Luckily, blogs are made from bytes, not concrete. I use rublog to publish my blog. It is very basic, and publishes everything from text files. So I can easily correct slip-ups like this, by correcting the blog entry and after saving the text file, change the date back to the original date. Charles Vermeulen recently told me he had bought a program for this purpose. You don't have to buy software to get this feature. Unix has the

touch

touch works like this:

touch -d 20041231 ITConversations.html

To prevent slip-ups with links, I have made a small program that automatically inserts hyperlinks to people I quote regularly. That way, I only have to correct mistakes once...

I had moved willemvandenende.com over to a new high-bandwidth server outside my house, all was well, except there was a strange idiosyncracy, when starting the web-server, it complained it couldn’t find a script with a strange name (net.defaultroute~ - I couldn’t figure out what the tilde was doing). Oh, what the … I thought, I’ll figure it out when I have some time, the system doesn’t seem to be running any worse…

Until the folks operating the (virtual) server boxes decided to install a kernel patch (there was a security whole in the Linux kernel - very rare). They were nice enough to send us and advance warning that they were going to reboot our machine. I thought, well, not much can go wrong.

I was, of course, wrong! When rebooting the machine, it started to look for the net.defaultroute~ (notice the tilde), and it couldn’t find it (of course not). Now the machine couldn’t give itself a name, and was hence unreachable.

As Murphy would have it, this happens in the busiest week of the year. And I still don’t know how to solve the defaultroute~ thingy, so it remains down. After a few days, I finally realized, that I have a backup server (the one in my attic that runs all the other domains) and that I could simply point www.willemvandenende.com to that…

Then of course, when I woke up this morning… no network… the ADSL modem had given up (this happens about once a year).

Lessons learned:

• Most of my system administration troubles happen in late November and throughout December (the whole thing seems to have an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of about a year, and then everything comes at once. The rest of the year it is just simple power failures and such.
• Having known flaws in your system administration, even if they are minor is not an option, just as with XP style programming: it works best when there are no known defects.
• (again) test rebooting your server, and see if all services come up again.

His visit highglighted an interesting problem with layered network architectures. The technician mainly looked at the physical level (is there signal), and knows how to make the phone over ISDN work again as well (KPN mechanics carry spare NT1 boxes for converting line signal to ISDN with them as well). For repairing ADSL I was somewhat left to my own devices. The ADSL modem/router seemed to work - but like the NT1 it didn’t really… Due to the lightning the modem could no longer connect. I found this out because I have a spare ADSL modem handy, due to previous troubles…

With some work X and the gigabit network card operate properly.

XF86Config

Forget about using Yast to configurate X, because it makes a mess of it, do the X configuration manually.

Linksys gigabit ethernet card

The linksys card has to be compiled into the kernel separately, but this is easily done. Install the ‘kernel sources’ package, go (as uesr root ) to /usr/src/linux and type ‘make oldconfig’, so that the current system configuration is represented in the kernel configuration. Then unzip the linksys install script somewhere (e.g. in /root/) and run it. The install script takes care of everything for you - it checks system prerequisites, and compiles the ethernet driver module so it fits with your kernel.

After compiling the kernel module (you don’t need to reboot like in Windows :-) ), do ‘modprobe sk98lin’ and ‘ifup eth0’ and everything should work as usual. At home and everywhere at clients, I use ‘dhcpcd’ to the rest of my network configuration for me, so that’s no effort either.

I finally got it to work without overheating. Add ‘acpi=off’ and ‘noapic’ to the grub command line (in /boot/grub/menu.lst) .

More info about this laptop on tuxmobil.org/asus_l5800c.html and tuxmobil.org/asus.html

Edit Text-files offline

The system I’m using for this piece (RubLog) is somewhat of a compromise. I write the article offline, using whatever text-editor I prefer, can commit the text to CVS (a version management system) if I desire, and let RubLog publish it directly from CVS. The advantage being, I can edit it wherever I am with my laptop and the text-file is accesible to any tools I might have on my laptop, such as a spelling checker if I’m not too lazy to use one. The other side of the coin is, if I spot an error in the text while reading the web-site, I cannot directly correct it, but have to go back to the text-editor to modify it and commit the new version to CVS.

Edit text-files and document objects online

Other systems, such as ZWiki and Itor (on which I’m programming myself) accept changes only through a web-browser. This makes it relatively straight-forward to correct typos - just open the web-page that needs to be changed, click ‘edit’ and presto… I can make my change directly, and version management (if any) is handled for me by the system. Click ‘save’ and I can see what the page now looks like. Not exactly WYSIWYG, but it provides me with fairly rapid feedback. This coin also has a flip-side: I have to be online to edit the text, and am constrained in editing possibilities by the simple text-boxes web-browsers offer.

Use a word-processor

One nagging thing RubLog, Itor and Zope have in common, is they are not fully WYSIWIG like my word-processor is. If I want to get an idea down fast, including pictures, I grab Open-Office Writer and Open-Office Draw. I can simply add titles, quickly create drawings, and include the drawings in the article. While I do that, I see what I am doing, because Open-Office is WYSIWYG, and does not need a separate rendering step after creating something. I currently like to write articles around a DiagramOfEffects (DOE). I usually start with a diagram, and describe that in the article. As the writing progresses, the diagram evolves. With a word-processor, I can add and modify diagrams rapidly. For a web-site, I’ll have to manually render the diagram to a bitmap. For every change to the diagram, rendering is required. Needless to say, I won’t start such an article with any of the text-based systems.

Another disadvantage of starting off the web, is that printing web-pages is still a nightmare, as I recently re-discovered when we tried to print registration forms for xp-day_benelux. So for readers who’d like a hardcopy, I’ll have to create a PDF from a separate document. Now I have two different articles… I’m unlikely to do this, If I ever intend to change anything to either of these articles.

render the word-processor text to HTML and PDF…

Now for the flip-side.… Although writing and drawing with OpenOffice is easy, rendering for the web leaves something to be desired. The easiest thing to do, is convert the document to PDF tm (PortableDocumentFormat) and upload it to the site. Most people have a PDF reader, and many search-engines index it. The advantage of this approach is, that it’s fast and easy :just choose ‘print to PDF’ when using OpenOffice in combination with Linux, it’s easily printable (unlike web-pages) for readers and the layout as written is preserved. The disadvantage is, that it isn’t a web-page, so it doesn’t integrate with the remainder of a web-site and doesn’t lend itself well to using hyperlinks. OpenOffice does render to HTML, but creates HTML with a horrible layout and duplicated style and font tags for every paragraph. The WYSIWIG nature applies to printed documents… Carefully added whitespace to put a diagram at the top of a paper-page leaves empty spaces that look ugly on a web-page. Specifying exact fonts to be used is inconvenient, as the web-site containing the document has to specify the style…

Where does this lead?

So for now, I guess I’ll continue to compromise. Write short rants like these with a text-based system, and write longer articles with pictures with OpenOffice, which I subsequently covert to HTML if I’m not too lazy.

That’s what I thought…

After writing this rant, I thought it’s time to get my act together and make my favourite way of writing articles of a few pages with pictures more comfortable for myself. This resulted in a simple program to remove extranous tags such as <FONT> from the html generated by OpenOfice . See TagCleaner for the result.

This week, I stumbled across bugmenot, where people can share logins for all kinds of sites. E.g. this one for soundclick, an online music site. I like to listen to fellow amateur composers, but I categorically refuse to register for these sites. There are too many, and i don't see what value registering provides me...

Unlike some other sites of course, where registering does provide value. For instance, forums such as synthforum.nl where registration makes it easy to follow who says what. bugmenot allows me to decide when I find it valuable enough to register, and when not.