420 Summit

The Death of USENET?

Time Warner is blocking all USENET access entirely. Sprint is blocking the entire alt.* hierarchy. Verizon, on the other hand, is blocking on a case by case basis…

69 days ago

Robtex

Swiss army knife internet tool.

154 days ago

Wiki Roundup

For some time now I’ve needed a confidential semi-secure space for a small group to share notes and an occasional file. While there is no shortage of collaborative/groupware type software out there most are overkill for my needs. I don’t want to learn anything new and I certainly don’t want to spend any money.

What I do want is a fairly fine grained permission system and ease of use. These people are writers, not geeks and I’m not about to walk them through Drupal or, for that matter, WordPress. I would also rather stab myself in the eye than install another weblog or CMS.

A wiki seemed to be a good fit so I started poking around for one. My hosting provider’s control panel offers a few installers so that seemed the logical place to start.

First up was everyones favorite, MediaWiki. This puppy, crafted for WikiPedia, is the Swiss army knife of wikidom. It does everything. It is also gigantic, has a bazillion (note: all numbers and facts are actually estimates and assumptions) files and code wise is incomprehensible to anyone without expert level knowledge of PHP.

MediaWiki is a fine piece of software and serves millions well, but for me to set it up for ten people is just absurd.

Then there was DokuWiki. DokuWiki comes very highly recommended by people whose web chops are beyond reproach. It installed effortlessly, was simple to modify and pages rendered 367% (that’d be one of those facts mentioned above) faster than MediWiki.

I thought I had a winner until I broke it. I was fiddling around with the ACL’s and did something foolish. I’m sure it was simple user error, but then again, if I knew what I had done I would have fixed it instead of deleting the database and directory. Having a short attention spanI moved on, but will be revisiting DokuWiki.

The third option was TWiki or, as they put it, “the open source Wiki for the Enterprise”. I should have stopped then. Instead, I wasted a couple of hours perusing docs written in Klingon and learning far more about .htaccess than I ever intended. It was ugly, too.

Then I remembered WikkaWiki.

I installed WikkaWiki a couple of years ago and recalled enjoying it. After confirming that it was still being developed, I downloaded the latest version. Installation was dead simple and the .htaccess — needed to avoid the ridiculous URI’s so common with this stuff — worked out of the box. Changing the appearance of the wiki was just a few lines in a simple and intuitive stylesheet.

It is also easy for users to modify pages, providing they are allowed, just by double clicking the page. This brings up an editing window and the syntax is fairly simple. These people are writing paragraphs, not floating page elements so simple is good.

More importantly, user permissions or ACL’s, just plain worked. Any page can be restricted in a damn near infinite number of ways via simple little check boxes. For example, restricting file uploads is just a matter of limiting access to the page containing the {{files}} action.

I think this will work out just fine.

304 days ago

Ahoy, ye wee pirate!

“I’d say “tooooo strict!” and anyway he can’t make me do anything. He’s not the boss of me…”

304 days ago

Twittering

A friend and I were fiddling around with Twitter and I decided to put my Twits in a sidebar. Twitter provides a few ‘badges’ for this but, like any good geek, I wanted a little more control.

Fortunately, Twitter also provides a RSS feed.

Textpattern Plugins to the rescue. The RSS parsing was trivial — Bit Santos’ bit_rss is dead simple to install and configure. While not as fully featured as a hand-rolled Magpie RSS feed parser, it did what I wanted and took five minutes to get up and running.

The remaining problem was that the Twitter feed prefaces each item with an @fultonchain (my username). This is kind of redundant when included on a weblog but something I have no control over. What I do have control over is what is displayed and another TXP plugin, an7_filter, made it easy for me to replace the ‘@fultonchain’ with whitespace.

Thanks to Textpattern, the total time from conception to implementation was about fifteen minutes. It doesn’t get much easier.

326 days ago

Spamming Hotmail

I have been modifying a chunk of canned PHP that has questionable past. Previous versions were manipulated by spammers so security conscious people are, for good reason, a little leery of it.

Gmail, Yahoo and AOL marked my initial test mails as spam. Oddly enough, Hotmail did not.

Just to be clear, I am not a spammer and current versions of this scripting are not compromised in any way — well, hopefully not.

345 days ago

Resurrection

This post was nearly entitled: MT blows goats.

Over the weekend I started rebuilding a postcard site I had once. At one point, after being a Yahoo! pick of the day, being dugg and making the print version of a nationally distributed newspaper this site was getting pretty heavily hit.

Built on a modified (read as: hacked all to hell) version of Movable Type and a not very secure old Sendcard script, it wasn’t exactly stable. While I have the data in a variety of formats exporting it in a useful way proved a little cumbersome so I decided to recreate the site from scratch using current versions of MT and Sendcard.

I started with a clean install of MT4.

Wowsers. It sure is pretty and chock full o’ fancy AJAXian goodness. The template system is new and ‘improved’ with the goal of separating the various components of a site into manageable and reusable chunks. Quite a few of them actually, a few too many for this guy. I find it absurd that I have to root through three levels of nested template menus to make a trivial change to a sidebar and, in all honesty, after reading the docs and fiddling with the site I still haven’t a clue what half of the templates do and the last thing I need is another ‘widget’.

Oddly, the one thing I couldn’t edit from my browser was the stylesheet. The CSS is kept in a template directory and, it would seem, has to be edited outside the MT application. Sure, there plenty of workarounds but why should I have to jump through hoops to change a font size? An even bigger problem was the new asset management system. It used to be that you could open a previously uploaded image and view/modify the [X]HTML, change captions and alt text and recreate the thumbnail. Now all you get is the ability to edit the ‘tags’. Tags I neither want nor need in the first place.

I remember how happy I was reading that MT had been open sourced. After using it for a bit I can see why — this beastie has gotten so large and complex that it is now beyond the reach of the casual designer/hobbyist. While I wish SixApart the best the reality is that Movable Type is no longer suitable for the individual who just wants a weblog and maybe a photo gallery.

As nice as it is to see a once loved tool move into newsrooms and the corporate big time, I am not about to devote my limited time and resources to learning a friggin’ operating system.

346 days ago

Battling for hearts and minds

A self described mad scientist and disruptive technologist has whipped up an IP based tracker widget to trace anonymous Wikipedia edits.

Fox News and the New York Times are about even, as is the government of Cuba and Ft. Meade in Maryland. This is a curious convergence of the ‘net, the media and those who make policy. Even stranger is the prospect that groups as diverse as Diebold, the Vatican and the CIA care enough to pay someone to make anonymous postings to what is essentially a big ass web forum.

Most importantly, where does one apply for these jobs? I’ve been trolling web forums anonymously for a decade and nobody ever gave me a cent. I can be bought. Tainted baby food, not a problem. Crazy right/left – wing government, who cares, commies and fascists are one and the same on the web. Big oil, hey, I like to drive as much as the next guy. US Army, sure, somebodies gots to do my killing for me.

You guys write the checks and I’ll write the copy. Anonymously, of course, since I wouldn’t want to actually be held accountable for my words.

373 days ago

One search, two results

I was reminded by a commenter on a weblog post about Google removing .torrent links about their censorship of results in China. While this is old news and something I was vaguely aware of, I never gave it much thought — while undoubtedly important, my capacity for outrage was, and is, pretty much maxed out.

Still, as suggested, I did a simple search for “tiananmen square”.

First, I did it in the regular old (US) Google image search and got a slew of results (21,799) with the iconic student and tank photograph featured prominently.

Then I did a Google (China) search and while the student and tank image happened to be number one (I figure it’s an oversight) the overall results were far fewer (991) and quite different.

What confuses me is that if Google is yanking .torrent links, based on US law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998), shouldn’t they apply US law to all search results? If citizens of Sweden are expected to abide by the DMCA, shouldn’t citizens of China benefit from our First Amendment protections?

377 days ago