The Great Blog of a Web Developer

Google friend connect, finally no more paper work

2009-04-08T16:50:00.000-07:00

If it's one thing I hate is online paper work, I hate registering to a million web sites and keeping track of my usernames on every one of them, well it looks like neither do the google people, and thet have come up with this wonderfull thing called "Google Friend Connect" which is free painless way to make your site social and get away with all this without knowing how to code.

Basicly you create your site add content to it, put Friend Connect on it, and when a visitor comes, he/she can comment on your articles without registering. Some may say "But that's possible right now, you just add a captcha to keep the evil spirits away.", the answere is "Yes you can!", but that's basicly anonymus, Friend Connect howerver uses your identity, so in practice, your contact photo will apear next to your name and comments, and you don't have to enter your name or upload your photo.

Friend Connect works with Google(bet you've never guesed that),Yahoo, AIM and OpenID accounts, they provide your identity the web site provides the content, fair enough. So I have a nice web site, and more half of the would has eihter one of these accounts, why should I make them create another account just for my site while they could just log in with these and do their thing, I don't even have to code these features, I get them for free. Yes I mean, I copy paste some code that I don't care about, and suddenly my site becomes social.

Heck this is what web supposed to be in the first palce, a place where mashups happen, I give the content, google gives the identity, I don't have to work all day, coding logins, registrations and profiles, visitors can enjoy my site without paper work, what more could you ask for?

Disclaimer: Google Friend Connect is alpha, but it shows a lot of promise to make the web a better place.

To use or not to use, that is the question

2009-01-25T05:18:00.000-08:00

To judge something, first you have to look at it closely, study it, and make your conclusions at the end of the day, when you are done with it.

We all make mistakes, admitting it is the first best thing to do, a few days ago I tried Debian, just because, I was fed up being forced to use third party packages on Kubuntu just o get a working KDE3. I have spent days experimenting with KDE4, it's not a bad concept(plasma) but it's still lacking the simple things I want, and as I saw it, it is not going to change in the near future, so I decided that until 4.3 I am definetly staying with KDE 3.5, to me it's the best desktop. Debian made me even more upset than Ubuntu did, I downloaded the DVD, and it didn't even give me a choice, it simply installed GNOME by default, this made a very bad first impression.

After installed Debian, I immedialty installed KDE, just to see that they have included the new version of Adept, which couldn't even manage repositories.

Conclusion, Debian didn't really catch my attention, so I moved on to Open SUSE, which was strange at first, because I was used to deb.....but SUSE's instlaller beats Debian's and Ubuntu's, it simply shows the options you need and doesn't bug you with stuff that you don't care about. SUSE's installer, actually asked me what I want: GNOME, KDE4, KDE3 etc.

After I installed SUSE, I was fascinated that Firefox actually blends in with the KDE, I don't know how they did it, but it rocks. KDE3 is super fast, also KDE4 programs start really fast too, I couldn't belive my eyes, maybe it's got something to do with this being a 64 bit SUSE.

My choices

I choose KDE 3 destkop over plasma just, because, I want to move my applets(read widgets on plasma) on the panel where I like, the plasma panel simple aligns them to the left and doesn' t let me move them where I want to. Plasma is themeable, but I didn't find, a theme that I like, and since it doesn't let me choose a picture as a background for it, I had no options left.

The all new kopete has even worst yahoo protocol support than the 0.12.7(last stable KDE 3) version, so KDE 3 won here again.

Kontact (KDE 4) on the other hand won my vote, just because the new KMail is cooler than the old one!

On SUSE, I got the KDE 4 version of Krusader which worked fine.

Amarok, aside my problems, with talking to Amarok developers, I really think that Amarok 1.4 is one of the best music players there is, but Amarok 2.0 is a dissaster, it's featureless and ugly too, I wrote a lot of posts about this, so I will not repeat myself I'm even looking for Amarok alternatives.

I'm a Konversation fan, so the Kubuntu-Quassel decision, made me really upset. No offense, I have nothing against Quassel, It's just the ignorance that makes me angry: dropping Konversation from Kubuntu just for a few megabytes, is anything but a valid reason.

Conclusion

I will definatly, not give up on KDE, like Linus Torvalds did, he was right, but not about KDE, but about Fedore agressively upgradeing to KDE 4, just because they wanted to look cool. But I will always use what's best for what I want, let it be a program, a desktop enviorment, a distribution.

Non Biased Kubuntu 8.10 Walktrough part1

2009-01-08T02:43:00.000-08:00

Last time I wrote how ugly Kubuntu 8.10 looked in my opinion, but time has passed and Intrepid had time to evolve and mature.

This time I will install Kubuntu on a real computer not rant about neither the color scheme, the installer style and so on, I will mainly focus on usability, performance and what I can do with Intrepid.

The target machine is an Acer Aspire 5101 with a "wonderful" ATI video card and both hard drive and CD/DVD drive is connected via USB.

My goals are:
1) install the system
2) configure the network
3) update the system
4) install drivers
5) customize the look and feel of my desktop
6) install and customize firefox
7) install firefox plugins, java and restriced codecs, play an mp3, play a movie, play a streaming movie from the internet

This first part contatins 1-3 and the first part of 4.

1) The installer is pretty good, since it has an option that will not load a whole desktop just the installer and the installer it self is pretty simple. I like the partioner but maybe it should have a fourth option that would be like the 3rd(manual), but less techincal, for example instead of "ext3" there could be "Linux file system"(yes I know the drawbacks too, but for the experts the 3rd option would remain). Note: the windows xp partitioner is no diferrant.

2) Since I don't have dhcp on my machine that provides the internet, I need to configure the network card manually. Note: I don't need dhcp because I identify my laptop by IP address.

The installation didn't take long, when the desktop is started I get a Notes and a Folderview plasmoid, in which I really don't seem the point, cause a Folderview plasmoid will not bring back the good old desktop feeling if it's not the desktop itself.

The systray icon has a context menu New Connection, when I click it, it gives me what I want, and nothing more, which beats the old KDE 3.x based network manager. It asks me for a connection name and has an autoconnection option, this is very sweet for my laptop, because I need to change my connection options depending on where I am, so this profile system helps me a lot.

After setting up my network connection I imeadiatly change the K menu back to the traditional menu, because I'm too old schoolish for the new one. I start konqueror, and try to access kubuntu.org, but it doesn't work, so I open up a konsole just to check that the network manager did absolutely nothing, so I double check it, it's correct, so I enable disable, but nothing.

Since the network manager seems to be on vacation I set up the conenction in the command line with ifconfig and manually create resolv.conf:

sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.69 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
sudo -s
echo "nameserver 192.168.0.11" >> /etc/resolv.conf
sudo route add default gw 192.168.0.11 eth0

I have network connection, but I had to do it via command line, even a basic interface for these command would have been better than provide a network manager that doens't work. This issue doesn't fit in the annoying category rather in the "makes this whole system unsusable to anyone who doesn't know the above commands". And to think this was a simple manual ip address assigning, I rather not look into setting up a PPPoE connection. It doesn't even realise that I'm connected to the internet after I connected myself with the commands above.

3) After 2 minutes I managed to calm down from my previous experience, I decided to continue and update the system, right after I did some kind of language update with some language installer. It's very strange that I get stuff like this on start, the language files should be alright by default, but as I was saying I clicked the update icon, again the new adept updater looks much more sensible than the old one, but in this case it actually works.

A very strange thing is that It doens't show an exit button after update, the developers probably tought this was obvius.

Since I did a kernel update I get the restart icon in the systray, which asks me again if I should restart, but if I wait 30 seconds it will restart anyway, so I don't really see what's the point other than showing of that effect.

After clicking on the restart button, instead of waiting 30 seconds, everything except the mouse dissapears, and nothing happens, and no CPU/disk activity. I got tired of waiting and presed the shutdown button(on my laptop) so it would emit a shutdown signal on, and at least I was able to shut down my laptop without having to wait 20 minutes for fsck next reboot.

4) I start up my laptop once again praying that I will not have any more issues again.

Kubuntu started up fairly quickly, and I clicked the hardware drivers icon in the k menu to address the hardware issues. I selected the ATI/AMD proprietory FGLRX graphics driver and pressed activate, but nothing happend. I pressed Close but still nothing happend.

I feel that I wanted basic things, that any simple user would want, but with the exception of the installation none of them worked without pain, I hope I will have better luck next time.

Happy flaming new year!

2009-01-05T14:52:00.000-08:00

Today I've red a strange blog post on planet KDE titled "KDE Trolls, eat this". When I looked at the title I immediately realized that this is a must-read post. The posts starts with a beautiful artwork that symbolizes love among other things, but right after that inspiring picture there was a message of hate:

"Anyone else noticed the extreme amount of hate & trolling against KDE lately, and especially against KDE 4? I have a special message for you trolls:

You're fucking idiots."

As I wrote in one of my comments I understand the frustration of developers but this had been taken a little way too far...

After this horrible message we have a description of what happened, where we are now and what happens next:

"For your consideration:

1) they ignore you

2) they laugh at you

3) they fight you

4) YOU WIN.

(we're at stage 3 now)
"

Okay he must be a prophet...The "YOU WIN" part reminds me of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MUAa3kuN3I

After posting the comment I realised something I did not before: this post came from amarok blog...

I don't know why but this is the second post(first was meant for me) that calls people idiots... there's gotta be an explanation for this...but I haven't figured it out completely yet. But it has something to do with someone writing "X suxx because Y" but some people neglect the "because" clause and call the author a troll. I've said in in a comment too, wonder what will these furious guys have to say to that, propbably delete my comment, but at least this post is not moderated like MR. I~~SUCK~~ROCKSOFUCKINHARD's post.

FFC 0.1 RC2 is out

2008-12-30T09:49:00.000-08:00

It has being long but it's finally here. Sadly I had to rethink my previous decision, I wanted RC2 to be database stable, but it's not, cause I wanted to clean up the database a little, hopefully RC3 will have this.

The main reason behind RC2 is the GPL compatibility, added copyright to all headers so that this would be finally clear. Planning on improving this, for example listing third parties seperately somewhere.

As I've read the changes of PHP 5.3, I was thinking of using the namespace feature, but decided to do that in future releases, since FFC relies mostly on singleton Objects, so adding this feature in the future hopefully won't break compatibility.

I know I've just released RC2 but RC3 is just a few bugs/tweaks away from being out and currently the differance between RC3 and the final version should be bugfixes only, I'm not planning to release an RC4.

The main feature of RC3 will be the removal of the obsolete 'texts' and the addition of a clean room user class implementation that actually works.

0.1 will be the first stable release so I will really work hard to make it a worthy release, it will probably get several patches afterwards. The only thing that is still lacking is documentation, but hopefully this will be resolved too in the future.

XUL Fail

2008-12-28T22:00:00.000-08:00

Let me get this straight, I open an RSS link in Firefox, it displays it, then I save it, and when I view it, I expect to see the RSS file, instead I get a strange XHTML file with XUL stuff, with a comment(probably from a Firefox or Mozilla dev) saying that XUL sucks....now aint that a .... fail!

Looks like Mozilla's usability team was on vacation when they designed this new "Live bookmark" system, even if I expected to save the RSS in Firefox's graphical presentation I would want to do it without XUL, embedding XUL in XHML beats the whole purpose of saving something in XHML anyway, cause there are a lot of browsers(likely every non-firefox browser) that do not support XUL. Even saving this in a JPG would have been more usefull.

Amarok2 the final chapter

2008-12-25T07:43:00.000-08:00

As an update to my previous posts it looks like the Kubuntu devs will be pushing mysql on the official Jaunty CD just because Akonadi needs it(and Amarok too, at least to waste some resources):

"I'd like to see KDE 3 libs off the CD for Jaunty, and if possible Qt 3 too. With Akonadi bringing in mysqld we'll need all the space we can find. One of the last hangers on to Qt 3 is OpenOffice, anyone feel like reviving OpenOffice KDE project for Oxygen and Qt 4 support?"

source: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3805

Now what did I tell some ignorant people a few weeks ago.... that's right: Amarok 2 is wasting resources by using MySQL embeeded instead of using a real mysql server like Akonadi does, and that most destkop distributions will probably include mysql server by default just for the sake of akonadi anyways, so adding a possibility for Amarok 2 to use that would be a sane decision.... no one belived me back then, instead they released Amarok 2 with some minor bugs like "Album covers are still getting mixed up." and "Amarok wouldn’t play files which filenames contain diacritics."(guess that's not top priority for some people) (source: http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-42-beta/).

Well I guess Jeff 'IROCKSOHARD' Mitchell (that's what he calls himself, see Amarok's about dialog) must be proud, expecting every future kubuntu user to have two mysql instances running just so that his ego can ROCKSOHARD, ohhh well, they could at least have fun renameing thousands of files, because of Amarok2's "minor" bug. Keep up the good work!

How Amarok people do moderation part 2

2008-12-09T07:31:00.000-08:00

In part 1 I wrote how does the censuring work amongst the Amarok developers, then I've got comments that quoted aseigo's post about this topic, I didn't have time to read it, since having two jobs really takes away all my time, but my friend balazsbela pointed out one part that was left out:

"It is therefore vital for a community to come to a shared understanding, before crisis arrives, as to what the difference between vandalism of the shared space and merely objectionable expression is, and to ensure that that definition is conservative enough and respectful enough of future minority positions to avoid ever being twisted into simple censorship, especially censorship of convenience. (As in: "it's inconvenient to address that issue openly.")"

I can't help repeat my self again, that post that was nothing more than a personal retaliation, was published on the official amarok blog and planet KDE. I've red some terms described on planet KDE.

"Do not inflame

KDE covers a wide variety of people and cultures. Profanities, prejudice, lewd comments and content likely to offend are to be avoided. Do not make personal attacks or attacks against other projects on your blog."

So that's a double fail for Jeff there:

1) he made a personal attack against me on two(or maybe one) public space(s), and refused to let me speak up for myself(translation, refused to accept my comment on his post), which in turn is pure censorship and ignorance.

2) if I understood correctly planet KDE forbids posts that are about personal attacks like Jeff's revenge here.

So that concludes my "rant"(general truth) for today, I really think Jeff Mitchell (or should I say pirate of the __________(insert some funny word here)) would have been better of writing on a personal blog or simply adding a comment to my post than showing off his ego.

How Amarok people do moderation

2008-12-07T02:56:00.000-08:00

It looks like amarok devs are afraid of their own users opinion, take this pointless,right back at you, f*ck me I'm classy and your an idiot if you don't agree blogpost.

This is the end of the article:
"Any comments will be read, but I may decide not to post them."

Let me translate this for you: "Any comments will be read, and will be posted unless it contains anything that's negative about Amarok or Jeff Mitchell."

Like my friend said "moderation on an open source blog, WTF!!!", so much for openness.

Here are two comments, one got posted and one didn't one is mine and one is not:

"I loved Amarok, I love Amarok 2 even more and I'm confident that the Amarok team will do their best to make it an awesome product.

Don't listen to those people that want to complain just to look "important".

Just remember: people who like amarok will use it and will only complain or point out problems in a constructive manner.

Keep up the good work. "

and there is the second:

""Who said I had to be classy? I could have made a very venomous post if I had wanted to. There, I'm just telling the truth."

This is a "venomous post".

"The guy calls me out by name"

Give me a break, it's way shorter than the "Amarok developer who talked about Amarok at the KDE4.0 keynote".

Next time I'll write:

#define "Amarok developer who talked about Amarok at the KDE4.0 event" somepersonwhoidontknow

and use it like that in the entire post.

"while chastising me for not being a good member of KDE and implying that I am a hypocrite"

This is foobar, it was about what you said and not you. I referred to three lines

"a KDE dev complained that how KDE3 sucked, because they couldn't port Amarok to Windows, and KHTML had bad performance"

...

At 2:00, he begins his story, about "Why they almost left KDE?"

He begins with complaining, how slow was rendering amarok's context with KHTML, so it looks like performance matters in amarok, not that anyone forced them to use KHTML for rendering context, but I will refer to this point later on.

...

At 5:00 he complains that KDE3 could not be ported to Windows, making amarok X11-only.

Jeff Mitchell the developer who spoke at the event that I was referring to, referenced KDE as a family, but where is the love now?
"

I can't see no personal attack here, where does it read "And somepersonwhoidontknow is "?

This was about Amarok not somepersonwhoidontknow. Point me to your nearest personal attack.

"Antal's post was uninformed, stupid, harsh, rabid, ranting, twisted, and idiotic. It was the very definition of a trolling post."

1) Name error
2) uninformed? define uninformed, sources were marked post didn't imply that the sources were perfect.
3) stupid: that means that you spend your time writing posts about stupid posts? :D
4) rabid: forgot the "18" sign there sorry :D, anyway I can't see no rated R content in it, just criticism
5) ranting: yes
6) twisted: can't get the definition of this adjective, can you describe what this word means to you?
6) idiotic: same as stupid, but is enumerating synonyms a smarter thing to do?
7) do you always call posts that say negative things about Amarok "trolling post"s?

"Again with the Windows/Mac. I made it clear that Windows/Mac was not really a factor in our decision. Why do you (and Antal) insist upon bringing it up over and over?
"

Because the "feature I asked for" is mostly useless to the Windows/Mac users, because these users will be the ones who will likely *not* have mysql installed. I can't believe you call people stupid/idiots and not have figured this out for yourself.

"I made an assumption about his first name"

I made an assumption about external mysql servers are not important to Amarok because of the Windows/Mac people, and I got called an idiot now what should you be called then?

"he was complaining about us not reusing Akonadi's mysql instance and how this showed that we neither got nor cared about interacting with KDE"

Adding that advanced button and make mysqle an optional dependency(so I can at least compile amarok without fiddling with dependency that I don't need anyway) was exactly what I wanted, can't see poison there.

I don't want to write a word(that is not bundled) that defines putting something in an application that not wanted and not used, because then can see it in front of me, another "Avast, We Be Getting Slandered Again, Yar". By the way is it just me or this title sounds like "All your base are belong to us"? no offense, just checking, please don't call me an idiot for asking this."

The first got posted because it praised Amarok and hat do relation with the topic, the other did not because it was a) written by me b) showed what a hypocrite and an idiot Jeff really is, which probably pissed Jeff of again.

While Jeff wrote so many lines of useless words in his post and the comments, he could have written a patch for Amarok, that would make my critism irrelevant, is it so hard to write a general mysql class that could use mysql or mysqle? and is it so hard to write a configuration dialog panel for this? But no, Jeff had to defend his own words that got quoted by me in my previous post.

Jeff critisized my blog title, but what about his post title?

"Avast, We Be Getting Slandered, Yar", and I tought I know english, but it looks like I don't, so I looked up these words on wiktionary.

The frist word: "Avast"

Etymology

From the Dutch hou' (houd) vast, literally meaning "hold fast!".

Interjection

avast

(nautical) Hold fast!, cease; stop; desist; stay.
(parody of pirate slang) Listen, pay attention.
Avast, ye landlubbers!

Usage notes

The form "avast, ye!" (as in "Avast, Hoisting!" or "Avast, this noise" or "Avast ye landlubbers!!") is often seen, but this is nonstandard.

OMG, this means that Jeff Mitchell is a pirate!!!

"We Be Getting", "we be getting" #$^"We Be Getting", "we be getting" #$^$&^??? never mind, I rather not comment this
amp;^??? never mind, I rather not comment this

next word: "Slandered"

slander (plural slanders)

a false, malicious statement (spoken or published), especially one which is injurious to a person's reputation; the making of such a statement

ok this ones fine.

Final word: "Yar"

yar!

A nautical exclamation used by sailors or pirates to express anger, dismay or approval.

This again proves that Jeff is indeed a pirate or at least he keeps fantasizing about it while writing blog posts that others read....

Great post Jeff, you write titles that poeple need a dictionary for to understand, keep up the good work, Arrrg ye landlubers!!!

So much for the title, so much for open colaboration, so much for Jeff Mitchell's grammar and style, my moderated posts tells the rest.

I can't say a bad thing about Vista

2008-12-04T13:03:00.000-08:00

The main reason I can't say bad things about Vista is simply because I don't use it. The people saying bad things about Vista are Vista users.

I can complain only about what I actually use, and I can only help people who are using the same stuff as I do, cause I can say "I use X software too and it has Y bug, but you can use Z workaround ore use W version of this software or Q software instead".

Some software developers(ohhh know here I go referring to some amarok devs again), doesn't seem to comprehend this.

The one thing I hate is when Windows users (especially Vista users) come to me asking for my help thinking "youre the linux expert", they don't seem to understand that in some cases I can't help them, mostly in the "my computer got infected with viruses, what should I do" topic, I have to tell them every time, "Reinstall Windows, that's the only effective way, It's the flaw of the platform, you need to live with it if you want to continue on using it.", but when I can help, and there is a choice between free and non free solution I go for the free.

I remember reading an interesting article an slashdot a while back, and now I actually read 2 posts from the linuxhaters blog:

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-write-kde-application.html
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-write-gnome-application.html

These posts have either good humor or sarcrastic ways of expressing bizare stuff. The person who wrote them undrestands them in sourcecode level.

Now I understand that the slashdotted article was right, if this blog could even be named linux-bugs. This blog is not a 'linux sucks blog', it goes very technical and has valid points, just look at this: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on-open-source.html

I am being a devoted linux user say that this blog is worth reading, cause it points out unsolved problems in the Open Source world.

Compiling lasts longer

2008-12-03T04:43:00.000-08:00

Compiling lats longer these days, which is more of a good news than a bad news, because the main reason is that a lot of source files get modified, the developers look like really getting into coding KDE, making it rock solid.

I can't believed what I did, and furthermore, I can't believe that what I did actually worked and was a success, Linux for my father was a success, Linux for my girlfriend was a success too, but now I'm having my girlfriend take the KDE source from the SVN and compile it....

She enjoys KDE4 better than I do, I still can't believe this, and I guess neither can those who are reading this, but it's true, and I know I deserve a beer or two for this, but it's not just my success, it's just shows all those "KDE4 haters" that KDE4 is really THE modern desktop, it didn't seem like it back then when KDE4.0 was shipped to the masses because the lack of communication, but now it's starting to shape up.

I would like to congratulate the people who wrote the kdesvn-build script, because it's pure genius, it hides all complexity of getting the source and building the binaries. Getting ready to build KDE4 requires a little work, but when it's done, all there is to do is make a K Menu Item for the script, and I can build the whole KDE from the SVN with one click, now that's what gamers call "ubercool" and it's a little gentooish too.

Even though I critisized the KDE4-only aproach of Kubuntu, I have to admit, it's a good platform to build KDE4 on, Hardy is a little better then Intrepid, because I can have a fallback KDE3 just in case of an emergency, but that's not likely to happen.

Too bad I can't do the same(compile the hottest source from the SVN) with amarok, because the developers are too busy writing defensive blog posts to care about it's sourcecode, but that's another story.

I'm happy, and all those guys who made this possible should be happy too.

I'm poisoness, don't touch me or I'll bite

2008-12-02T12:18:00.001-08:00

I'm poisoness, don't touch me or I'll bite, or at least I am considered poisenes, I twist the truth for my evil doing.

Jeff Mitchell got really mad at me, I pissed him off for quoting him on his talk at the KDE4.0 release event. He got so mad, that he wrote a post about it.

He clearly took a defensive position by calling me a "~~blathering idiot~~" and critisizing my blog's title. Way to go, that's a very good defensive stance: getting personal....

Ok so first things first, I've got a message for Jeff Mitchell: You can call me what you want, I don't really care, I didn't critisize your persona, I didn't call you an idiot and so forth, and still you mock me. And you are really really so so wrong, about this: "and probably because he hasn't bothered to watch past five minutes in", because I watched the whole thing, and I didn't turn it into a "complaint-a-thon", or wait, let me double check my post for "that whole release event talk was a complaint-a-thon"....no matches found, then that means that you twisted my words.

There is a difference between, "he complained about it on his talk at the release event" and "his whole talk was a complain at the release event". It's just basic grammar, it happens to everybody, I'm not perfect myself, maybe because I'm Hungarian, ohhh speaking of Hungarian, Antal is my family name, now should I call someone idiot of not checking this?

"Much of the blog can also easily be decoded as baseless, factless trolling ("amarok1.x is the slowest KDE3 program, if not it's surely in the top 3 slowest KDE3 programs"), and the-developers-don't-agree-with-me-so-they're-wrong syndrome."

Ok Jeff, maybe my grammar was a little wrong there, but I will explain this so you can understand:

- I ran amarok and other favorite KDE applications
- I opened yakuake(konsole), typed "top" and guess what amarok was at the top

Was that so hard to understand?

To back this up, here is a comment "significantly faster than sqlite", which basicly means in plain english: "amarok 1.x's performance sucked bigtime because of sqlite", if you don't believe me go on and try it.

Jeff talks of me twisting words, and then he says that I'm suffering from a "the-developers-don't-agree-with-me-so-they're-wrong syndrome", I never said that the developers made a mistake in amarok1.x, performance was horrible, but at least I could get around it by using an external database server or better, not use collections at all, see the thing is that I had choice.

But Jeff, is not gonna stand there and let me write on my blog what I want, no no, he is "..going to defend.." his "..statements at the Release Event.", it's like "our town is under attack".

Jeff goes on explaining his talks at the release event, but what's to explain? Didn't I link it?

I don't understand, I put a link for the video on my post, and referenced two points from the whole talk, and now Jeff defends his whole talk? This is kind of akward, If I would want to twist the words of someone's talk, than why would I put a link to the video of that talk so that others can check it out if I'm wrong or not?

"This may not be apparent to everyone, but Amarok was an early poster child for adoption of many of the Pillars of KDE. We are the only application, to date, that has embedded Plasma inside of our application (with our developers doing a large amount of work to make that possible). (Update: we are technically the first, outside of the plasma workspace, but there are others playing with that now.) Device detection completely relies on Solid (which is one reason Mac and Windows ports have no device support right now). And we have completely standardized on Phonon for our media engine. We've also had Oxygen team members working on our icons and our interface."

Great work.

"It's hard to imagine ways for us to more fully integrate with KDE4 than what we are doing. We've gone for KDE4 whole-hog, and it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Picking out random Pillars that we don't fully integrate with (yet) does not mean that we are not KDE4-oriented. After all, right now we don't have a use for Marble (who knows? that could change) -- but does that mean we don't get KDE4?"

MySql is not a KDE technology and I did not say that amarok doesn't integrate KDE4 technologies,

"No, I did not say that KDE3 sucked."

Well Jeff is actually right at this one. He didn't state this, he just made KDE3 look like a bad platform, because one of it's drawbacks is that KHTML is slow.... KTHML is a kpart, so if I write a bad kpart, than it will be a drawback of the KDE platform?

"He even contradicts himself:

He begins with complaining, how slow was rendering amarok's context with KHTML, so it looks like performance matters in amarok, not that anyone forced them to use KHTML for rendering context..."

Full version: "He begins with complaining, how slow was rendering amarok's context with KHTML, so it looks like performance matters in amarok, not that anyone forced them to use KHTML for rendering context, but I will refer to this point later on."

Q: Now why did Jeff leave out this part?
A: Because he doesn't have have better things to do, than making people who don't agree with him like me look like a troll.

By the way, here is the part were I referred again: "But what now, didn't a developer just say at a big release event that performance is important for amarok...", well should I say now that Jeff is an idiot for not noticing this?

"It is not surprising, given how little he understands of Amarok, KDE, and the integration thereof, that he thinks both that there is a lack of communication between Amarok and the rest of KDE4, and that he implies that Akonadi is the entire rest of KDE4."

I never specified the rest of KDE as being Akonandi, this just shows how ignorantly my post was read, "Amarok and the rest of KDE4(Akonandi)" means "Amarok and the rest of KDE4(Akonandi in this specific case)".

"It is not surprising, given how little he understands of Amarok, KDE, and the integration"

Kind of like politely saying "youre a n00b, you don't know anything". Surprise Jeff, I may not be an Amarok dev., but my point was so simple that even a non-programmer could undersand it.

There have been some inaccurate comments too:

I said "- mysqle is not yet suitable for every day use"

and "sven423" replied:

"Nope, it works just fine for most users. Better than SQLite (which is too slow) or an external SQL server (which most users aren't able to configure)"

This was not the point, my point were the bugs that I quoted from the amarok wiki itself, so this party is completely irrelevant.

"- mysql is known to just work

Nope. You have to set the server and users up. 90% of our users aren't able to do that. So this is absolutely no option as the only backend.
"

Again I was not referring to this, I was saying that mysql doesn't have those bad bugs that mysqle has, so this is useless too.

sven423's are mostly right, but they are missing my point here.

I never in my life taught that my post could be taken so seriously, not that it matters, I'm not perfect, nobody is, to show everyone that this is not a "right back at you" type of post I will summerize my key taughts.

Personal things:
- Antal is my family name and Istvan is my name, just because I'm hungarian "Hungarian names use the "eastern name order", or family name followed by given name. Hungary is the only European country to do so." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_name)

- I develop websites/web apps, that makes me a web developer, but I call myself a web developer, for one reason: just because I can, I could call myself a coffe addict, but web developer sounds better

- Again, I can call my blog what I want, and I called it "The Great Blog of a Web Developer" just because I can, and "A blog of somebody" didn't sound as good as this title anyway

- Making connections between my loose naming schemes and my intellect, is like doing the same with google and their jokes, I personally think they are genius.

Technical things:
- I am a web programmer/developer, but you can call me "~~blathering idiot~~", it still doesn't change the fact that I know a thing or two about databases and other things

- Use cases:
a) I want compile amarok from the SVN, like I did with KDE, see my howto(critics are welcome there too), and I simply can't because mysqle is required. Amarok works with mysqle, but it has patches for mysqle, the problem is that the mysqle amarok has patches for is not downloadable anymore from Sun's( MySql's) site, and the patches aren't compatible with the downloadable version, not to mention that the mysqle bugs, mentioned in amarok's wiki are very serious ones, one of them can make amarok crash without waring,...

b) I have a full featured KDE with akonandi which requires MySql, and Amarok2, with mysqle, that's basicly two mysql servers, which is a total waste of CPU time and memory, that was the reason I quoted Jeff in the first place, he said that rendering and generating HTML was a waste of resources(he didn't say it this way, but for the lack of understanding I converted it to this form), that's where I came in and said that isn't having two mysql servers a waste of resources too?

I was never upset the fact at the fact that, mysqle comes to an amarok near you, I was upset because the dev's didn't(don't) care much about the possibility of using an external database, they just constantly refered to "Joe user can't configure a database", they never tought about automatic configuration, but that's not the point The point is that mysqle and mysql are the same database but in different forms, the main point is that, the querys are the same, so an SQL query written for mysql will work an mysqle(at least theoreticly), than why is it so hard to put an if statement and a few extra lines in the code, to make it work with externel mysql too, and leave the use cases to the distributions?

Final notes:
I quoted two points from Jeff's talk, but he quoted my whole post, made sure that it all looked wrong, called me names, and even got my name wrong in the process.

I never sought attention for my posts, don't even know how so many people got to it, not that it matters, one thing is for sure: I'm not a troll, I hate writing bad things about Amarok as much as Jeff and the others hate reading it, but this is what I've experiencing, and this can't be changed by a thousand comments and post-replies.

You can call me an idiot again Jeff, but this simply won't change anything.

Amarok developers don't see the point in KDE4

2008-12-01T14:10:00.000-08:00

Visiting the #amarok channel on freenode gave me very disappointing results, the amarok people seem to be very ignorant to me, I think their main focus is to deliver an MS Windows version and a Mac OS X version of amarok, instead of at least trying to integrate with the KDE4 desktop.

Why am I thinking this?

As I tried to compile amarok2, I realised that It will never build without mysqle, but there are problems with this, because:

"Unfortunately there's still packaging issue, being that mysql-embedded packages present in most of the existing distributions are not fit to use with Amarok for the following reasons:

they are built without -fPIC (MySQL bug 39288 http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=39288)
mysql library calls exit() wherever it feels like it (MySQL bug 39289 http://bugs.mysql.com/39289)

Also, there were some failures reported:

InnoDB does not start for lfranchi. But his configuration is too complex for me to contemplate. Perhaps this is a bug for Lenz/bugs.mysql.com

"

"Download MySQL 5.1.28 (5.1.29 doesn't seem to work) "

source: http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/MySQL_Embedded

So there are so many problems with mysqle and the amarok devs still insist on using it, they want to make amarok work with mysqle and *maybe* then let it work with an external mysql server.

Why is this a problem?

If it's not obvious from the quotes, mysqle is not mature enough for general use, seriously, how can you manage a large collection of music(that was the reason to use mysql in a first place) when "mysql library calls exit() wherever it feels like it"?

I asked on the IRC about plans for using external database instead and this is what I got: "post-2.0 you will be able to connect to an external server as well"

OK, let me get this straight, it's more important to make amarok use an embedded RDMS that doesn't have a usable upstream version, than making it use an external database, that just works, not to mention the hell, it puts you trough if you want to compile it.

Let's say that Sun probably will fix those issues with mysqle in the near future, and it actually becomes usable, but what about KDE4?

By today's standards it's inevitable for a desktop to have a good efficient database, that's why the Akonandi team has chosen, to use an external MySQL server, and for that reason most distros will probably ship MySQL with KDE for that reason, because, they would most likely want to provide all the features, that KDE can offer. But does amarok2.0 want to comply with this? No, they want to be standalone-only.

You don't have to be a genius to guess where this is all going, it just reminds me of one of the KDE4.0 release event, where a KDE dev complained that how KDE3 sucked, because they couldn't port Amarok to Windows, and KHTML had bad performance:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5412915388096352771&ei=mWY0SaeJIYiOiQLC1c2KCA&hl=en

At 2:00, he begins his story, about "Why they almost left KDE?"

He begins with complaining, how slow was rendering amarok's context with KHTML, so it looks like performance matters in amarok, not that anyone forced them to use KHTML for rendering context, but I will refer to this point later on.

At 5:00 he complains that KDE3 could not be ported to Windows, making amarok X11-only.

Let's get the facts all together one more time:
- mysqle is not yet suitable for every day use
- mysql is known to just work
- Akonandi uses mysql for storage
- KDE4 will probably depend on mysql on most distros, because missing out features of Akonandi because of mysql would be a really bad thing for a distro
- mysqle is important for amarok2.0
- mysql support will not be available for amarok2.0

Using mysqle mostly benefits non-KDE4 desktops, because as I said earlier KDE4 will probably have a mysql server anyway, but isn't improving the KDE4 user experiance top release priority anymore? Is amarok on Windows on Mac more important than getting the best out of amarok on KDE4?

Why is using mysqle in amarok ruins the user experience in KDE4?

Akonandi has a mysql server, that can be used by anyone(any program).
Amarok has a mysqle server, that can be used by only amarok.

1+1=2 for what? for windows and mac? but what about KDE4?

2 mysql servers = almost 2 times as many CPU and memory usage

But what now, didn't a developer just say at a big release event that performance is important for amarok, and now they making amarok use an embedded mysqle under KDE4 for no reason? (mysql can be used by others, mysqle can't so there is no other way around)

What did the people in the IRC channel had to say about this?

"come on, you should not run amarok on a server that has a high load anyway. if it does not have a high load, your point falls flat"

"how much RAM does it wast, how much CPU? And what would you do with that amount instead. would you even notice the difference? and if you do, how many of amarok users would and how many just enjoy the speed and ease of mysqle."

"but thanks for making clear that you just want to complain without having any point and are not able to consider the majority and see no way but to exagerate. bye bye"

"why do people simply don't see that we can't do everything at once?"

My favorite quote from here is: "consider the majority"

It's like saying: "consider the majority, which are Windows and Mac users, and screw the KDE4 users"

Today, amarok1.x is the slowest KDE3 program, if not it's surely in the top 3 slowest KDE3 programs, I expected amarok2.0 to finally deliver improvement over here and do what it's supposed to do "just play the music", but now amarok 2.0 will be busy "playing database" instead of "playing music".

Jeff Mitchell the developer who spoke at the event that I was referring to, referenced KDE as a family, but where is the love now? The lack of communication between Amarok and the rest of KDE4(Akonandi) doens't seem to back up Amarok as being a family member.

UPDATE:
Jeff posted a response to which I wrote a response in form of a post, which contains my answerers to some of the comments: http://djdarkmanx.blogspot.com/2008/12/im-poisoness-dont-touch-me-or-ill-bite.html

Compiling the KDE4 from the SVN under Kubuntu Intrepid/Hardy

2008-11-30T06:40:00.000-08:00

Since I critisized Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex so much, I decided it was time, to show something instead of just telling people how cool is the SVN and how much the Kubuntu packages suck.

First things first:
- SVN means in english: current development snapshot, it may not work at all, and it may break stuff, but in most cases it works just fine, so use it at your own risk
- Compiling the whole thing takes time, on my machine it takes up to 12 or more hours, so it is best to set it up to compile at night ;)
- You need a lot of free space in your home directory to begin with, in my case : 7,5 GB for the sources+built files and 2GB for the compiled binaries, so you would tipically need at least 10GB
- by default qt-copy(qt with patches) installs in ~/qt and kde installs in ~/kde so don't worry, you can compile a broken KDE, but you can't break your system, kdesvn-build itself does not require root, and will leave your base system intact

For compiling the SVN I use kdesvn-build, a script that automaticly downloads and compiles the KDE sources, it's easy to use and very flexible, so there is no real reason not to use it.

The first step is to ensure that the dependencies of KDE4 are met, there are a lot of dev packagees that are needed, but this needs to be done only once.

Kubuntu hardy users need to enable the intrepid backports repository because there are packagees which are needed from that repository, ex: cmake.

I've got a really long list of packages that are required by kde from: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4/Kubuntu_and_Debian

sudo aptitude install build-essential xorg-dev cdbs debhelper cmake  \
kdesdk-scripts subversion ssh xserver-xephyr doxygen graphviz libqt4-dev \
dbus-x11 libdbus-1-dev libstreamanalyzer-dev libstrigiqtdbusclient-dev \ libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev shared-mime-info libgif-dev libpcre3-dev \
libclucene0ldbl libclucene-dev libjpeg62-dev libkrb5-dev libsm-dev\
libssl-dev libbz2-dev \
libpcre3-dev libxml2-utils libpcre3-dev libopenexr-dev libjasper-dev \
libenchant-dev libavahi-common-dev libaspell-dev libasound2-dev libboost-dev \
libgpgme11-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev libxine-dev libqimageblitz-dev \
libsmbclient-dev libxkbfile-dev libxcb1-dev libxklavier12-dev libxdamage-dev \
libxcomposite-dev libbluetooth-dev libusb-dev libcaptury-dev \
network-manager-dev libsmbclient-dev libsensors-dev \
libpam0g-dev libnm-util-dev libusb-dev libcfitsio3-dev libnova-dev \
libeigen-dev libopenbabel-dev libfacile-ocaml-dev libboost-python-dev \
libqca2-dev libqca2-dev libqca2-dev libsvn-dev libsvncpp-dev \
libcommoncpp2-dev libidn11 libidn11-dev libxtst-dev librdf-dev xsltproc \
libxrender-dev libfontconfig1-dev libpci-dev libxss-dev libxft-dev

These almost covered all needed packagees except for a few others:

sudo apt-get install libphonon-dev libical-dev libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev

On hardy libical and libical-dev is old, you need to manually grab the new versions:
First you go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/libical0 and http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/libical-dev , download the debs for your architecture, and install them.

Another missing package was alsa-lib, which I prefered to compile from source, because it is simply fast and easy to do so :)

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/lib/alsa-lib-1.0.18.tar.bz2
tar xvf alsa-lib-1.0.18.tar.bz2
cd alsa-lib-1.0.18
./configure
make
sudo make install

The howto is posted here: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/kdesvn-build

..next step is to download the kdesvn-build script, and run it:

mkdir -p ~/kdesvn
cd ~/kdesvn
svn cat svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdesdk/scripts/kdesvn-build > kdesvn-build
svn cat svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdesdk/scripts/kdesvn-buildrc-sample > ~/.kdesvn-buildrc
chmod +x kdesvn-build
./kdesvn-build

After the build is done, we need to tell our display(login) manager where to find our newly compiled KDE:

kdesudo kate /usr/share/xsessions/kde4-svn.desktop

Here is a template of what this file should contain, you must replace 'username' with your respective unix username:

[Desktop Entry]                                                                              
Encoding=UTF-8                                                                               
Type=XSession                                                                                
Exec=/home/username/kde/bin/startkde                                                                       
TryExec=/home/username/kde/bin/startkde                                                                    
Name=KDE4 SVN                                                                                                                                                                       
Comment=The K Desktop Environment. A powerful Open Source graphical desktop environment

After this is done, save the file, and reboot the system, and you can log in to your fresh KDE4, and every time you want to update it, all you need to do is run the kdesvn-build script again and sit back, enjoy.

KDE4, the desktop, that some distributions fail to deliver

2008-11-20T12:21:00.000-08:00

I already wrote about how Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex failed, I'm not gonna talk about it anymore, but I didn't just stand there and talk about it all day, I've opened my web browser typed http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/kdesvn-build, because I wanted to prove to myself that I can do better than the almighty Canonical, don't get me wrong I admire what Canonical did/does for the linux user base, but I can't just look past what Canonical does for the KDE community.

First of all, I would like to point out, a general rule in the market, if the customer is not satisfied with the product, then the manufacturer failed, no matter how, when and why, there are no buts, it's an undisputed fail.

Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex failed to deliver KDE4 and failed to deliver KDE3 too and that's a double fail! If anyone can give me a good explanation to why was it so hard to package KDE3 with Intrepid, I would be happy, and if someone could also explain, why did KDE4 needed to use .kde so badly, I would be more happy.

Since Kubuntu was a failure, I decided to install Intrepid anyway, boot take matters into my own hands. First off I decided to go with the 3rd party KDE3 packages, and it was fairly good, but didn't integrate with Kubuntu. After using intrepid for a while, I came to considering, trying the current SVN of KDE4.

As I wrote above, downloaded kdesvn-build, and built KDE4 from the SVN, and what can I say... It's what I would have expected from Intrepid Ibex, It was more stable and more usable than Intrepid and it also had more features and I was finally happy, and I am constantly compiling KDE4 from the SVN every second day. Why didn't Canonical do this? It seems that no one there read that KDE4.2 will be for the users, not KDE4.1x.

Ubuntu people keep telling that KDE is not a second class citizen, but if I look at Ubuntu, and at Kubuntu, I see the truth, but if KDE would not be a second class citizen, than how come Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex is so useless? Why didn't they simply ship it with KDE3.5.9, and ship an optional KDE4.1.2 repository?

No ones perfect, everybody makes mistakes, admitting a mistake, and doing something about it is the right thing to do. Did the ubuntu people do that? No, they'd rather blame the users, and send them elsewhere. Here is what the ubuntu people(or at least one of them) had to say about this whole mess. After reading the article, I din't know what to say, in short it's like failing to deliver a faulty product and telling the consumer to go elsewhere if the don't like it, and blame them.

So, the article starts out with some general placeholder text, about how distributions deliver software and then tries to prove that the user is an idiot if he/she downloads third party packages, just because the distribution's package sux. I couldn't believe what I've read, because the person who wrote this is a usability expert of some sort. How could she miss the fact that many people use Kubuntu for work, so If I upgrade to Ibex, and find out that it's unusable for my work, I should suspend my work for a week and look for another distribution?

The next part is a typical "I told you so".

"These expectations allow the distribution to to its job: provide a cohesive product which they can reasonably support while protecting its brand and reputation."

I and the majority of KDE users fail to see a "cohesive" product in Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex.

"But what do you do when your users try to reinvent your distribution? There seems to be some confusion as to why the Kubuntu distribution exists and who it exists for."

I already wrote that I use KDE for everyday work, I upgrade to Intrepid, assuming that It's usable, find out that it's not, don't have time, to reinstall my whole system because of that, and don't want to because I'm not a windows user, find a 3rd party repository for KDE3, quickly install it so that I can resume my work. How is that for reason?

"Kubuntu is a KDE distribution."

Which was true until Intrepid, now "Kubuntu is a FAILED KDE distribution."

"KDE also focuses on usable functional design rather than universal usability."

KDE focuses on usability more than GNOME will ever focus on, but I don't want to go deeper into this, cause it would be just another KDE vs. GNOME flamewar.

"One of KDE’s primary user groups is made up of Early Adopters."

Am I the only one to see that this assumes that most of KDE users are early adopters? Then how come the 3rd party KDE3 repository had such success, or better, how come some users, made the 3rd party KDE3 repository in the first place?

"I find it ironic how I’m discovering so many “KDE users” who are resistant to change."

It's not irconic, it just proves the point that the KDE users are not early adopters.

"Kubuntu attempts to balance itself between its user community and KDE. "

And doing a really really bad job.

"We tried to appease traditional KDE users (the early adopters) by also releasing an unsupported KDE4 Remix distribution. Everyone was happy and the world was a good place"

1, KDE users are *NOT* early adopters
2. Yes, everyone was happy, until Intrepid, where the damage had been done

"When Intrepid rolled around, it was 10 months since KDE 4 was first released and time for Kubuntu to realigned itself with its goals and focus on KDE. We shipped 4.1.2. This has become a lose-lose situation."

I think shipped means: go to kde.org, download the source, mkdir build, cd build, cmake .., make, sudo make install, and package all this. Don't understand why they didn't just provide a shell script to do this. It became a "lose-lose" situation because, there was no analysis of what does the KDE user really want.

"At the time when decisions were made, there were still some bugs we were concerned about in 4.1.2. In an attempt to support our users, we temporarily disabled some not-quite-working functionality until it is fixed in 4.1.3. This pissed off the traditional KDE users."

Newsflash: forcing 4.1.2 pissed of the traditional KDE users.

"In the other hand were our traditional 3.5 users. By refocusing our attention from them to KDE and shipping 4.1.2, we pissed them off as well. As a result, instead of sticking with what was known and supported (Hardy), some users installed Intrepid and then resorted to third-party 3.5 packaging which has now damaged their systems."

Because it was too hard to make an official 3.5 package for the Kubuntu developers.

"As a KDE distribution, it is our responsibility to ship what KDE is developing, not a stagnant branch of what it was."

Newsflash: the KDE 3.x will be supported for a long-long time and what KDE is developing is in the SVN not in the release.

"KDE 4 is the future of KDE. It is the purpose and goal of Kubuntu to support, package, and distribute KDE and make it easy to install and fun to use."

That's a pretty lame excuse not to make a KDE3 package.

"If some Kubuntu users can’t get over that, then maybe Kubuntu isn’t for them."

If the Kubuntu devs would ask the users what they want, maybe there wouldn't be anything to get over.

As I wrote before, there is no excuse for failure, a fail is a fail, writing an excuse for a failure and ranting about what a bad operating system(Windows Vista) others(Microsoft) make, is just plain stupid.

I think maybe asking the KDE user next time, would provide better results, than just delivering a faulty product, and blaming the users.

FFC 0.1 RC1 Released!

2008-11-17T12:56:00.001-08:00

I hate time constaints, but they are never successfull at making me deliver bad releases. Every FFC release has it's goal, I try to make it clear to everyone what they mean.

0.1 RC1 has been mainly a bugfix release, it's 2MB less then the previous release, all unused material has been removed, and has only 1 default skin, the rest will be packaged seperately. User management has been reviewed and fixed, although there are things to come in that place, but this is the last time I modified the user table structure.

0.1 is comming, it will be the first major release, and it will have backward support up until 0.5, stay tuned!

People who I should be thanking

2008-10-27T22:34:00.000-07:00

I went trough a lot of hell, the company server was configured well, but it lacked a mail server, and I didn't quite know how to configure one, so I wanted to learn and do it like most server administrators out there.

I succeeded in configuring a simple good old unix-fashion mail server, but that was entirely not what I needed, the server is for web hosting, I can't afford to give everyone user to the system just for mail, so I decided to dig deeper. I've eventually found an ubuntu complete mail server tutorial, but failed while doing it since it was incomplete, this I learnt after I posted it to the ubuntuforums.

Sadly no other person replied than the one that told me that the tutorial is bad, so I got desperate and when I'm desperate I go to places like IRC for answers, there I found someone who told me to use an integrated solution rather than doing everything entirely by hand like vhosting and so on. I said OK but what should I use? they are integrated solutions out there but most are not open source and/or very expensive. He recommended me EHCP (Easy Hosting Control Panel) and gave me a howtoforge installation page. I said it's fine and all but I should really at least really read what the developers have to say about this control panel.

When I opened the site, I was delighted, the title was "Easy Hosting Control Panel for Ubuntu and alikes...- Free Fast Opensource web hosting control panel for your server". Reading "ehcp is the first control panel in this field with its unique features such as: complete php based, object oriented, opensource and free. even install is using php, so it is extremely easy to learn and extensible.. " afterwards really put a smile on my face.

It's a shame their site is not as good as EHCP itself, this forum post contains more information then the site itself.

At first almost everything worked except the smtp, which was because the config files weren't "clean", but the best thing was that since EHCP was written in php and has a feasible code structure, I found what I wanted to without problem. I done the smtp procedure by hand since, I didn't want to reinstall the working parts, and it all worked. EHCP is true to it's name and has quite a few features that make webhosting a lot easier, without having to pay infinite amount of cash.

These are most of the features of EHCP:
"
* php and apt-get based simple install,
* automatically installs and works: dns, apache, mysql, ftp, email, domains,
* most easy install: copy & paste in console and watch
* ready to use after install - at ubuntu
* adodb and phpmyadmin included
* object oriented programming using php,
* easily extendable/modifiable..."

The best thing is that the code is really understandable, even by inexperienced programmers, you can even re implement, or use parts of the code yourself, I encourage everyone to try this out, you can even learn how to do these setups yourself.

Linux for my gilfriend

2008-10-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

I have never forced anyone to use a linux distribution, because, It's not a good tactic, if someone's comfortable with his/hers OS than so be it, why break up that harmony?

On the desktop, I make more compromises than on the server, where I would never use closed technology. On the desktop I have a few things, that are good even considering that hey are closed:

- opera, opera is standars complient, and way faster than firefox, integrates better in KDE, Konqueror is good and all, but it lacks a lot of features, It's more like IE on windows

- picasa, because it's user interface is very pleasent, and has many usefull features, that can make me forget about GIMP, and Kolour Paint for simple taks, it's based on wine, true, but that doesn't mean it's evil, Google does this on purpose, because Google, knows that what's good for Wine is good for Linux in general

- skype, beacause it works and it's not a pain in the ass to set up, when It comes to basic tasks, like voice chat + webcam, and currently it has the best audio/video quality

There are more, but these are the basic tools that help me, when I need to set up a Linux system for a windows user and myself.

My gilfriend uses her Asus F5N laptop for what most people do:

- browsing web pages

- watching movies

- sending/reciving emails

- IM with voice/video chat

- editing documents

- etc.

She knows how viruses work, and she avoids them, but there are tricks that are too good even for her. Please don't tell me to use an anti virus, for one they are expensive, and they are useless, I've seen a lot of infested people with anti virus programs installed. You use windows, you got to live with the possiblity of infection, but she got very frustrated because all she wants is to use her laptop, she doesn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on anti-virus programs, and hack her laptop all day just to keep it working, she already had a Kubuntu installed, but sadly I didn't have the time to finish off the remaining hardware issues, but is was there, along windows, so that she could take a look at it any time she wanted.

After getting infested, she asked me to finish off the installation because she was fed up with getting infected by viruses even when she did her best to avoid them, so I agreed. There were two issues, to deal with:

- for some strange reason the clicknet driver didn't work when I gave eth0 a manual configuration, so I made a script that would revert it to the default configuration

- wireless issues are common, so this time I used ndiswrapper, to load the windows driver, I would have preffered to use the madwifi, but I needed to go for the more accurate solution becuase, I didn't have a wireless router to test it, and had little time to hack on this problem

So basicly now, my girlfriend has a stable virus free system with all she wants:

- opera and/or firefox for browsing the web, flash 10 is simply fabulous on both browsers

- kopete and skype for IM, both of them work greate

- OpenOffice.org and/or Google docs for document editing

- picasa for organizing pictures

- amarok for music

- smplayer for movies, because it simply works

and other cool stuff.

After she went back to Kolozsvár she told me that the wireless works perfectly, so I think this day is a win for open source, the bad thing is that she would have had very little chance of getting this if it wasn't for me. The basic problem is, that her laptop had quite a few hardware issues, that requied a little hacking, to get around them:

- soundcard needed extra configuration, and still behaves strangely on boot, ubuntu's alsa is always one step behind the official alsa release, which makes matters even worse

- webcam needed a *not stable* driver that was refused to be included in ubuntu in any form, this is how much respect open source drivers get these days

- wireless card needed ndiswrapper

Not all people know and/or want to do a little tweaking to get things going and there are very few people who can help people adopt linux, the two main real problems, are hardware, and compatibility with some proprietory stuff like yahoo! messenger, which make these things realy hard, some say gaming is also a problem, but I denie that because Windows is not a gaming platform itself compared to XBox, PS3 and Wii.

I myself never tought that I can do this and get out of this succesfully, but I managed, and I would like to encourage everyone to do the same, the moral of this story is: never push people, but when they ask, just help them

What Kubuntu 8.10 RC is all about

2008-10-26T11:21:00.000-07:00

My friend balazsbela, gave 8.10 RC a try, via livecd, and he had mixed feelings about it, so I decided to digg a little deeper.

His main compliant was kopete, after reading this:

"We will review KDE 4 ports of applications for suitability for inclusion at the time of KDE 4.1 release and before feature freeze. Applications we are still unsure about the quality of the KDE 4 port include Kontact, Digikam, Amarok, Kopete and Ark. If the KDE 4 version can work without regression and with successful upgrade, we will use it."

source: https://wiki.kubuntu.org/KubuntuIntrepidVersion

I visited the #ubuntu+1 irc channel and asked what was will be happening to kopete, this is how it went:

[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:09:26] hello, what's the status of kopete in ibex? will the kde4 version be used or the kde3?

....

[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:10:23] djdarkman: 4 from the looks, i don't see a package for 3
[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:11:09] adz21c: that's very sad, the new kopete has major regresions when it comes to the yahoo! protocol
[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:11:21] djdarkman: like what?
[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:11:33] doesn't download contact photos

....

[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:11:53] doesn't download contact list correctly
[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:12:26] if i just updated using update-manager -d to the beat version then on the 30th will i be able to update again the same way ?
[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:12:29] djdarkman: how does it not download the list correctly? seemed ok to me, although i rarely use yahoo so i hadn't noticed the pictures thing
...

[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:13:40] my friend told me that it didn't show all the online contacts, and I never saw any photos in the contact list
[Sun Oct 26 2008] [15:14:15] djdarkman: ok, can't confirm that either, my yahoo list has been empty for a while :)

I can't say that IRC is a absolute place to look for information, but it's general knowlage, since I din't reliable information there, I looked for myself, I downloaded the CD image, plugged it into virtualbox, and let it fly.

The first moments were very dissapointing, the installer looked like a bad Windows-clone, here is the evidence:

I don't understand, weren't there better themes for this qt-based installer than the windows-theme?

This is an insult to both the kubuntu developers and linux in general, in my opinion, this is not what KDE stands for, not to mention that it's very ugly. Keeping the debian text based installer would have been way better, than making an installer with a windows theme.... KDE4 is about "Be free." not about "Be like Windows.", I can't understand, why make an installer for the KDE4 version of kubuntu that is ugly compared to the one made for the KDE3 version of kubuntu and also insulting?

By the way, the designers don't seem to know the term "padding" here:

Some would argue and say that it's not a big deal, but I would disagree with that, because, how can you expect someone to use linux, if the first thing he or she would see would be like those disturbing images above, what's the point of having a "graphical" installer, if it's that ugly anyway? Not to mention that some would think that if the installer of a KDE4 based distro is this bad than KDE4 must be just as bad.

Enough has been said about the look of the installer, I've gotta admit: at least it works.

Sadly after installation I've got something almost as bad as the installer

This is a default KDE4 destkop...with the default ugly color scheme, I don't even want to know why, didn't the Kubuntu team "kubuntuify" this, and why did they put folderview there, it's garbage if it's not the desktop. Hint for those who think that folderview is innovation: take a default kde3 desktop, open a folder in dolphin, position it on the desktop, right click the title bar, click no borders, and hide all toolbars, basicly it's the same feeling. A good thing is that adept updater, looks a lot nicer than in KDE3, but it's still no excuse that KDE4 is so "stock" in ibex, they didn't even put one tenth of the effort that they've put in GNOME when it came to appearance, but if you say that in Ubuntu KDE is a second class citizen they flame you right in the face, well I would love to get an explanation for this, because I think, If I would have taken this screenshot, and told that I've compiled this from source, you would have belived me, because the only sign of kubuntu I've seen here is the little logo on the all-new-and-ugly K menu.

I've updated more than 80 packagees, a little too much for an RC I think, after that I adept didn't even show me a close this window button, I for one know that the process is finished but did they(the developers of adept updater) think about what would an avarage user be thinking? no! The updater didn't even suggest that I should restart my computer because I made a kernel update, things like this wouldn't happen in the KDE3 version of hardy.

But again I'm a power user, I know that a new kernel means that I should restart my computer, I open the K menu, click restart, the screen goes grey, and the shutdown menu appears o I can click Restart AGAIN or wait 30 seconds, these are moments when I go: OMFG, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Do I look stupid? when I click restart I mean, restart, don't ask me twice, I'm not a retard, and I don't have time to silently wait 30 seconds!

Now I can confirm that the KDE4 version of kopete is the default and only, seems like the Kubuntu dev's don't care about yahoo users... very very sad, because they've shipped the good old amarok insted of the all new 2 beta version, why didn't they do the same with kopete? or at least they should have given a choice.

Sadly I have to admit that balazsbela was indeed right, if you are a KDE user, and want to use KDE4, then kubuntu is not an option.

FFC use and implementations

2008-10-21T21:46:00.000-07:00

A good thing to know about where does a CMS stand is to simple see the real life implementations, FFC has a few too:

http://vector-group.ro/site/

http://btinternational.eu/

http://euroturizmus.ro/

http://tkk.ro/

http://vilasara.ro/

Too few? too simple? Well for a web engine that hasen't even reached v0.1 I think it's a good start. What I would realy like to see in the future is a site that would use nearly all the features of 0.1.

FFC 0.1 Beta is here, get it while it's hot!

2008-10-18T04:17:00.000-07:00

The all new FFC has a lot of improvements over the Alpha, it's actualy even usable, and since FFC is all about up to date technology, it features YUI 2.6 and FCKeditor 2.6.3, sadly the lightbox-fckeditor integration is still under progress so it didn't make it. This release also has exiciting new features like an experimental Cron system, a Power Panel and redesigned menu editor to make life easier.

On road with new features and plans!

2008-10-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

There are 3 different levels in development:
level 1: making existing features work, bug fixing, usability testing
level 2: implementing new features
level 3: planning new features

level 1:

The menu manager has been changed a lot:

I realised that if the menu tree contains the term tree, then it should be presented as a tree. More features for conviniance will come here.

level 2:

Making a separate site for administration like the joomla people did, is overkill, makes development harder, and narrows the possibilites. PowerPanel goes beyond forcing people to work twice, it's trough that an administrator should not see the site in "visitor mode", that's why there is a $PowerPanelMode variable which is true when you are in administrator mode, this if usefull, because the skin knows that it shouldn't show adverts banners etc.

PowerPanel is still in beta, it's new, and it doesn't have all the planned features, but it's usable.

level 3:

I like extending the roadmap adding much needed features to FFC, here are the features that will come with 0.1 Beta:

libspider library
A library that makes creating spiders/crawlers much easier, text pattern matching and friends will call this library home.

experimental Cron API
There are some tasks that cannot be completet at the blink of a HTTP request, that's why we need a task manager for these things, that can execute long tasks periodicly, continue aborted tasks and write logs about all this.

Date Lib
Date class that will help manipulating dates.

Mailing system
A unified mailing system, wich can be connected to the famouse PHPMailer, or phplists.

CodeGen Features
~~- new type: reference~~
~~- new type: float~~
- new type: hidden
- popup date picker

FFC 0.1 Beta is going to be a very exiting release that I can recommend for productive use, even though 0.1 will be the first milestone that will be rock solid and ready for the world.

Jealousy will get you nowhere

2008-09-19T09:18:00.001-07:00

I can't understand why does Novell think, that making Ubuntu look bad can make people look up on them.

At the Linux Plumbers conference a Novell employee highlighted in a keynote that Cannonical contributes too few patches to the Linux kernel, binutils, man pages, X.org etc.

Response came from the Ubuntu community, that called his keynote, trolling. There is truth there because, I can't image how in the world does telling that Cannonical contributes few patches benefit the Linux ecosystem in any way.

What I found strange is that in the first of the slides it shows Novell, It shows the second company, doesn't show the third or fourth, but it imeadatly shows Novell as number five.

Another strange thing is that he even admitted that he was wrong a while ago while stating that Cannonical contributed only 6 patches to the kernel.

As they say it's freedom of speech but, how about making another type of statistic next time like "the linux company that had the most deals with Microsoft".

The 10 default FFC skins

2008-09-04T02:13:00.000-07:00

Today I worked out one of the two major problems that need to be addressed until 0.1 Alpha, I've reviewed all the skins that came with 0.1 Pre Alpha, and I removed the ones that I didn't like that much or needed too many work/effort than it was worth.

While I removed skins I also fixed those that stayed, so the focus turned to having fewer but better.

The resolution of the skinning problem will be addressed completely in 0.1 Final, because there will be a feature to install/uninstall skins, till then, just copy the skins to /skins.

Here are the 10 default FFC skins:

FFC on Google Code and FFLite comming soon

2008-09-03T12:53:00.000-07:00

Today I registered FFC on google code, I really like it, if it goes well, I might as well keep it there, but if there's advantage on keeping ffc on both I will do that.

here is the google code url: http://code.google.com/p/fframework/

A few days ago I started coding FFLite, which is a lighter implementation of the Fatality Framework API, designed for non-ff envioerments, I tought that FF is something way too complex to be made light very easily, but I was proven wrong by myself, I didn't t take me much effort to make a standalone code that can run extensions based on the FF API, which can be embeded in any CMS-es. But FFLite won't be available until it's ready to be used together with the Code Generator.

FFC is on the road

2008-09-02T01:47:00.001-07:00

To make the development of FFC more interactive I've made a roadmap and an online changelog available:

FFC Roadmap
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgvb929d_6dtgqf2dg

0.1 Alpha Changelog
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgvb929d_7hrjt2gd6

I think I will migrate soon to google code, it seem to be more intuitive and simple than SF.

Reasons why I hate GTK and GNOME in general

2008-08-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

I reinstalled Linux on my laptop, because I wanted to repartition it and other stuff, I kept my old /home partition, because I don't want to set up all my programs again.

Everything worked fine except for Firetray(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4868) which caused my a headache once again, I knew that it needs some GTK lib, but didn't know exactly what did it need, so I went to it's Firefox addon page, but it didn't mention any dependency, so I went to it's google code homepage, taught that I should find it there, but to no avail, so as a last resort I opened a header file(http://code.google.com/p/firetray/source/browse/branches/gecko-1.9/src/nsTray.h) from it's source and found two lines of code:

#include <gtk/gtk.h>
#include <gdk-pixbuf/gdk-pixbuf.h>

So this told me to install stuff like libgdk-pixbuf2, and other GTK libs, so I concluded the following:

1) it's obvious that everyone has GTK and libgdk-pixbuf2 installed on his system, no need to tell anyone that this project requires it, it's a secret

2) if you use KDE you must be a coder to be able to install Firetray

3) why use a name like libgsystray or libgtk-systray when you can use sexy names like libgdk-pixbuf2, it makes sense that it's for systrays....

GTK/GNOME people always whine about how easy is GNOME compared to KDE, but I fail to see the innovation of using the GTK File Open Dialog (probably has a sexier name than this) in the context of finding an application that could open a file after download in firefox. Here are the steps:

- I click on the pdf
- open dialog appears
- it's not set up to open it with kpdf, so I click on browse
- a File Open dialog appears, yeah that's right the innovative GTK one, which normally defaults to my home directory
- it has a long input box, so I type in kpdf, but it won't work, because it assumes ~/kpdf, because I'm currently browsing my home directory
- to make use of the input box, I need to type /usr/bin/kpdf, now that's what I call user friendly....
- instead of typing, I decide to browse, but I should get a coffee while this innovative dialog lists everything in /usr/bin

The moral of this story is that GNOME people call GNOME more user friendly/simpler than KDE, while having usability issues like the one I've just described, they should really look into usability more deeply and they should name their stuff more sanely, I don't see the downside of other people understanding their libs.

Firefox Qt, a duplication or something else?

2008-08-19T22:18:00.000-07:00

After reading this (http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2008/08/difference-between-working-and-usable.html) post today, I pondered on a few things:

1) Is the current Qt port of Mozilla useless?

From a user perspective yes, but it works, as the title of the post pointed out, working is not useful, for example KDE 4.0 worked, but except for developers, it was no good to nobody.

This point however is irrelevant because, this is just a preview, this is just o show the world that there is something going underway, if I understood correctly, it was never intended for end users.

2) Is Mozilla duplicating the efforts of QtWebKit, QtNetwork and Qt's Javascript engine and so on, by not using them, and using stuff of it's own?

Saying that Mozilla is duplicating the efforts of KDE/Qt, is like saying that Amarok has duplicated the work of XMMS, Firefox and Konqueror are not the same thing, like It was said, that Qt is modular, it's not an "all in one or nothing"(aseigo) solution, you don't have to use all it's modules, for example the QtNetwork, why use it if you have your own that you like better? if I understood correctly, this port doesn't mean that Mozilla will replace all of it's core functionalities with Qt equivalents, It is meant to give the possibility for a GTK free desktop, to integrate into a KDE/Qt or any other enviorment.

The main reason behind the Qt port is probably from user perspective, why should a non-GTK user install GTK libs for just Firefox, it doesn't make sense.

3) The Qt port is late.

I agree on this one, Mozilla should have started this years ago, then it would have more attention.

But before flaming this project, keep in mind that Firefox is a good browser that so far holds ground against Internet Explorer, which I can't say for Webkit or KHTML, I fail to see the "evil" in this project, improving the user experience for a Firefox user under non-GTK enviorments is a good thing.

Firefox has a lot of extensions, it's browser that can be extended in almost all ways, which I again can't say for any native KDE/Qt browser, so there is no real reason not to welcome the Firefox Qt project to the KDE/Qt family.

F Framework CMS 0.1 Pre Alpha released

2008-08-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

Finally I made an alpha release of my framework, which should be only downloaded and used by experienced PHP developers, because there is little documentation and missing features, but I'd love to help anyone interesting in using something like this :)

The reason behind this framework is that when I want to code custom sites, I don`t want CMS features I want an API, so in reality this is an API, that has a minimal CMS built right on top, these are the main goals of the F Framework:

- Clean backward compatible API that should never break in major releases
- Abstraction for everything, making the API not care about certain protocols
- Abstract database and in the future data handling
- Everything must be (Smarty)template based (mixing PHP code is kinda obsolete)
- Written code can be version aware

..and others.

The main goal is a good api, to program in, but the CMS part is quite functional, here are some sites, that use older versions:

http://btinternational.eu/
http://euroturizmus.ro/
http://tkk.ro/

..and others.

Another feature of this framework would be the code generator: imagine, that your boss tells you hat you need to make an application that could manipulate(list,add,delete,edit) a database table with at least 5-10 fields and you could generate the whole code with a few clicks and edit it afterwards, and if that code would be based on a portable API, you could do anything with it. This is exactly what the code generator is for.

There is much more to tell, but too little time, this is the URL of the release:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=219724

After a successful installation you can login with user: admin password: admin .

But remember this may be release quality to me, it`s still alpha quality to others.

Welcome to KDE 4.1 on Kubuntu

2008-08-17T00:42:00.000-07:00

Since I needed to (re)install Kubuntu on this machine, because my hard drive broke, I thought that I should give KDE 4.1 a spin, since I have a fresh/clean system, I shouldn't run into migration/compatibility bugs/issues.

Following this (http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-4.1) guide, I have installed KDE 4.1 and immediately ran into my first issue, Firefox (which previously replaced Opera) looked really ugly, because of it`s default gnome look. So I knew what I had to do:

sudo apt-get install gtk-qt-engine-kde4

After it was installed all I needed to do is to set the GTK Apps to use KDE`s styles in the System Settings

After tabs and everything looked like KDE, all I needed was this (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7574) theme, and Firefox looked like it was built for KDE 4.

After I had a browser, I needed some music too, so I installed Amarok 2 from the Kubuntu KDE4 packages, it was a disappointment, crashed at first sight, and the layout is just what I was used to, so I removed it, and tried Amarok`s nightly build, which had the same problems. It looked to me that Amarok 2 has a bunch of new features, maybe too many, but it`s alpha version, I just forgot this ever happened, and continued using, the good old KDE3 version of Amarok.

Next up was instant messaging, which is very important, but sadly Kopete 0.50.80(the KDE4 version of Kopete) doesn't want to display the contact photos (http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146118), which is a bug, that goes back to the early KDE 4.0 days, as I see it it was opened on 2007-05-29 18:39 , and it`s still not fixed to this ( 2008-08-17 ) day, I don`t need Speed Crunch to calculate that it`s more than a year, I can`t realy understand how come a bug this old still bares the status "NEW". Before someone comes and says, that it`s not a KDE 4 version bug, but a KDE 3 version, I must show that I reported this(http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161190) bug against the KDE 4 version , so correct me if I`m wrong:
- I go report a bug against the KDE 4 version of Kopete
- It gets marked duplicate of a bug that was reported against the KDE 3 version of Kopete
- It gets the status "RESOLVED" while the bug that was considered "original" still has the status "NEW"
This kinda looks like a fast duplicating/resolving/neglecting issue to me, although I may be wrong, and maybe I`m missing something very important here. But if I`m at least partially right I encourage Kopete developers to try the protocols, It`s really not that hard and/or time consuming to register a yahoo or any other account, or organize a quality testing and invite users, to help them test, like Mozilla did.

Since because of the above issue I could not want use Kopete 0.50.80, I had to get the good old Kopete back again, for some strange path reasons, both Kopetes in the menu started kopete-kde4, the menu entrys looked like this:

Kopete (KDE3): kopete -caption "%c" %i %m %u
Kopete (KDE4): /usr/lib/kde4/bin/kopete -caption "%c" %u

It`s pretty clear to me why I got Kopete(KDE4) with both menu entries, so I've changed to KDE3 entry from kopete -caption "%c" %i %m %u to /usr/bin/kopete -caption "%c" %i %m %u and the magic was done, I could use the Kopete that I wanted. I think this issue is the Kubuntu distribution's fault, it looks to me that they didn't test KDE4 thoroughly enough, because the original entries work on KDE3. Filed bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kubuntu-kde4-meta/+bug/258757

The last issue may be personal, but as I talked to other people, it's more likely not, I don't like the oxygen default style, and there are too few color schemes to choose from by default in Kubuntu, but Get Hot New Stuff comes to the rescue and I quickly find a nice light color scheme for my taste, although I don`t understand how come it's not implemented in the window decoration selection, it could help a lot there. Plasma theme selector is great, again Get Hot New Stuff makes life a lot easier, although I couldn't find a good light theme, I could hope that in the near future someone will make one.

Font style is a problem for some people, again, I think this is a Kubuntu problem more then a general KDE4 problem, and it could be solved very easily, all I did is start the System Settings this is how I did it:

One thing I like about KDE4 other than Get Hot New Stuff, is that it`s fast and more responsive than KDE3 in many cases, maybe it`s because of Qt4....

I think I described many issues, pros and cons about KDE4, the rest was said and done by much wiser people, and remember before you blame everything on KDE, please check out other distributions and read what the developers have to say, like this article: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080710131440951, and If you don't happen to find a good explanation of the KDE4 versioning, here is it in short:
- KDE 4.0 binary compatible libs until KDE 5.0, release ment for developers
- KDE 4.1 meant for early adopters
- KDE 4.2 meant for the rest of us

Netbeans 6.5 beta hits the spot

2008-08-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

Sun is one of the corporate overlords that I like, at one of the conferences hosted by Sun, I have heard a memorable sentence by a Sun employee (or CEO, I don`t remember) "innovation happens everywhere", this is the reason behind Sun`s commitment to Open Source(according to Sun).

Sun has good enterprise level technologies, but as I see it, they see that there are other players in the game, and instead of working against them they choose to work for them, PHP is one such player. Sun has Java Server Pages, but began supporting PHP in Netbeans, at first(in Netbeans early access for PHP) it was a very experimental support, but it`s becoming better and better(Netbeans 6.5 beta), it got to a level where I can actually use it.

Some may not understand what`s in this for sun as a "Corporate Overlord", I pondered about this myself and came to the conclusion that this goes back a while. One of the web`s pillars was(and probably is) the famous Linux Apache MySQL PHP stack, it`s a milestone in both web and Linux history. MySQL is a required component, because most PHP engines support only MySQL (I can`t blame them), this increases the chance that someone would want commercial support for MySQL, and since Sun bought MySQL, it`s good for them, so my theory in short goes like this:
- PHP in Netbeans makes PHP developers more happy
- PHP developers prefer MySQL
- Sun sells MySQL

This may not be (entirely) correct, but it`s my way of interpreting it, this way everyone is happy, PHP developers(like myself) get a full featured open source IDE for free, and Sun get`s a chance that more customers would want to buy commercial MySQL, and everybody is happy, this is how open source should work.

Netbeans 6.5 beta is now comparable to Zend, although it lacks remote SSH support, it can be fixed with sshfs(under Linux). But unlike Zend, Netbeans support both CSS and Javascript, which makes developing much easier. Note to smarty developers, using .tpl extensions: you need to add the .tpl extension in Netbeans file associations as a HTML object so that Netbeans parses them as HTML.

Those who want to try Netbeans 6.5 beta, can grab it at http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/65/, but since this is a beta, be sure to back up your files.

This is my second big switch to open source tools since my last switch, and I`m really pleased that there`s not much proprietary stuff that I`m using, just drivers, codecs and of course two games.

Firefox 3 rocks

2008-08-16T15:37:00.000-07:00

Being truly open source is hard, sometimes it`s hard to get open source good open source alternatives to commercial applications, I have been using Opera for 4-5 years, because I liked it`s features and speed, I have tried Firefox too back then, but it did not have Opera`s great features and it was noticeably slower than Opera. But things over the years have changed, Firefox 3 had been dramaticly improved and optimized compared to it`s early versions and one day when I got frustrated for Opera`s poor flash support, I decided to give Firefox a shot.

Firefox is realy fast and stable, even with flash sites and I also managed to solve the problems with my missing features with Firefox extensions:

- Firetray https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4868
- Secure Login https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4429
- Speed Dial https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4810
- Tab Mix Plus https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122

Some of these extensions work even better than It`s Opera counterparts, I never taught Firefox is such a flexible browser, that these features could be implemented via extensions.

The only thing that`s left to do is to convince Firefox not to be so gnomeish, I use KDE and I don`t like the look and feel of the GNOME desktop, I have seen that even the Kubuntu team is concered with this https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/firefox-kde-integration-intrepid and since there is a Qt port of firefox going on, I can hope that in the near future I will have a Firefox that will fully fit in my KDE desktop.

Overall to this day my experiances with Firefox are good, I have no tentation to go back to Opera, and I`m not planning to because I prefer Open Source to Proprietory, but I must admit that Opera is a good cross platform commercial browser, and that this company works hard to insure that Opera works well on linux.

New blog up

2008-08-16T15:14:00.000-07:00

Up all night, nothing special to do, I decided to open up this blog, I chose blogger.com because I`m a google fan :) , I like all of google`s services, not just it`s search engine.

My only problem was that google has a good language detection script, that sniffs out where I am, and displays everything in the language of the country, that I`m currently in, the only problem is that I may, live in Romania, but that does not mean, that I`m Romanian, in fact, I`m Hungarian, but I don`t want my blogs labels to be displayed in neighter of these languagees, because I prefer English, it would be strange to write English posts on a non-english interface anyway.

Lucky for me, google, who got me into this mess in the first place helped me find the answere to my problem: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/05/language-problem-when-using-blogger.html
This helped me get started, my experiance with blogger.com is the same as with any other google services, it works as expected with greate features.