These Things Matter to Me
Sunday, February 08, 2009
  Guess Who's Not Crazy: That little Plugin notification in WordPress 2.7
In my fresh WordPress 2.7 install, the Plugins nav had a "1" next to it that would not go away. I couldn't figure out what the heck it was trying to notify me about.

Here's what I've been trained to think it means:
Sometimes it was red.



Sometimes it was grey.




Here's what it actually meant:

An inactive plugin that came with my install, WP-Super-Cache,was eligible for an upgrade. This was installed via Dreamhost who may have packaged some dormant plugins. I have no idea at the moment whether non-Dreamhost installs will run into this.

I guess it's a variation of the "needs attention" design pattern, but given that it was an inactive plugin, and the status of the available upgrade wasn't particularly prominent or connected or linked-to from the Plugin (1), I know I'm not the only one who's been stumped by this. I won't name names, but a WP vet I asked didn't know either.

GUESS WHO'S NOT CRAZY.

The more you know.

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Wednesday, January 14, 2009
  Google Video is winding down new uploads, hopefully it doesn't touch Google Apps Video.
I just read over at Search Engine Land that Google announced it will be shutting down/stopping new development on multiple Google products, including Google Video (so far, just new uploads, not deleting anything, or disabling the search of existing content).

As you may or may not know, Google Apps, the Google suite of collaboration and office tools, includes a video component.  While parts of the experience resemble and no doubt share technology with Google Video, the upload and video administration experience are different enough to suggest they're two separate products (with frustratingly similar names ;D), and that Google Apps users shouldn't worry about their Google Apps Video going anywhere.

Still... it got me thinking... consumer Google Docs features roll down to Google Apps customers all the time, it's not so crazy to think that a consumer Google service change could impact Google Apps customers.

For this reason, I posted on the Google Apps support forum asking for emotional closure :D

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Tuesday, September 09, 2008
  These Drupal links matter to you 20080909
  • Oh yeah, Lullabot is the primary organizer behind a big Drupal conference, Do it with Drupal.  3 days in New Orleans in December.  No BarCamp or Drupalcon, it looks to be a highly curated event, with major speakers from within and outside the Drupal community, 1000-2000 attendees (?).  I'm super excited that Drupal is getting a major event like this. The Drupalcons and Drupalcamps are great, but I think this kind of context for Drupal can legitmize in some corporate environments.

  • I swear I don't work for Lullabot, but another announcement related to them: There are some Lullabot Drupal workshops next week in Portland.

  • BTW, Drupalcon Szeged was very well documented, often with full videos and slides from the talks. Check out the full session page with links to files and descriptions for the Drupalcon Szeged talks. Bravo to the group who ran it. I've heard only good things from those who attended, that it was a great atmosphere. Also, as somebody viewing from afar, the speed with which they've uploaded videos after the event is quite fast!
  • This is interesting. Web-learning mainstay Lynda.com has Drupal training videos. As with most Lynda.com content, there are some free samples on the course page. It's great that they have some Drupal training, but it's confusing that they cover MAMP and WAMP installation, but neglect what is by far the most prominent Drupal hosting environment (or any web hosting environment): LAMP (Linux). Maybe the context is proof of concept?
    Also, Lynda.com has WordPress coursework up, so Drupal is not the first open source tool to make the cut, but it's still significant that a site mostly known for teaching HTML and Final Cut Pro has Drupal videos.

  • LA People, DrupalCamp LA is next week, September 13th, 14th
(Very cool Drupal  knitting chart by ejhogbin)

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Monday, September 08, 2008
  How to install the Python prerequisites for the Memetracker Drupal module
How to install the Python prerequisites for the Memetracker Drupal  module.

Usually the installation of Drupal modules is pretty straightforward:

  • Download module to modules/
  • Uncompress
  • Enable
  • Configure
  • Profit

But the Memetracker module is a bit different, requiring a bunch of Python stuff, and ideally, "root" on your server.  It's not that hard to set up, but if you're not used to installing stuff outside of the Druapl-verse, these notes might help you.

(These instructions are for Ubuntu Hardy Heron. The steps are likely very similar on other Debian-based distributions, including earlier versions of Ubuntu.
I've also successfully installed Memetracker on Centos 5.x/Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.x. I have a document for that coming soon, though the packages and steps are very similar, and you could extrapolate these notes and apply to other Linux versions.)

Most of you should skip to step 2, as you probably already have Drupal running..

1. Make sure you have all "normal" LAMP and Linux utilities installed for your typical Drupal install.

1a. Install the LAMP stuff, mail server stuff that Drupal requires.

# apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql mysql-server php5-gd postfix 

(Note: Though Drupal core can run on PHP4, the Memetracker module *requires* PHP5, so that's what we're using here.  You don't have to go out of your way to get this on Hardy Heron, but there is a small possibility some of you went out of your way to get PHP4, so I'm steering you towards PHP5 here.)

1b. Though not required to run Drupal, these additional packages make life much easier, and it's just a matter of time before you miss them:

# apt-get install openssh-server wget build-essential groff-base man-db unzip

2.  Unlike most Drupal setups, you also need to have some Python resources handy to run Memetracker.

2a. The first bunch of Python tools already have nice Ubuntu packages already made up for you.

# apt-get install python-numpy python-numeric python-dev python

2b. Pyclust doesn't have an Ubuntu package made for it.  We need to compile it from source (There will be a python-cluster package in the next Ubuntu version, Intrepid Ibex.)

Get the source:

# wget http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/cluster/cluster-1.41.tar.gz

(Note, this is the newest version as of 20080908.  Please check http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/cluster/software.htm  for newest version.)

Uncompress the source:

# tar -xvzf cluster-1.41.tar.gz

Now install it:

# cd cluster-1.41
python setup.py install

You now have all your Python stuff installed. 
Let's verify it works:

# python
>> from Pycluster import *
(You will get your Python prompt back if you have your Python stuff installed correctly.)

That's it. You now have your environment ready for Memetracker.  There's lots of other stuff you can do to optimize your system for Memetracker, and I have some additional Memetracker documentation coming up.  However I noticed an immediate need for this Python stuff to be written down in a step-by-step manner, as many Drupal folks don't usually have to do so much Python/Linux stuff.

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Wednesday, September 03, 2008
  When Chrome crashes
You're almost pleased.



When a page bombs out, it only kills that one tab/window.
Notice only one unhappy tab. The rest go on living.

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  Monitoring Chrome's Ascent
In the 24 hours since Google released Chrome, its browser share has reached 2.6%, at least amongst the 45,000 sites tracked by browser stats tool GetClicky.

Do with that information what you like.

(via Techcrunch)

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Tuesday, August 26, 2008
  Second big day for Opentape. Community + Policy.
  1. If you know anything about licensing, and would like to help a great free software project out, considering talking with Opentape. It looks like they need guidance choosing a license, and would prefer to package up some stuff made of disparate permissive licenses (MIT, GPL, etc) along with their own code.
  2. Opentape now has forums! This is great. People are submitting bugs, requesting features... all that good stuff.

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Monday, August 25, 2008
  New open source music software I'm excited about: Opentape, a muxtape-inspired tool.
Opentape is an extremely easy-to-install,  open source implementation of Muxtape. You unzip it, upload songs, and you're done. No database to set up, no need to edit php files in vi. It looks like Muxtape, except with an unlimited number of songs. 

(For those that don't know about about Muxtape,  Muxtape is a web-based tool for sharing and listening to music.  Like much social software,  it benefits from a network effect, getting better and more useful the more people use it, and being hard to explain to people who don't.  (Explaining social software to people who don't use it can be frustrating. "It plays music? With your friends?" That's it? Le sigh.)

Muxtape is also basically gone. It became unavailable last week.  In their redirect they confirmed some issues with the RIAA.  But since the day they went dark, they've made no more public statements about the situation, which is a bit confusing and unfortunate.  I don't feel wronged, after all, they were giving us a great free service.  But I wish they could communicate a bit more, especially when their software has so many non-infringing uses and passionate users.)

But let's get back to Opentape.

What an opentape looks like for the listener/ visitor (via screenshots from the Opentape live demo):

An administrative view of rearranging songs:
How do you set it up?
  1. Get the Opentape source code to your server, ideally in a place that's in your web's root/user's public area, often this will be "public_html."
  2. Unzip it.
  3. Browse to the Opentape  directory on your server, probably something like, "http://yourdomain.com/opentape"
  4. You'll find a fully functioning website awaiting a password of your choosing.
  5. You're done! No database to set up!
Once additional cool thing about Opentape running on your server, rather than on a central service provider's, is that you can actually upload your songs via ftp/sftp, in addition to the normal web-based upload method. 

There's also mention of a future ability to federate with other Opentape users across other servers' installations of Opentape.

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probably a little too much

About
Linux sysadmin. I cry when make fails. And during the Oscars. Every year.
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