oheric.com

Most school networks provide users a personal network folder mounted as a Windows network drive and accessible from any campus workstation. This is primarily meant as a document folder, but executable programs can be stored here too. I have several useful programs in my network folder, but the most useful by far is jEdit. The same copy runs on both Windows and Mac workstations, with the same plugins and configuration options.

To use jEdit in a network environment, just make sure that your jEdit user settings directory is stored on in your network folder by launching jEdit with

“jedit.jar -settings=P:/ath/to/your/folder/.jedit”

via an application shortcut in windows, or a shell script on Mac/Linux (jEdit is an executable jar). Enjoy!

An empty husk of a posting.

At the OSCON Django meetup last Tuesday I asked some vim aficionados how they managed to keep their .vimrcs synchronized between different hosts. I myself prefer to use a network-aware editor like jEdit and KDE’s kate to avoid platform quirks.

Me and Heather are going to make a website! We take lots of pictures of native plants, animals, lichens etc, and this will be a database of amateur sightings. Of course anybody can contribute their own sightings, and we will have a rating system so really neat pictures etc can float up.

Todo:
- temp domain (can't login to dyndns.org?)

collect:
- coordinates (or address)
- Photo
- species tags (free at first?)
maps

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_articles

I'm listening to the Lego article, it's a good format to listen to while doing something else, not too distracting but you pick up interesting snippets here and there.

I bought a ukulele a few months ago, the $20 China special at one of the 3 string shops in downtown Corvallis. I don't play any songs all the way through yet, but this guy's rendition of the (NES, Level 1-1) Mario Bros. theme on the uke should hold you over:

• I find this ukulele chordfinder very useful. Also surf around their site, if you can figure out the wacky navigation. It's a media playground!

• My favorite ukulele tablature site.
• Article on relative tuning method

Setting up filesharing on Linux has never been a completely satisfying experience for me. Samba, NFS, FTP. I tend to settle on FTP, but I don't have a preferred server for which I know the conf file format, and I've been confounded in the past trying to set up this simple case:

All login users get access to their home dirs.

So I've been playing with mDNS/Zeroconf/Rendevous/Bonjour - just call it whatever you want to. The implementation used for Linux is called Avahi. So if you install the avahi-daemon package throughout your home network, you get automatic hostnames under the .local TLD, for free. Yippie! It even works with Macs.

The cool part is the ability to advertise not just machines via peer-to-peer DNS, but also services. OSX users know what I'm talking about, yeah. You think you're bad, punk? We got it on Linux too!

Ahem. Getting back to filesharing, this post shows how to easily set up vsftpd for the sharing scheme I wanted in the first paragraph, and then advertise it via Avahi. Great! Now when I type zeroconf:/ in the Konqueror address bar, I see the service. Reliably. Not like frickin SMB shares. That ftp server restarts, and in Konq I see it disappear for a sec and then reappear. Not only that, but when I yanked the ethernet cable out of my laptop, Avahi smartly switched the machine name to point to the same machine on the wireless net! So ftp://me@my-desktop.local:21/home/me continued to work. Sweet!

Content management

Editing interface

• Filter configuration
• Evaluate rich text editor or simple markup

Image handling

• Attachments
• Aggregate formats
• Insertion
• Blocks

Events

1. Submitted by Anonymous
2. Reviewed by moderator
3. Approved

/base/(head)|(stable)

• Core system + select essential contribs

/sites/[name]

• Drupal sites dir for each site.
  • settings.php
  • database.mysql (prod snap)
  • themes
  • modules
• ACLs prevent snooping.

The auto database backup feature needs some thought. Database/sitename.mysql should always be a recent copy of the production database for the site. The main question is, when are backups made? I'd backups to be user-driven rather than timed. Ideally, checking out a new copy of the site should result in the creation of a db backup. Unfortunately, hooks are only fired on commit, not checkout. Since there are so many questions, we should start simple. I'll just make a script which parses $1/settings.php for $DB params, dumps to $1/database.mysql, and commits $1. Simple and useful. It may be necessary to play with the diff settings to get reasonable patch sizes.

Ok, we're discussing repos structure here. The question is, given Drupal's builtin per-site config dirs, are per-site SVN branches useful? It is possible, for instance, to put site-specific mods in the sites dir. Whether dev versions of mods which already exist in the global mods dir will consistently override the global copy, I don't know. Let's check… [opens editor] ^v^v^ Yes! (includes/bootstrap.inc function drupal_get_filename). So there would seem to be no reason to mainain seperate branches for each site. Awesome! The other thing is access control on the sites dirs. So we have two (or three) branches: prod, test, dev. In each branch we have implemented some acls so that you only get the site dir if you pass muster. That sounds hard. So maybe we store the sites in another repos path. Then you need to explicitly check out the site. And each site is ACLed. Frito pie!

So alot has been happening behind the scenes since my last blog update. I have a beefy new Ubuntu virtual server, which I have been industriously whittling into a kick ass Drupal hosting and development environment. The component which ties the whole system together is the Subversion repository. Whenever a new site branch is created in subversion, a hook is fired which automagically configures Apache and mysql. Sweet! Anyway, I'm working hard on launching some new services, in particular a business homepage with project management, documentation, etc. Cheers