In Loki We Trust

Drupal Portland Group
———————

groups.drupal.org/portland

Drupal sites
————
* http://www.drupaled.org
* http://www.drupal.org
* http://www.sao.corvallis.or.us
* http://www.lug.corvallis.or.us
* http://www.blackpast.org
* http://www.theportlander.com
* http://www.lime.com
* http://www.kpsu.org
* http://www.benkaplan.org
* http://www.plugfinder.com

Drupal modules
—————-
* ubercart.org
* CCK+views
* User Node

Drupal Issues:
————–
* Easy to set up
* Harder to maintain.

Notes by John Sechrest

So there’s this thing called BarCamp - (haven’t heard of it? you have to check it out). This past weekend was the first BarCamp in Portland, and it went off amazingly well.

Though initial expectations were that it would be a good even if 100 people managed to show up, by Saturday morning there were over 250 people registered on the BarCampPortland wiki. Big thanks and props go out to the vendors, especially Jive, JanRain (and their Pibb platform), and CubeSpace, all of which put a lot of effort and time into the event - and can’t forget Microsoft, for that wonderful dinner from the Nicholas they provided.

There were a lot of good sessions, and a lot of very interesting people at BarCamp, and I can’t wait for another one!

Nathan Young introduced me to MoonEdit (and later, we discovered Gabby, though I have not had time to use it), and I set up a server Friday night. Saturday, Nathan, myself, John Sechrest, and others used it to take notes during the sessions, and after BarCamp was over, I was able to use the files on the server to put together all the notes. You can find the notes either in seperate blog posts here, or on the BarCampPortland page.

Session I attended:

• Enhancing User Experience
• Dig into Coding for the Browser
• IA Slam
• Open HArdware Design
• Redundency & Load Balancing Web Applications
• Hack Share

I’ll see you all at the next BarCampPortland!

This is a modification of the standard UltraVNC SC server, that allows the helpdesk.txt to be embeded inside the executable itself, and so gets rid of the need for the 7zip self extracting wrapper. I’ve also added support for a RANDOMCODEWITHPREFIX setting, which will generate a random 4 digit number, and then prefix it with a static code set in the helpdesk file.

To use, all you need to do is get a copy of my modified binary (winvnc_sc_sa.exe), then download the php script used to embed the helpdesk.txt file (apply_helpdesk.php.txt)

run the script using a cli php, providing it with the binary to modify, and the helpdesk.txt file.

Also, you can use this script multiple times on the same file - it will just overwrite the settings area with the new data each time.

Once you have embeded the file, you can use upx to compress the file even smaller (from 260kb to ~120kb).

source is available, as usual, through SVN here

Some ideas I am considering:

• Having a timer in the tooltip showing how long you have been connected
• reporting that back to a server somehow
• allowing embeded logos and icons
• any other ideas suggested to me…

I’ve managed to put together a Lighttpd+PHP+CakePHP environment neutral package for windows.

It is actually very simple, my package has a control script, a couple batch files, and some template configuration files. When you start Pocky, it will look in the “sites” directory for cakephp directories (each directory in the sites directory should contain a complete cakephp package), and ask you to choose which one to run. You pick the correct one, and it will take the template config files, spit them out into the lighttpd and php directories with the correct absolute paths for where the files currently are, and then start lighttpd.

You can unzip it anywhere, and run - it does not affect your current windows environment, and is entirely self-contained. (I specifically use it for running my dev environment from a usb stick, since the usb stick never has the same drive letter, and I needed something that didn’t care if it was in a specific directory).
I would love some of the people who need something like CupCake, but for windows, to try it out and give me feedback.

There are two packages, the basic and the complete.

Basic is just the control scripts and directory structure, you have to drop the Lighttpd and PHP binaries into the lighttpd and php subfolders, respectively (see the README.TXT in the requirements folder).

Complete has everything basic has, but already has the lighttpd and php binaries in the right folders, and is 100% ready to run. Complete currently uses Kevin Worthington’s Lighttpd 1.4.11 binaries, and the binary zip package of PHP 5.1.6

Have fun, and comments are always welcome

Well, we have been trying to get our Alteon AD3 (Ace Director 3) to do both SLB and NAT at the same time, which is amazingly difficult. At any we finally got it working. Check it out:

(more…)

This is a very alpha release of a new widget I have been trying to get out for a while now.

Download Link: myBalance_0.01_Alpha.wdgt.zip

This widget will periodically check a bank account you have configured it for, and display the current balance. In this release, only US Bank is supported, however the code for Washington Mutual and for Wells Fargo is complete, just not included. You can configure the title of the widget, to reflect the account, and if you have multiple accounts, you specify the last 4 numbers of the account you want to monitor. The background changes color based on the amount in your account *grin*.

All communications are done directly with the banks, through HTTPS in javascript - none of your information ever goes anywhere else.

Issues that will be resolved in future releases:

• More banks
• Better error handling
• Some sort of automatic update feature
• Storage of access credentials within Keychain

Have fun!

As a side note, part of the reason for my lack of updates lately is that my development speed has been drastically hindered - my only Mac decided to bust both hinges (Powerbook Titanium 550Mhz) - so I am having to develop with it plugged into an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor - not the most conducive to relaxing and programming… but the new GMaps WILL be coming.

As the title says, this is just a quick update to let people know that the dnsEditor SVN repo now includes a docs directory that has a schema.sql file, with the DB schema I use, and a named.conf.local. Any improvements to wither are welcome of course, just as any improvements to the base code are welcome.

I’ve released the source for SQL_CLI under the GPL. SQL_CLI is a simple program that allows you to run a set of SQL commands against a given DSN (or DSN-less connection string) using either OLE or ODBC.

It is written in C#, and the code should be easy enough for someone to understand.

It takes three arguments:

• [ole|odbc] - The type of connection to make
• [DSN] - The name of a DSN, or else a DSN-less connection string
• [filename] - A SQL command file - essentially, a file with one SQL command per line

Hopefully some of you should find this useful - I use it for mass imports of data into all sorts of databases.

Source is here:
https://svn.lokkju.com/svn/SQL_CLI/trunk/

The source code for the dnsEditor:Ajaxified is now available. you can get it anonymously at:

https://svn.lokkju.com/svn/dnsEditor/trunk

Yes, it is ugly, but it *does* work.
All of the code is released under GPL, and other licenses are open to negotiation.
I will be commenting more code and cleaning it up as time goes by, and patches are always welcome - if you really want to help, I can also give you subversion access.

And donations are always welcome as well (see that little button on the side? it is there for a purpose…) *grin*.

Have fun…

Just a quick note, I have started back in on the gmaps widget, using the GMap2 structure, and basing it on the API code to prevent future breakage.

Hopefully it should be released in a couple weeks!