dawgiestyle

04/10/07: NucleusCMS

From B2evolution, to Wordpress, to Drupal, and now to NucleusCMS, I seem to be slowly making my way through all available blog software.

This latest transition comes after a very long period of inactivity. I installed Drupal about a year ago and made a total of 2 posts since then. This actually worked to my benefit, as there doesn't seem to be a Drupal -> NucleusCMS conversion script available anywhere. Luckily, I still had my old Wordpress database, so I was able to convert from that and only lose 2 entries.

I still have some messing around to do with the categories, as Wordpress and Drupal both allowed for entries to belong to multiple categories and NucleusCMS does not, but all in all, it was a very painless conversion.
Drupal really wasn't right for me. It was a bit heavy for my purposes, and I really dislike the available themes, many of which use table-based layouts, which I oppose.

As silly a reason as it is, I chose NucleusCMS because there seems to be a large number of themes that are pretty suitable "out of the box". I really just don't feel like creating my own, or heavily modifying existing themes anymore.

I am hoping to get this site going again, starting with this entry. I have done a lot of different things with my home servers in the past year, and would really like to write a few howto's. Guess we'll see what happens...

04/23/05: From b2evolution to Wordpress

Craving change, and having read up on Wordpress, I finally decided to give it a shot. The biggest catalyst for this change was probably the referrer spam and the occasional comment/trackback spam that I was getting with b2evolution.

The installation was a breeze, taking no more than 5 minutes. The problem, however, was getting my b2evolution data imported into my Wordpress tables. Wordpress has a number of importer scripts, including one for the original b2, but unfortunately b2evolution is different enough that this one doesn't work. After some searching on the Wordpress support forum, I found this thread linking to this file, which once renamed to b2evo2wp.php, did the trick.

Wordpress also seems to handle spam better, with some more configurable options for comments, and a plugin I found that bounces referrer spam, so hopefully there will be a noticeable difference in the next few days.

Overall, Wordpress looks to be a very nice blogging engine, though I cannot knock b2evolution either. Both have their benefits, but I think Wordpress is a better fit for me. Maybe now somebody googling to find out how to import b2evo data will find this.

03/26/05: Helpful "make" Tips

make for Nonprogrammers by Dru Lavigne -- If you're a typical FreeBSD user, you may never have compiled C source code on your own. Yet if you've ever issued a make command, it's compiled code for you. How does it do that? What does it do, anyway? And what else can it do? Dru Lavigne answers all of these questions.

Especially useful is this great way to help automate updating your system sources.

On my test system, I already had cvsup up and running and had created a sup file in /root/cvs-supfile. So, I added these lines to /etc/make.conf:

SUP_UPDATE= yes SUP= /usr/local/bin/cvsup SUPFLAGS= -g -L 2 SUPFILE= /root/cvs-supfile

Note: In order for this to work, you must have cvsup-without-gui installed and have configured a SUPFILE at the specified location. If you've installed cvsup-without-gui but haven't yet created a SUPFILE, replace that SUPFILE line with these:

SUPHOST= cvsup.ca.freebsd.org SUPFILE= /usr/share/examples/cvsup/standard-supfile PORTSSUPFILE= /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile DOCSUPFILE= /usr/share/examples/cvsup/doc-supfile

When filling in SUPHOST=, please choose a mirror geographically close to you. Also, review the three files in /usr/share/examples/cvsup to pick and choose which parts of the operating system, ports, and docs you wish to update.

When you've finished, run make update from /usr/src to update the specified sources.

I highly recommend adding OnLAMP to your RSS reader, if only for Dru's FreeBSD articles. Always great information.

03/05/05: SCO v. IBM: The Short Version, by toads_for_all

For anybody like myself who is too busy to keep up with the SCO/IBM saga, here is a funny little summary.

Sure it's sort of a joke, but this is pretty much what happened.

IBM: But Caldera contributed parts of the original to Linux. Aren't we just doing what Caldera did, treating the derivatives the same way Caldera did the original by contributing parts to Linux?

SCO: Um, I mean, well, I guess.....Did I say contracts? I meant it's about copyrights.

NOVELL: But you don't own all the copyrights, we do.

SCO: Do not!

Read the rest here.

03/02/05: IBM Extends Workplace Reach to SMBs, Partners

This story could have significance, but I really only linked to it because I thought this was funny. Remember, they're targeting small and midsize businesses.

Known as IBM Workplace Services Express with AT&T Managed Internet Service, the new offering is designed for companies with 1,000 to 1,500 employees, according to Michael Loria, director of business partners and product marketing at IBM's Lotus Software division.

1000 to 1500 employees? I'm sure there are bigger and better things than what I know, but I come from a place where small businesses have 2 employees, and one of those is the owner.

The obvious argument here is that a business with 2 employees has no need for a server anyway. Fair enough. Locally, I do support for a few businesses of around 20 employees each. Certainly this is still a small business, but I've never run a 20 pc network as peer-to-peer, and I never will.

Granted, a fileserver for a 20 pc network can be run on pretty much any hardware. Of course, the same uptime/reliability requirements exist, such as a high traffic point-of-sale system which utilizes an SQL backend.

But 1000 to 1500 employees? Seems to me that Big Blue is really just targeting smaller large businesses.

02/16/05: An open letter to people who write open letters

Remember that letter to Bill Gates about interoperability? There were some genuinely good points made in it, but here's a guy who has a major beef with open letters, and I can see where he's coming from.

The "open letter" format was an attention-grabber the first few times it was used. The first few online petitions were novelties, too. But now both of these devices have played out their usefulness. They have become as trite as football announcers using the phrase, "shy of a first down," which was an elegant turn of phrase the first few times it was used but is now used -- overused -- during every televised game.

Take a look at the rest here. The guy is hard to argue with.

I can't say I won't continue to find good points in open letters, but yes, I would much rather read those points in a well-written commentary piece.

02/14/05: Opera to MS: Get real about interoperability, Mr Gates

Here is a great letter from the Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software to Bill Gates on the issue of interoperability.

You say you believe in interoperability. Why does the Hotmail service deny Opera access to the same scripts as Microsoft's own browser? As a result, Opera users can't delete junk mail.

The letter gives many more examples, along with some suggestions for Microsoft to get them on the right track. Check it out.

02/06/05: MySQL Ups and Downs

I'm going to roll these two stories into one as eweek should have done.

Analysis Finds MySQL Code Low on Bugs has good news about MySQL's bugs:lines-of-code ratio, while MySQL Criticized in Wake of MySpooler Worm suggests a secure by default stance should be taken.

I actually agree with both. We cannot give open source software a break when it comes to security. If we let things slide, then quality will slide.

I believe MySQL AB will make this change. Security flaws, afterall, whether they result from bad coding or merely bad policy, are a stigma you do not want associated with your product.

Coverity Inc., the company that performed the code analysis on MySQL, seemed to be more impressed at the speed in which the bugs they did find were fixed.

"We gave them the results about two weeks ago," Hallem said. "They had them all addressed in two days. It was a very fast turnaround."

I am impressed by Coverity's report, but coding is not MySQL's weakness. It is trusting people to secure themselves. It is not a lot to ask, but too much to expect.

02/03/05: Problem Installing Horde/Imp On FreeBSD 5.3

I've just had the most frustrating problem trying to install imp on my home server. I ran my "make install" command in the ports tree, and here's what happened after a few minutes.

checking for magic files in default path... not found configure: error: Please reinstall the libmagic distribution ===> Script "configure" failed unexpectedly. Please report the problem to ale@FreeBSD.org [maintainer] and attach the "/usr/ports/sysutils/pecl-fileinfo/work/Fileinfo-0.2/config.log" including the output of the failure of your make command. Also, it might be a good idea to provide an overview of all packages installed on your system (e.g. an `ls /var/db/pkg`). *** Error code 1

I finally found the solution at freebsdforums.org, which consists of a single command:

cp /usr/src/contrib/file/magic.h /usr/include/

I wanted to help ensure that anybody else running into this problem finds the answer quickly.

01/31/05: Is Open Source Ready for Prime Time?

Oh great, another article about Linux on the business desktop, right? Nope.

That was me as I saw the headline on eweek and clicked on it. I do always click on the is linux ready? links, hating that the subject is beaten to death, but still curious as to what the opinion is this time. Anyway, this isn't one of those articles, so lets move on.

This one is actually more about open source software on the enterprise back-end, and how it enables small companies to utilize enterprise class solutions.

Companies such as SourceLabs Inc. and SpikeSource Inc., have entered the market with just this model in mind, offering an open-source software stack and providing services around it. The stack typically includes Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python components, otherwise known as LAMP.

A good read.