Archives for February, 2011
The claw is my master!
Feb 27, 2011 (about 1 year ago)
I have redesigned my personal Whird theme. The new design is dramatically different from my previous effort. For starters, I have used colours, and pretty bright colours at that. I cannot remember the last time I used any colour in one of my designs, which probably explains why I have gone a little overboard‽ Having said that, I think the colours work quite well together, and besides, they are fun and smile inducing :)
Regarding the actual colour values and how I came about choosing them, I started with Debian red and then worked around the colours found in the Toy Story character, Squeeze. Here is the final colour palette.
Apart from the new colour scheme, I have also included some microformats in the form of a hCard. I am not sure if too many people are actually using microformats, but I find the topic interesting and I wanted to make a start at including microformats within my site’s code. When I find time, I will try to include more — I would like to include a classic blogroll with XFN values, but this will require some additional Whird coding.
Also, I was feeling inspired after reading Jeremy Keith’s journal and decided I would have a go at creating a responsive design with CSS. So, if this new design is being viewed inside a 960px or wider browser window, it should feature two columns, those being a content column and a sidebar. If being viewed in anything less than 960px but more than 600px, it should degrade nicely to a single column. And finally, if narrower than 600px, it should become completely fluid. Well, at least in theory, I have only tested it with the beta of Firefox 4 and Chromium 9. I will have to try and grab the daughter’s laptop to test it in Internet Explorer, not that I really want to. :/
Next job, apply the new colour scheme to the CrunchBang Linux project. :P
The Twitter is dead, long live the Identi.ca
Feb 21, 2011 (about 1 year ago)
Last night, I got involved in a conversation on Identi.ca regarding the use of Twitter. The conversation was started by reality with this dent:
I just deleted my Twitter account. Identica is the way.
There seems to be a movement of Identi.ca users who have decided to stop using Twitter and delete their accounts. This is something I have been thinking about doing myself, but I am not sure that deleting my account is something I really want to do. To be honest, I am not keen on deleting anything, even 4+ years of mundane Twitter drivel.
So, instead of deleting my Twitter account, I simply closed the Identi.ca to Twitter bridge — which is the only way my Twitter account has been updated in years. BUT, before I did this, I sent one last dent to appear on my Twitter account:
The Twitter is dead, long live the Identi.ca: http://muppy.org/n
Now, knowing that tweets really only have a fleeting existence, I am almost sure that nobody read it, or even noticed it, but it did give me a great deal of satisfaction to do it. Sad, I know. Also, if anyone inadvertently/unfortunately stumbles across my Twitter account, there is a slight chance that they might click on the link to see what Identi.ca is all about, and I would class that as a win! Also sad, I know.
Oh, and I also changed my Twitter bio to read:
I used to use Twitter, but then Identi.ca happened and the world changed for the better.
I am hoping my efforts will qualify my joining the !twitterfree Identi.ca group. :)
Finally, in totally related news, my friend richslxh also joined the conversion, and blogged about it too.
Effy does CrunchBang
Feb 14, 2011 (about 1 year ago)
I enjoy listening to the TuxRadar podcast, I think it is witty and insightful. If you have not listened to the podcast before, it is well worth a download. Anyhow, the podcast has a “You Dare Us” feature, where the presenters take on a new challenge to perform, before talking about it on the next episode.
The current challenge is for the presenters to contribute “something” to an open source project and Efrain Hernandez-Mendoza talked about how he is planning to contribute by redesigning a logo. Effy said:
After looking at various icons and distribution logos, I came to the conclusion that I should contribute by redesigning a logo for a distribution. Some of the logos that I saw they do look like corporate identities, some of them look quite amateur, some of them look quite professional, but I think the worst one is CrunchBang Linux…
…basically it seems like someone just typed it.
LOL. I am really excited to see what Effy comes up with. Many people have attempted to redesign the logo before, and the results are always interesting. Good luck, Effy. :)
If anyone is interested in listening to the feature, you can download the full episode, or listen to the clip below.
File name: tuxradar_s03e03-clip-effy-does-crunchbang.ogg
File type: audio/ogg
File size: 1.45 MB
File md5: c8922d3e8c89ec444c3dc3dc9456b5c
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Whird of the day: “Moonthology”
Feb 12, 2011 (about 1 year ago)
A few days ago, I was quite surprised, in a nice way, when I received a message from Hanna, saying:
I thought it would be fun to try Whird…
As far as I know, Hanna is the only person, other than myself, to download and set-up a working instance of Whird. I think this is amazing.
Hanna is using Whird for her Moonthology blog and she had this to say about it:
So to why I like this then. I have a blog, I write mostly about crocheting these days, I don’t need bells and whistles for that. Whird allows me to write and post entries and tag them, create pages and upload files. Creating a theme for it pretty much piece of cake. I can preview posts and save them as drafts. All I need.
It pleases me to think that someone else is finding Whird useful. :)
In semi-related news, I have been playing around with my own Whird installation, more specifically, with its custom Bazaar integration. My project logs can now be subscribed to as Atom feeds. I am not too sure how useful a feature this is, but I had fun coding it. I also made the code slightly more modular, mainly to ease with the creation of new projects. Oh, and I also made revision patches downloadable, as well as viewable. I am sure there are still improvements to be made, but I am happy with how it is progressing.
As for Whird’s code, thanks to Hanna, it should now work when PHP’s magic quotes are on. I was not aware that any hosting providers are still using this magical, not, feature, but I am now. It makes me sad to have to support depreciated features, more so when the feature has the word “magic” in its name.
Also, I added some working code to Whird’s example new post hook, which basically details how to have Whird post to identi.ca with the post’s title and a short URL created using the goo.gl API service.
Finally, in completely unrelated news, I can categorically state that slicing the top of your thumb off, whilst chopping hot chillies, really stings! :/
Throttling Pigs
Feb 8, 2011 (about 1 year ago)
Hogthrob and Strangepork, 2 of the 3 CrunchBang Linux CD image servers, have had their connections throttled from 100Mbps to just 10Mbps. Piggy remains unaffected, for the time being.
This is not good news, but not totally unexpected. The servers have been doing a fine job of dishing out images, but at the same time, they have received an absolute hammering. Since March ‘10, more than 50 terabytes has been distributed, which is not bad considering the machines only have little solo Atom chips and 512MB RAM.
Anyhow, what is done is done and I think it is probably time to rethink CrunchBang’s distribution method. I am currently toying with the idea of only offering BitTorrent downloads. I am sure the CrunchBang community would understand if the direct download links disappeared; after all, the project is only small and it does have limited funds available. Also, as yamatt pointed out:
Centralised storage was so last decade :P
I could not agree more, especially when it involves distributing large files. This was one reason I was very keen to set-up CrunchBang’s opentracker instance, which has been performing well. I think it would be good to use it more.
My only concern over using a BitTorrent only distribution method is with the initial seeding of the images. I am sure I could probably get by with just a couple of machines on different networks, or may be I could keep all 3 pigs running and just limit their torrent connection speeds, when necessary. Hmm, food for thought.
In other semi-related news, I released some new CrunchBang images today, I know, great timing, eh?!
Muppy URL shortening
Feb 7, 2011 (about 1 year ago)
There must be hundreds of different URL shortening services in existence, but the other evening, I had a few hours to play with and I somehow decided that it might be fun to create my own personal URL shortening service.
I think the idea to do this probably seeded itself in my brain when I read ‘URL Shortening: Hashes In Practice’ on the Coding Horror blog. If anyone is interested in the mechanics of URL shortening (who could possibly not be?), it is a good read, with most of the really interesting content being produced by the commentators.
Anyhow, up until now, I had been using the ur1.ca service for my URL shortening needs. I now use muppy.org. It is not the shortest of domains, but I figure it will take a long time before it becomes impracticable to use for this purpose.
The code used for muppy.org is available here. It is derived in part from lilURL and is released under the GNU General Public License. It differs from lilURL in that it is designed to be used as personal URL shortener and therefore it does not produce a publicly accessible interface for creating short URLs, but must instead be accessed by an alternative method.
I do not foresee muppy setting the URL shortening world on fire, but coding it has been a fun distraction. I may think about adding more features at some point, but for the most part, I think I can cross URL shortening off my bucket list.
P.S. If anyone is interested, Muppy is also a Muppet. :)
Heybuddy, some thoughts
Feb 3, 2011 (about 1 year ago)
I really like Heybuddy. I like the software and I like the community surrounding it. I think Heybuddy itself is probably the best identi.ca/status.net client available for the Linux desktop, hence why it is now included in CrunchBang.
Previous to Heybuddy, I was using Pino. Pino was great, but the developer decided to rewrite it from scratch and it looks like it might be heading the way of Gwibber, which also used to be great.
Anyhow, while I was using it, something I liked about Pino was how I could toggle its visibility by clicking on its system tray icon. I wanted this same behaviour in Heybuddy, so the other night I started playing around with the Heybuddy code.
A few minutes later I had created a trivial little patch, which I sent to Jezra, the Heybuddy developer. I did not think Jezra would apply the patch, thinking it to be a personal preference, but he did, which I am pleased about.
There are some other modifications I would like to see happen with Heybuddy. For a start, having used it on my desktop machine at home, which I never turn off, I have found that it tends to cause quite severe CPU usage spikes after a week or so of running. I have not investigated why this happening, yet, but if I had to guess, I think it would probably have something to do with Heybuddy keeping a week’s worth of dents in its display. Restarting Heybuddy fixes the issue, but it is not ideal. I think it might be an idea if Heybuddy were to free-up some resources by only keeping the last X (user definable) amount dents in memory. I might look at how this can be achieved myself, but my Python coding abilities are limited, so if any Python hackers can provide assistance, I would really appreciate it.