ARLY this morning I bought iuron.com. The host was admirably rapid in its automated response and setup. Subsequently, after just minutes since the purchase I was able to access the domain (DNS was up-to-date already) and initialise things, e.g. content, passwords, customised error pages, siteinfo.xml, robots.txt, favicon.ico, etc.

In the intermin I created a site/project logo using The GIMP. It took me roughly 10 minutes to produce the compact GIF version, of which I keep a non-lossy version (bitmap) as often required.

A detailed but not yet comprehensive proposal is bound to go public in the brand-new domain soon. The specifications are not public and are password-protected for the time being. Let the title and excerpt give you a rough indication of where the project is headed. I am yet to seek funding opportunities so many more details are (hopefully) soon to follow.

Many on-line services incorporate RSS feeds these days. Briefly observe, for instance, the vendor-specific feeds management for this Web log.

It turns out that Google have joined that game with what they call Google Reader. GReader is bound to deliver quite a lot given what we know about Google engineers and their love-affair with Web applications (more latterly videos).

For feeds, I am still using RSSOwl (JRE, hence inter-operable), of which I am a tester. I am also a tester of the Web-based, AJAX-rich Feedlounge (screenshot below), but admittedly I never contribute immensely as a tester. I use RSSOwl (screenshot below) almost exclusively. I am rather loyal to RSSOwl though I occasionally take Feedlounge for a short spin. Feedlounge is somewhat irresponsive, is still in its testing phases, facing an uncertain future and boasts commercial aspirations.

Feedlounge in action

RSSOwl back in April (click to enlarge)

EVIATING from the a development branch, thus staying away from the regular updates cycle, is a step which is bound to have its problems, e.g. security and missed out extensions. I am fully aware of these issues and I made mistakes in the past nonetheless, particularly with Web applications. I am rather confident and comfortable with my choices to extend applications, but one must remember the pitfalls, as well as the very few advantages.

Rather than simply downloading pre-installed and/or pre-configured packages like Gallery, WordPress, a VPN client or PHP-Nuke, one can add a wee bit of ‘individuality’ to them. For example, with actual words and vocabularies that do not suit your way of speaking, you can instill some personality within the software — a beauty to be found most commonly in Open Source software. It gives a feeling of ownership, a sense of personal contribution.

Linux users are often inclined to hack software and customise it, maybe because they can. With some Linux distributions like Gentoo, people struggle to compile individual components and some have the odd habit of re-compiling the Linux kernel. Again, it gives an utterly unnecessary sense of achievement. That free platform, however, unlike other platforms, can be claimed to be one where very little intervention should be involved. With 5-CD installations, for instance, all the necessary software is in place, is well-integrated and simply works without any apparent conflicts. Somebody else took care of all the nasty installations and then burned some ISO to be distributed and put as-is on other people’s computers. So, we perceive a situation where there is a great deal of freedom, but at the same time that freedom is unneeded or even discouraged.

Change to existing packages is risky. It can bring an application to a fragile state. Attempts to exploit vulnerable (usually non-existent if the owner is fortunate) components are being re-directed to an unpleasant page at server level on this domain. I hope these can successfully deter a determined hacker. The only ones to come across such a page would be those attempting to sabotage (hence the rel="nofollow" in the link above).

When forking and choosing to no longer follow a development cycle, there is always some possibility of ‘flushing’ self-made components and starting fresh with similar, even identical data and an application belonging to the current generation, hence incorporating state-of-the-art technologies. Upgrades usually mean some loss of personal changes which are better off never lost. This may lead to feelings of regret due to waste. It also means hours of conversions, not to mention the laborious process that is involved in updates and getting accustomed to new interfaces. As it stands, I continue to fork, but do so cautiously.

When I first set up this site, which is administered using cPanel, I was blocked access to a terminal (AKA shell, console, command-line) and denied telnet/SSH access by the Web host. By default, most hosts do likewise, depriving site owners from excessive flexibility in hope that security will not be jeopardised and sites will rarely ‘break’. Nonethess, I found a terminal workaround, which I would like to share.

Run command as a cron job (widget/icon shown above). Have it scheduled to run a minute later with output to get sent by E-mail (default option) or saved to a file, e.g.

du -all >~/output_file

output_file, which gets created in your home directory, should then contain text that otherwise will have appeared in a terminal. Likewise, virtually anything including installations can be carried out. System administrators would become distressed if this practice became commonplace. In essence, this is the same as having a terminal-based interface, albeit it is slower and unresponsive.

Example cron job in cPanel – periodic mySQL backups (click image for full-sized equivalent)

A shrunk-down screenshot of CrossOver-themed Thunderbird

OZILLA Thunderbird has been my primary mail client for several months, having made it the permanent replacement for KMail. I thought I ought to share a recommendation for a theme. I personally find Apple’s Aqua theme and brushed metal elements in Jaguar/Tiger highly appealing. I even went as far as tailoring my own in Firefox (see below). I have also come to discover that CrossOver, the Aqua-inspired theme for Thunderbird, is by far the most popular theme at the moment with approximately 18,000 downloads in the past week alone.

Related items:

• Firefox Mac OS X Theme – my personal Firefox theme (see picture below)
• My Firefox Theme

Mac OS X theme for Firefox

Quanta Plus – a Web development editor (click to enlarge)

wo of the most common arguments/wars in UseNet, as well as various forums, are over Linux distributions and favourite text editors, which are very fundamental tools, particularly in development.

There is no ideal text editor. Different editors suit different purposes and a different editor should be used depending the user’s level of skills. Below, for example, are various editors that I use for numerous distinct yet related tasks:

• NEdit – for editing C and tables (can make rectangular selections)
• KWrite – C++ due to colours, smart indentation, etc.
• KEdit – includes a well-integrated spellchecker
• Notepad – very light
• Wordpad- rich formatting
• BBedit (Mac) – much of the above, yet commercial (i.e. expensive)
• MATLAB editor – colour syntax highlighting, debugging capabilities (e.g. breakpoints) are integrated into the editors, consistency and cohesiveness with the rest of MATLAB
• Quanta – Web development in KDE – widgets for markup, code generation for tables, and more (see screenshot at the top)
• cPanel File Manager – editing on server-side using the browser

The bottom line is that there is no best editor (likewise there is no best Linux distribution). Perhaps this explains why there are endless arguments that end up nowhere. A developer would need to use different editors at different times. I can think of 5 distinct types of text editors that I use at the moment: MATLAB, C/C++, HTML and simple (plain) text. even E-mail and newsgroups clients can be considered editors just being themselves, not to mention textareas and forms in the Web browser.

My screens at the time of writing – WordPress is on the right monitor

nly a couple of days ago I finished implementing the little tool (pet mini-project) which I have longed for. I finally made everything public this morning. In a nutshell, the tool serves 2 tasks at the moment:

• It grabs a screenshot of my display every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, and puts it on a public Webspace, which I can then access from anywhere
• Similarly, some simple scripts get usage statistics (memory and CPU) as well as running tasks and make these public via the Web

To me this is valuable as I can ‘eavesdrop’ on my computer while I am away. All of this is done without the need for remote login means such as Telnet or SSH; the disadvantage is that things are passive. Since screenshots are visual, there is no need to forward X11 (component responsible for display and user interaction in most UNIX systems) either. Feel free to take advantage of these scripts. You can see an example of these scripts in action by viewing the bottom of my introduction page. Although it jeopardises my privacy slightly, visitors can now see (roughly) what I work on. I personally use it to check when my experiments have reached completion.