MySQL for storage and behaves like
it should - i.e. there's an option to prefix all table names with
wikka_ or whatever you prefer. I'll see how it shows during usage, but
currently I can highly recommend it to anyone.