Ted Roche's weblog

Seacoast WordPress Developers meeting, 2-March-2011

By Ted Roche on March 2, 2011 in CSS, HTML, JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, PHP, Technology, Web Development

Five people attended the March meeting of the Seacoast WordPress Developer‘s meetup, held at the New Hampshire innovation Commercialization Center near Pease in Portsmouth. We did a round of introductions and welcomed two new members and discussed what the group could focus on. We discussed the boundaries of CMS and Blogging and Wikis and how they overlap (A professional in education provided us with some great insights on how we think about some of these items), the challenge in finding consultants and clients, and how we can build up a network. We talked about potential agenda items: what should we schedule, what should we have in free-form.
I think an FAQ we ought to be prepared to answer is “What is it that WordPress is?” It’s less than obvious. “A blog” is the wrong answer, as that is a form of document, and not an application. “A CMS” is such a vaguely defined answer that it’s not much more useful than “an application.”

Other questions we started to explore, and possible future topics:

What is it that others are looking for on the web?
Good resources for learning WordPress: Codex, FAQ, books, etc.
WordPress SEO
WordPress Security
Loop/structure of databases tables, templates
Popular plugins
WordPress Backup tips: data and files
WordPress Community

Finally, Amanda presented her talk on building a plugin. She’d done some excellent research and used clear examples and explained them well. Here are the notes and slides posted to the new Seacoast WordPress Developer’s website, running WordPress, of course, and BuddyPress.

So, it was a great second meeting of the Seacoast WordPress Developer’s group. Stay tuned for more news. Thanks to Amanda for organizing the event, and to the New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center for providing the great facilities!

Color vim on CygWin

By Ted Roche on February 24, 2011 in Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

I’ve had to do some admin work on a Windows 2008 R2 server and found it handy to have a POSIX environment installed on Windows so I have ssh, grep, rsync, git, bash, vim and other functionality available all working within the same shell.

While vim was functional, the terminal was one that vim didn’t recognize as color, and hence the editor was only black and white and a few shades of gray. A little Googling returned this page: http://infrablue.tripod.com/cygwin.html with instructions on using rxvt as the terminal and configuring bash to run within it. A few tweaks, and I’m running vim and editing in color!

[UPDATE] @mintty_cygwin on twitter was kind enough to point out that rxvt development is pretty much stopped, but that the project http://code.google.com/p/mintty/ offered yet another TTY to run on Windows. This one has some pretty cool options, and is easy to install. I’m up and running with it now!

WordPress updated to version 3.1

By Ted Roche on February 24, 2011 in Technology

A new version of WordPress is available, and I’ve updated the blog to version 3.1 and downgraded it again. It seems like some of my custom hacks didn’t make the transition as smooth as I’d like. A good lesson there: always make backups; they’re handy for quick rollbacks. Check out some of the new features, listed here.

It appears that the Header Image Rotator (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twenty-ten-header-rotator/) is the problem. I’ve disabled it, got the update working, re-enabled it and it broke again. Sure enough. I’ve let the author know about the problem and the error messages in my logs. Let’s hope for a painless fix. In the meantime, I’ll post a favorite old picture of mine, taken on a cold snowy night.

Updated Planet Fox

By Ted Roche on February 23, 2011 in Technology

The Venus aggregator is a Python program which will read in a list of RSS feeds and generate an HTML stream-of-news page that displays the posts, most recent first. Planet Fox (http://www.tedroche.com/planetfox/) uses the list of blogging FoxPro folks posted to the FoxPro Wiki as its source. Add yourself to the Wiki and your posts will appear in the aggregator. Thanks to one of Planet Fox’s regular readers for pointing out that Jim Nelson’s great PEMEditor blog was not on the list; it turned out the Wiki post incorrectly listed the location of the RSS feed. I’ve updated that manually, and you can see Jim’s posts.

Notes from NH Ruby/Rails, 21-Feb-2011

By Ted Roche on February 21, 2011 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

Eight attendees made it to the February meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby Rails group at the New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center. A round of introductions included the usual suspects and several new people with interesting backgrounds and interests.

Brian Turnbull talked about Ruby debugging. He had a sample he created on Github Ruby comes with it’s own debugging library, but you can add a good one with a gem: ruby-debug.
Commands:
list – lists the code currently load
next – steps through the code listed, but skips over subroutines.
step – steps into the code
where – dumps the stack
finish – finishes the current subroutine call
display – dumps a value
(commonly use display value.inspect to make a cleaner display)
pp – pretty print, evaluates any Ruby code you want
edit – launches the EDITOR variable in our shell
catch – catch exceptions
cont – continue
break – set a breakpoint

,,, and so forth. Use the help, it is your friend.

The second example is far more complex, with a Sinatra app using OmniAuth and an LDAP provider. Following the supplied documentation, the app crashes on startup. (That’s what you get for reading the docs!) Debug and another tool – rbtrace to the rescue! Excellent demo of the problem and how the tools can debug them.

Fail2Ban more skript kiddies poking 404 files

By Ted Roche on February 21, 2011 in Technology

I review my web server logs pretty regularly, and there’s a pattern of 404’s I’ve seen recently that I haven’t been blocking up until now: searching each directory for ‘contact.php’ or ‘setup.php’ — the latter often searching for every variety of phpMyAdmin. I don’t have PMA on my machine, but I’d sure make sure I read all the instructions and removed setup.php if I had! (And you should, too!) I found this link that adds a simple test and rules using Fail2Ban to temporarily banning sites that hit too many 404’s too fast. I’ll have to see if this bonks too many search engines.

http://www.barbarycodes.com/2010/10/06/automated-banning-of-script-kiddies-with-fail2ban/

“That shouldn’t break anything…”

By Ted Roche on February 14, 2011 in Technology

I changed one of the settings on the web server. I had it set to redirect from the older location of this blog http://www.tedroche.com/blog/ to the new subdomain of http://blog.tedroche.com but the redirect was set to a temporary (302) redirect rather than a permanent (301) one, causing extra traffic to the web server and slower response to the clients. I’ve changed this to a permanent redirect. There shouldn’t be any negative effects, he said, with his fingers crossed…

Seacoast WordPress Developers Group announce March meeting

By Ted Roche on February 12, 2011 in CSS, HTML, JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, PHP, Technology, Web Development

Organizer Amanda Giles announced a second meeting of the Seacoast WordPress Developers Group:

When: Wednesday, March 2, 2011 7:00 PM
Where: NH-Innovation Commercialization Center, 75 Rochester Avenue, Portsmouth, NH 03801
Why: Let’s get together for another meetup. More details coming soon. Please send me your suggestions or ideas for things you would like to share or see shared.

CMS Learning Curves

Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate

By Ted Roche on February 8, 2011 in Technology

I’ve had the chance to use Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate on a new project, and I’m finding it very helpful.

Paul appeared at the San Francisco HTML5 user group meeting, which was recorded (and very well produced!) by MarakanaTechTV:
Paul Irish on HTML5 Boilerplate

ManchLUG, 25-Jan-2011, Marc Nozell and Sheeva Plug, Kenta Koga with Boxee and Kinect

By Ted Roche on January 26, 2011 in Technology

Seventeen people attended last night’s meeting, held at Wings Your Way on Elm Street in Manchester. A good time was had by all. There was no dearth of conversation, whether on-topic or dissing Perl.
Marc Nozell brought a Sheeva Plug to show us the tiny computer. Marc has owned it for a couple of years and uses it as his in-house file sharing server. The Sheeva came with an older Ubuntu installed, he has used a couple of different Debian installations. It’s an ARM-based processor, has 512 Kb Flash and 512 Kb RAM. It has an MMC slot that supports Compact Flash, and that’s typically where Marc keeps his OS. The box also has USB and Ethernet connections, so it can host external drives via a powered USB hub and have a network presence. Marc passed it around and there were a fair number of questions on installation and configuration and file system choices.
Kenta brought his Mac to show Boxee, an application based on XBMC (originally, XBox Media Center, but its evolved to be more hardware-generic). Kenta talked and demonstrated how Boxee could show his social media feeds, NetFlix, Hulu, YouTube and more. It’s a pretty slick application for the next generation of media centers. We talked about some of the hardware available, proprietary and not, and the evolution of the media space.
Kenta also brought a Microsoft Kinect and showed how he had hacked it to work on his Mac. We talked about some of the new immersive and interactive technologies out there.
Thanks to Kenta (and Chip Marshall) for organizing and announcing the meeting, to Wings Your Way for the fine facilities, and to Marc for his presentation, and to all for attending and participating!

Older posts Newer posts

Navigation