• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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Thanks to this nice wordpress plugin/theme from the guys at content robot this blog now displays even better on an iPhone or iPod Touch. It works by first providing a theme that is optimised for use on Mobile Safari and then adding a plugin that uses that theme automatically for just Mobile Safari. It’s a nice idea well implemented. (Thanks to Alison for the tip)

Tagged with: web site • site news • Wordpress

There was a time when I was one of those freedom of speech nuts who felt I had a right to stick my ore in everywhere, including the comments on other people’s blogs. You know, confusing the non-existent right not to be edited on other people’s websites with the right to free speech. Thankfully I’ve grown up a bit in recent years. Freedom of speech is very important, absolutely vital, but it does not include a right to effectively deface other people’s expressions of their right to free speech with your own rantings. As long as people are free to set up their own blogs you will have true freedom of speech. Don’t just take my word for that. Far wiser people than I have come to the same conclusions. The following articles make interesting reading:

• Dave Winer – The Unedited Voice of a Person
• Joel Spolsky – Learning from Dave Winer (this article sums it up perfectly IMO)

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Tagged with: web site • blogging

Although I was very happy with the Blue Zinfandel Squared theme as it was out of the box there were one or two things about it that annoyed me so I spent this evening fixing them. I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised when I dove into the code, it was clear, simple and well documented! All my changes were minor, no more than a few lines of code each but they make things pretty much exactly as I want them. Anyhow, in case you care these are the tweaks I made:

• I moved the search box up to the top of the side bar
• Fixed the way the categories were shown – it wasn’t playing nice with nested categories
• Added the full date to the information at the top of posts
• Added an “edit” button to each post that only shows up when I’m logged in
• Tweaked the way lists are rendered in posts
• Tweaked the page header and footers a very small bit

And that’s it. That’s all the changes the theme needed. I really can’t give it high enough praise!

Tagged with: web site • site news • Wordpress

I’m pretty sure this is useless on most versions of Linux because the default DHCP plugin that comes with the Nagios Plugins distribution has this functionality and seems to work just fine everywhere except on RedHat-based distros like RHEL, Centos and Fedora Core. On these systems the default plugin does not seem to work and fails to detect any DHCP servers. This plugin is different to the one I gave instructions for before which tests whether a particular DHCP server is answering requests, this plugin finds rogue servers, it will not alert you if any of your actual DHCP servers are down. Hence, you should probably install both. This plugin is not very polished, it is rough and ready but I know it works on RHEL4. If you’re running a different system you may have to do some minor tweaks but this should serve as an excellent starting point none-the-less.

[tags]Nagios, DHCP, RedHat, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Linux[/tags]

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Tagged with: software release • tutorial • RHEL • DHCP • Linux • Perl • open source

This is the first post to my new blog since I moved it from www.minds.nuim.ie/~voyager/blog to here. The move has not been a smooth one because I also moved from using the Serendipity blog software to WordPress. ATM all my old posts are here but many have not imported perfectly and all the comments were lost. I’ll be fixing the posts over the next while and I haven’t quite given up on find a way to get the comments across but the changes are it won’t happen.

I still have some work to do here before I get back up to my normal level of posting but from tomorrow on expect to start seeing new posts again.

Tagged with: web site • site news • Wordpress

I recently did a post on Dashboard Widgets for techies and am working on another about Dashboard Widgets for developers. There was one important widget missing from my list of widgets for techies, one for converting Unix Time Stamps to human readable dates and vica-versa. The reason it was missing was because I couldn’t find one anywhere on the Apple site! I find this strange because I regularly need to deal with Unix Time Stamps in things like logfiles and raw data in Databases, hence I’d have expected others to need this too and hence for there to be a widget for it. Well, I decided to remedy this omission by writing my own Widget which I’ve now submitted to Apple for addition to their Widget Downloads Page. I’ve decided to release it as GPL so you can get it on the downloads page of my home page.

So, how easy was it to develop my first widget? Trivial! I went from deciding to write the widget to a fully working first implementation in about 2 hours including all reading and experimenting that I had to do to get started. IMO that’s not bad at all, in fact I can’t think of any other platform I’ve ever used where I was able to do something useful as quickly.

So, what’s involved in writing a Dashbaord Widget? TBH very little. If you are up to speed with client-side web technologies then you’ve pretty much got everything you need. Yes, there are some extensions to these technologies involved to allow you to interact with the OS and the command-line and also for 2D graphics with Quartz if you want to get fancy but they are very easy to get to grips with and there are some excellent guides on Apple’s Developer Site.

A Dashbaord Widget is basically a web page written in XHTML that is skinned with CSS and made interactive with JavaScript. There really is nothing more to it than that. If you want to give this a go yourself the links below are all you’ll need.

• Apple’s Dashboard Developers Page
• Apple’s Dashboard Programming Guide
• Apple’s help topic on getting your Widget to flip

As I said I had a fully functional Widget in two hours, took me a little longer to get it to do cool stuff like flipping round to show the credits on the reverse side and getting it skinned in a way I was happy with but all in all that Widget was no more than 5 hours work including all the fiddly graphics and layout stuff. A screenshot of the finished product can be seen below.

Tagged with: OS X • JavaScript • CSS • HTML • software release • Dashboard Widget • Unix Timestamp Converter