Apr 04 2008

WordPress Updates

Category: Free Software,IT,Programming — Jonathan @ 8:42 pm

Just upgraded to the new WordPress version 2.5. The release is excellent, with loads of new features,and I decided it was time for some changes on here, the previous theme (although excellent) was getting a bit old now, so I have set-up a brand new theme, Stardust by Tommaso Baldovino. This theme did need a bit of code tweaking for some of my plugins, and in turn some of my plugins needed a bit of tweaking to fit in with the theme, but it all seems to be ticking over nicely now. I have installed a few more assorted plugins, Lightbox Plus is a great addition which gives me fancy lightbox effects on all my photos.

On the PHP coding front, MyJDCMS seems to be getting a bit of usage now. While writing this it has been downloaded 69 times from SourceForge, several people are using (or attempting to use) it at the moment, and it also will form the basis of a CMS system for a charity website I am currently developing. Unlike my other projects this one certainly merits some more development time to improve it’s features and code, as it may actually prove useful to people. It’s certainly rewarding to see my GPL’d work in action on real websites!

I’m also now looking forward to the release of Ubuntu 8.04, a countdown timer for which is below! It’s release is scheduled for while I’m on leave from work, so I should have plenty of time to play around with it.

Jonathan

Feb 12 2008

Ubuntu 8.04

Category: Free Software,GNU/Linux,Geek Stuff,IT,Programming — Jonathan @ 1:59 pm

Yes, it’s another Ubuntu release preview blog, I know I always do these, but they’re interesting!
Well, to me anyway!

Although before I jump into Ubuntu though I’m going to talk a little about some of the other work I’ve been doing lately. My PHP work is coming along well now, and I’m working on several different projects, all documented on my new code website:

JDCMS - The newest project, started only about a week ago, is a very basic content management system (CMS) designed for an administrator with no technical knowledge to keep a basic website (html/css) up to date through a very easy web interface. I have integrated the TinyMCE editor into the package and it’s almost ready for an alpha release once the code has been cleaned up and the CSS is complete. This will be the CMS used for a charity website I am currently working on.
[Update 22/02: An Alpha has now been released.]

ATS – Airport Taxi System, is being developed as a project to replace an aging Lotus Smartsuite system with a brand new PHP/MySQL database. It will cover all aspects of the business, including bookings, customer/driver management, code tables for airlines/destinations etc, financial and misc reporting, PDF/E-Mail outputs and letters. This will eventually be open-sourced for anyone to use, modify and contribute back.

OrgDirectory – This is a basic organisation/staff database I have been working on. Work on this has stalled slightly at the moment, although an alpha release was completed late last year. It needs an overhaul of the design and graphics, and also needs plenty of new features before it’ll be useful to anyone! This one’s on the back burner, or might just get scrapped!
[Update 27/02: Yeh, I scrapped it!]

Now on to Ubuntu 8.04:

8.10, due for release in April, is the latest incarnation of the Debian-based distro, and only the second Long Term Support (LTS) release from Canonical. This will mean 3 years support on the desktop and 5 years on the server.

Among the usual X-Org and Kernel updates, there are some interesting new features that should make a significant difference to end-users, and might help Ubuntu/Linux/GNU to take the edge over Microsoft, in the wake of Vista’s failure to perform as expected.

Transmission – Gnome’s Bittorrent client is set to be replaced (thankfully!) with Transmission. Although not my favourite Torrent client (which if you’re interested is Bittornado) it is certainly an improvement and novice users might find it easier to use.

Policykit – Policykit is a new security framework that allows security to be applied not just to applications, but to certain aspects of an application. This will allow application authors to tailor access to features/screens to a very specific security level, and should you try to access a part of the application not allowed by your access rights, you will be able to to unlock it with the sudo functionality.

Firefox 3 Beta’s – 8.04 will include the option to test out the latest versions of Firefox from the repositories, with a shedload of new stuff, including tighter integration with GTK, updated download manager, ACID2 support, and better bookmark management.

Brasero – Replacing the (very basic) Serpentine package is Brasero, a CD/DVD burning application, which can be used as an alternative to the Nautilus burner, and hopefully might reduce my previous reliance on K3B, so another nice change there.

Nautilus – Version 2.21.6 includes various new fixes and a new virtual filesystem (GVFS) which fixes many of Nautilus’s file-handling problems, including not being able to restore from the trash, and being able to handle multiple file transfers much more neatly.

Vinagre - A new default VNC client which supports bookmarks and multiple tabbed connections is a MASSIVE improvement over anything I have seen in the past for VNC on Linux. Although I’m not a massive user of VNC (SSH is where it’s at!) I am really looking forward to this one.

8.04 includes many other changes to the default system, including a new world clock and improvements to the System Monitor and new KVM features.

Hardy Heron (8.04) will eventually replace my Dapper Drake (6.04) web server, so I’m particularly interested in this release as a LAMP server. It certainly looks like they’re preparing for an excellent LTS release, but time will tell.

Jonathan

Oct 19 2007

Facebook Apps

Category: Achievements,Geek Stuff,IT,Programming — Jonathan @ 4:23 pm

I seem to have been posting a lot of Linux related stories lately, and although I’m planning to update everyone on my experiences with Ubuntu 7.10, I’m going to leave that for a week or so until I can give it a really good review. I thought I’d have a bit of a change this time and write about programming languages.

I have had experience of many languages in the past few years, including ASP, HTML, CSS, VB, VB Script, JSP, Batch, Python, Shell Scripts and many others, but apart from HTML and CSS, I have never really taken to a programming language well. The only language I have had a lot of experience with is PHP. It seems that PHP has become the standard language for web applications these days, especially the open source ones, and all of the applications I run on my sites (PHPBB, WordPress, Mediawiki) use it, so it’s inevitable that I have picked up some skills in that area by poking around, adding new features, fixing bugs etc…

Only recently I have started looking into learning PHP to code professionally. I have started small by building some simple applications, scripts to access MySQL and MS Access databases and am really enjoying it so far, and it’s a great rush of excitement when you finally get a script doing what you want it to do.

After all the recent publicity around Facebook’s API and the associated applications I started looking into the technical side of things and how the Apps were built, as well as how they were linked into the user’s Facebook account. Remarkably 90% of the work is done by the developers own web server, which stores the code and manages adding and configuring the App, with the results appearing integrated into the Facebook site.

It’s quite a nifty system, based on PHP, with Facebook’s own mark-up language (FBML) similar to HTML. It also allows you to extract any information from the user’s Facebook profile and add it into your application. Facebook’s own documentation on this is sparse, although they do provide a sample application and the PHP5 library which you need to install (and configure with API keys and so on) to link your site to Facebook. Fortunately I managed to find a great page which gives newbie developers a much more useful guide to developing Facebook Apps.

My first application is small, but it seems to work well. It’s basically a ClassicKidsTV box which provides the site’s logo, with a link to the site and some additional text, I have also played around with the confirmation page so that it drags through the user’s name, and I plan to add in some functionality that will grab the user’s favourite Television shows and then ask them to add some Classic Kids shows to it!

Facebook Application

It’s only an initial release, buggy and fairly useless to most people, but I really enjoyed coding it, and given that there are currently only around 6,000 applications on Facebook (compared to it’s 47 million members) I feel it’s quite an achievement!

Jonathan