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.

Yahoo! Mail and chat

I've been using Yahoo! web mail since 1999 or something around that.
There was a time when it was slow and bloated and Internet connections
were slow. At that time, first browsers that allowed to block images
were a bless. Later, when Firefox came out and we were able to "block
images from xyz site" it was really good. They soon replaced those
with flash ads, but those were even easier to circumvent, either using
flashblock or not installing flash at all.

However, ads are not what's bugging me. It's the stupid new "Chat &
Mobile text" box on the left side. I don't want to chat, I want to
read e-mail. Google Mail has a similar feature for some time, and it
was driving me mad because it would change the size of the box at some
point and move rest of the page below it, making me miss some clicks.
Anyway, Google was smart enough to remove it (or allow us to remove
it, I can't remember).

But Yahoo! seems to be a different story. The box just stays there,
presumably drawing my bandwidth with some AJAXy calls. I have to press
Cancel for it to stop. EACH TIME. This is really annoying. I search
the options, and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off.

I understand that some people would like to chat while they are
reading e-mail, but I'm not one of them. Why would I want anyone to
know I'm online while I'm reading the e-mail. Can't I just read my
e-mail in peace and quiet?

BTW, Facebook is plagued with a similar problem. As soon as you are
logged in to read other people's updates, someone of your "friends"
might jump in to chat with you. So, the only way to work around this
issue is to ignore them? How nice is that?

Just let me be non-existent until I'm ready for the world...

Right-click problem

Click here to download:

rightclick.ogv (957 KB)

One of the things that get on my nerve lately is the right-click mouse
button and context menus. I have an optical mouse and if I don't hold
it very, very still, the context menu runs away as soon as it shows
up. What's even more interesting is that sometimes X window system (or
is the problem in Gtk+ ?) detects another right-click (???) although
there was only one physically. This happens only on one of my two
machines, which makes it even more puzzling - maybe the problem is in
the mouse. Anyway, here's a short video to demostrate the problem. I'm
using Slackware 12.1, KDE 3.5.

CSS is Awesome?

After spending endless hours days trying to get some webdesign at my latest website to work correctly on most browsers using CSS, I finally gave up and decided to use tables for a small part of it. You would suspect that the usual suspect, IE6, is the one to blame, but no. It was Mozilla Firefox 2.x. I couldn't even find any CSS that would display the way I wanted, even if it would break some other browser. All others would work without a glitch: Firefox 3, IE6, IE7, IE8, Safari, Chrome, Konqueror.

You might say that I should just tell Firefox users to upgrade to Firefox 3. I'd love to do that. However, statistics show that about 5% of visitors are using Firefox 2, and I simply did not want to lose them. So, tables are back until everybody switches to Firefox 3 or above, and then I'll probably remove them and go back to clean CSS.

Taking over expiring domains - part 2

On my old software woes blog I wrote about an
interesting article regarding takeover of expiring domains. Recently I
had a first-hand experience myself:

For about two years we run the website www.firebirdfaq.org. It has
become pretty successful if you consider the niche market it covers,
that being the users of Firebird DBMS. Ever since the start in 2007. I
wanted to somehow get a hold of the .com variant of the domain. Just
to make sure that people who mistype the URL come to the right place.
At the time it was owned by someone in Germany, and they did not seem
to use it much (no website, only e-mail apparently). In fact, it was
to expire in August 2007, so I spent $19.99 or something like that on
GoDaddy to grab it. To my misfortune, the owner extended the
registration, and I canceled monitoring on GoDaddy. I completely
forgot about it until a few weeks ago.

August 2009. came and domain registration was not extended. I was
completely unaware of this, but I got an e-mail from
initrustbestdomains.org saying that domain is soon to be deleted and
enter the market. They offered my to send a bid for the domain. My
guess was that these guys already have a pick on it, so I don't stand
much chance if I go alone. I even considered placing an offer for $30,
but I though that was a bit too low. So I decided to do give up on it.

And here it gets interesting:

At the moment when domain was deleted and returned to the "pool" I got
this e-mail:

We are selling the domain name firebirdfaq.com. Since you own firebirdfaq.org if you would also like the more desirable .com we are making it available. The one time cost is $99.97. That includes a year of registration and transfer of ownership to you. To purchase or to learn more go to:

hxxp://www.buyyourdotcom.com/check...etc.

If you pass on this opportunity someone else could purchase this domain and it may not be available again.

Cool? Not!

Instead of giving them a hundred, I went to GoDaddy and registered the
domain for $9.99. ;)

Of course, all this was a little bit of gambling on my side and I
could have lost the domain, but it wasn't that much important to me.
YMMW.

Google Groups bug

I'm using Firefox 3.5 on Linux. Everything was fine until today, but
now the right-hand-side interface suddenly appears on the left,
covering the messages and preventing navigation. I noticed this on two
different computers. I wanted to report a bug to Google, but didn't
have much success. Their Help Center only shows FAQ, and googling for
"report a bug in google groups" or similar terms doesn't yield
anything.

I'm sure I'm not the only one with the problem, but how to we get
through to the Google?

Subversion and SourceForge.net

milanb@kiklop:~/devel/flamerobin-trunk$ svn up
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy 'flamerobin';
please get a newer Subversion client

milanb@kiklop:~/devel/flamerobin-trunk$ svn --version
svn, version 1.4.6 (r28521)
compiled Feb 1 2008, 17:17:53

I find it funny that you cannot use a less-than-2-years-old client to
access the server. I don't blame sf.net much though, I just hate
people who break backward compatibility (SVN team in this case).

A cool way to pinpoint your location

Of course, use a different map :)

Source: twitter blog