420 Summit

UCCASS

Survey software I may actually be able to live with.

23 days ago

The man behind Ubuntu

The idea is to build an institution that focuses on accelerating social change, or accelerating change in the social areas…

41 days ago

Another 16 Firefox Add-ons

Because you can never have too many.

69 days ago

AtMail

Pretty, pretty webmail software. Anyone hosted here want to give it a go?

89 days ago

All but buried

AOL has dropped support for Netscape. It really is a new web.

232 days ago

Picnik

Sometimes it’s just silly to fire up Photoshop. Picnik is perfect for quick crops or resizing an image, and as an added bonus:“You can also enter the URL for any website…”

302 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

Unpaper

“Unpaper is a post-processing tool for scanned sheets of paper, especially for book pages that have been scanned from previously created photocopies. The main purpose is to make scanned book pages better readable on screen after conversion to PDF.”

312 days ago

Always a bridesmaid

I just updated my browser and a few extensions broke, a few just worked and a few had been updated. As expected. I don’t usually install these things without a bit of research as I depend heavily on my Firefox extensions (Greasemonkey and Web Developer in particular) and wouldn’t want any breakage. It isn’t as though it’s never happened before and hitting the developers site before installing anything is always a good idea. Today, I was lazy and let the update process do it’s thing.

FoxyTunes is a dead simple little audio controller that sits in the bottom bar. What could go wrong? So I updated it without a thought and a few minutes little it did something. All by itself. It popped up a little window with links. I hate that shit and bugged, if I want a browser toolbar to do something I’ll damn well tell it to.

I clicked a link, to see what would happen, and a nice new Firefox tab opened with all sorts of goodness in it. Last.fm — I’ve been scrobbling since before it was a word. Video — I’ve never seen the ‘Mats live. Lyrics — I’ve always wondered what he muttered at the end. Flickr and Pandora — beta’d both. Then there were the usual Google, Rhapsody and Amazon suspects — gotta make a buck, ask Dvorak:

“Web 2.0 is the latest moniker in an endless effort to reignite the dot-com mania of the late 1990s. This one seems to be succeeding. The problem is that little has changed. Bad ideas of the past have been renamed and spiffed up. We’re watching a classic example of “old wine in new bottles”: Changing the label doesn’t make the wine any better, but it does get us to buy more wine.”

Most of the above are services that I use and, who knows, I might even buy an album. Knowing WTF Paul muttered at the end of the song is worth every cent and kicking a little back might help keep all this Web 2.0 stuff around.

Despite the opinion of self-parodizing trolls.

If you need any convincing of how out of touch Dvorak and his ilk are, just follow the link to his column in PC Mag. Just be sure to turn down your speakers before the loud, and ugly, Flash ad loads — on every single page of a four page article.

382 days ago