Here’s what I did:

1. Add a category “rss-able” and make it the parent of all existing categories
2. Add a category “web wandering” (not under “rss-able” off course) and configure Lifestream to use that for the digests
3. Configure Feedburner to use http://blog.futtta.be/rss-able/feed instead of http://blog.futtta.be/feed
4. Exclude both new categories from being displayed in my “category cloud” widget

And there you have it; my Google Reader shared items, YouTube video’s and favorites, Facebook status and Tweets (if ever I would decide to do such a thing) are automatically collected in a weekly blogpost without bothering rss-readers or my Facebook-friends (who get that info shoved down their throats via Facebook-imports of the individual feeds anyway).

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Next on my list was getting the “shared folder“, which I configured in Virtualbox (look ma, no samba), to automount in my Ubuntu-guest with read-write permissions for my non-root user. I ended up adding this line to /etc/fstab (the dmode and fmode-options did the trick eventually):

teleporter /home/frank/Desktop/teleporter vboxsf rw,dmode=777,fmode=777,uid=1000,gid=1000,auto 0 0

And to wrap things up I also installed the Mozilla Labs Weave-plugin, which syncs a.o. bookmarks and passwords in Firefox between my 3 environments. It caused me some headaches at first, synchronizing just seemed to take forever and no error was shown in the frontend. But I found some obscure messages (things like “Exception caught from onComplete handler of CryptoWrap__decrypt-57 generator”) in the verbose log and Google linked those to a post on the Weave Google Group which explained that the problem was with an incorrect “encryption passphrase”. And sure enough Weave was syncing happily after once I re-entered my -too complex- passphrase.

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But some time ago my laptop got a memory upgrade (from 1 to 2 Gb) and last week Paul Cobbaut wrote about Virtualbox on his blog. I installed this example of German craftsmanship (both a “free as in beer” and an open source version are available, version 3 was just released a few hours ago!) and my computer hasn’t been the same since. I’m now running a fullscreen (guest additions rock) Virtualbox virtual machine with Ubuntu 9.04, using an openssh-provided (with some help from corkscrew, off course) socks-proxy for unlimited internet access and I feel like a kid that has just been allowed in a playground.

Next to Ubuntu, I also installed Opensolaris (which seems to need a shitload of RAM) and a leaked version of the emulator of that much anticipated (well, by me at least) Palm WebOS. On my disktop I installed the Linux-version of Virtualbox and I’ve got OS-weirdness such as ReactOS, Haiku and Syllable running there. Hell, maybe I’ll even install (a clean version of) Windows XP in a virtual machine there, just to make it full circle. ‘Cause I’m free!

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• Wordpress 2.8 loves your proxy

But that was yesterday, because the recently released WordPress 2.8 “Baker” (which is chock-full of new features) has support for internet-connections through a proxy, thanks to its great HTTP API. Don’t bother looking for it in the admin-screens, you’ll need to configure the proxy-settings in your wp-config.php.

Here’s what you’ll have to add (values are examples which you’ll have to replace with settings for your environment off course):

define('WP_PROXY_HOST', '192.168.22.1');
define('WP_PROXY_PORT', '9099');

If you need to authenticate to access the proxy you can add your credentials this way:

define('WP_PROXY_USERNAME', 'frank');
define('WP_PROXY_PASSWORD', 's3cr3t');

You can also exclude requests for specific hosts from going through the proxy:

define('WP_PROXY_BYPASS_HOSTS', 'localhost, blog2.corpintranet');

And finally you can block all outgoing requests by default and add domains to a whitelist to only allow those to connect:

define ('WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', 'true');
define ('WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS', 'api.wordpress.org, akismet.com');

Off course some WordPress-plugins do not use the HTTP API yet (e.g. Lifestream and wp-security-scan rely on Simplepie, which does not use the proxy-aware wp_remote_get-function), so you might have to be careful when installing plugins that need internet-access.

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• Invitation to comment: dofollow
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Nu zien dat ik niet overmoedig word natuurlijk

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Wie op deze blog terechtkomt op zoek naar deredactie; op http://futtta.be/deextractie/mobile.php?deffont=medium kun je tijdelijk de inhoud van deredactie raadplegen. Het is een onafgewerkte (en normalerwijs overbodige) light versie van deredactie op basis van de eveneens onofficiele volledige feed die op http://feeds.feedburner.com/deprotestactie te vinden is.

Yet another great post powered by mlogger

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Here’s the stuff I did write down, just some quotes really;

“[With Tridion] We’ve got a Rolls Royce, but when we need to cross the desert we prefer to use the SUV [which is Drupal]” (Bart Van Herreweghe about using Tridion for belgium.be and Drupal for smaller, web2.0-oriented fast-track sites)

“When you use Google Apps, which is “Platform As A Service”, you’re tied into their platform, you can’t just take your application and put it elsewhere.” (Terramark’s Kurt Glazemakers trying to position his “Infrastructure As A Service” virtualized hosting solution, forgetting Amazon or Akamai.)

“Web 2.0 was a bust, will web 3 succeed?” (the challenging title of Charles Chrouch’s presentation about the lack of financially sound business models in social media, he didn’t explain how Twitter could make money)

Not a lot more to mention, except maybe that the new Cultuurnet-database should become available (through an API I guess) for non-commercial use. Anyone want to write UiTmaps or UiT.mobi? And One Agency has its own mobile platform, GlowBox, which is Drupal with some custom-written plugins, integrated with Siruna.

While missing out on presentations, I met various people I know from past and present stages of my work-life (great to hear things are going well Tjorven, sorry to have mistaken Panoptic for Amplexor Igor) and that’s always nice. But I would especially like to thank Tom Remans. It’s always great to chat with Tom and -even more important- he provided me with real good coffee, which (for reasons I just don’t want to understand) was only available for exhibitors. Thanks mate, really!

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En nog even over Elises magische 3; De La Soul haalde de mosterd blijkbaar bij een soort Schooltelevisie-project.

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Die ken ik ergens van! Suske en Wiske! Ik Google nog een beetje en inderdaad, in “De IJzeren Schelvis” stond een dwarsdoorsnede van de gelijknamige bathyscaaf van Professor Barabas;

Nog wat rond klikken op Wikipedia en zoeken in het fantastische Time-archief en het wordt duidelijk waar Willy Vandersteen z’n inspiratie voor de duik-wedstrijd tussen “De IJzeren Schelvis” en de “Barracuda” vandaan haalde. In 1954, het jaar van publicatie van “De IJzeren Schelvis” in De Standaard, waren de Franse marine en het Italiaanse Trieste-team rond vader en zoon Piccard verwikkeld in een wedloop  om het diepzee-duikrecord op te eisen. De Franse bathyscaaf was overigens een gewijzigde versie van de eveneens door Piccard ontworpen Belgische FNRS II (FNRS was de naam van geldschieter “Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek” dat ook Piccards’ stratosfeer-ballon financierde).

Professor Barabas’ Schelvis was, getuige de tekening hierboven, een geduchte concurrent voor de FRNS III en de Trieste; 4000 meter was maar een fractie minder dan de recorddiepte die de Franse bathyscaaf in maart 1954 bereikte. Maar in tegenstelling tot Auguste en Jacques Piccard, zijn Suske en Wiske en Professor Barabas de daaropvolgende jaren niet meer teruggegaan. Maar eenmaal je de parels van het geluk in Alanta hebt gevonden, is er niet veel reden om nog terug te gaan, toch?

The setup was pretty basic; the URL in the newsletter pointed to the servers of the mailinglist-provider, where each request got logged and the browser was redirected (with a http 302 status-code and Location in the http response-header) to the target URL on one of our servers. That target URL contained an anchor to have the browser to display a specific tab on the page thanks to some jQuery-magic, which worked perfectly in Internet Explorer 6 in a non-redirect scenario.

The problem seemed as simple as it was annoying; MSIE 6 dropped everything starting with the ‘#’ from the URL when performing a redirect. Google pointed me to some sites that claimed that adding an ampersand should solve this, but that did not work. I made a little PHP-script to test with different encoding-tricks, but that did not work. So that old fart of a browser indeed did not support anchors in redirect-URL’s and that’s what I told the colleagues last Thursday.

Yesterday I started writing this post, thinking it was a great time to demand the death of the piece of junk that Microsoft unleashed on us back in 2001 and which, believe it or not, still has 16,94% market share. So  I replaced the company-specific address in the php-script with the URL of the wikipedia-page about anchors and … it just worked, even in MSIE 6! And then I remembered getting that silly popup in MSIE 6, warning me that “The current website is trying to open a site in your Trusted sites list”. Apparently the ugly bugger does not only ask you if he can redirect, but also eats the anchor in target-URL’s that are in your Trusted sites.

So dear colleagues, in case you’re reading this; you can send out that newsletter now, it’ll work for everyone except for those who are silly enough to use MSIE 6 with our site in their “Trusted sites”-list. And let’s not forget; MSIE 6 must die is dead!

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