Charl van Niekerk » Blog: July 2007

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Firefox 2.0.0.5 in Afrikaans

Sorry for not blogging much the last while, I am hectically busy with work and study.

A few days back I discovered mozilla.mirror.ac.za, a South African Mozilla mirror (just in case that isn't obvious from the URI - should be obvious, especially to locals).

Anyway, on there I found the latest Firefox 2.0.0.5 in Afrikaans for Linux so I immediately downloaded and installed it (I needed to upgrade my copy anyway since I was still using 2.0.0.4).

I am really impressed after installing it. The localisation work is of superb quality and I didn't find any bugs yet. For those that don't know, the Afrikaans Firefox localisations are made by the really cool guys at Translate.org.za.

Well done people! You are doing excellent open source work for our country!!!

Of course there are some minor issues, like I would prefer using "vertoon" instead of "bekyk", etc. but I realise these words were handed down from the old seamonkey translations.

Beryl on Kubuntu 7.04

Today I uploaded 5 videos to Youtube made by my homie Linoxxis. He was demoing Beryl, an open source 3-dimensional desktop for Linux, on Kubuntu 7.04 (a.k.a. Feisty).

There's also a lot of other good videos on Youtube about Beryl. Check the "beryl" tag search results.

Pidgin

I have quite a disliking for Gaim. Although it gets the job done, the interface feels really old-school.

Today finally I upgraded to the latest version of Pidgin. For those that don't know, Pidgin is the successor of Gaim. There are some unofficial packages available for Ubuntu Dapper, but since I don't install binaries from untrusted sources for security reasons I decided to download the sources and compile from scratch. I had to install the packages libgtk2.0-dev and libxml-sax-expat-perl first and then the usual ./configure, make and sudo make install. After that I launched pidgin like any other app and configured it. Lots of my settings were imported from Gaim so this was no major task. The configuration dialog was pretty simple and minimalist anyway, in typical Gnome style.

I was very impressed with the new interface. It's very modern and sleek. The status system finally allows me to set a status message even while I'm not marked as away. The status message textbox disappearing the whole time was rather irritating though.

The old Gaim kept crashing every time I attempted to log into Windows Live Messenger. No more hassles however with Pidgin, as I expected. And since Pidgin has support for separate socks proxy server settings for each account, I can now get into Messenger while on local-only ADSL while having my Jabber account go through a direct connection to the local South African server jabber.obsidian.co.za.

There were a few issues however. Firstly, the English spell checking didn't work anymore. I found the FAQ item How do I change the language for the Highlight Misspelled words option?:

Pidgin currently only supports spell checking in your locale language. This is because gtkspell 2 does not offer a good way for us to know which dictionaries are available or to switch between them. This functionality has long been promised for gtkspell version 3, which has been delayed somewhat indefinitely. See gtkspell.sf.net.

There is, however a simple plugin called switchspell that can change the spell check language on a per-buddy basis.

That kind-of sucks, doesn't it? One of the major reasons to use Gaim was always the out-of-the-box English spell checking support (to see Afrikaans, Dutch, and the other languages I speak over there would have been even better naturally). Maybe I'll look into this again once I have more time.

Another weird issue is that the auto-away sets itself even when my computer is not in idle. Gaim used to work perfectly here but Pidgin stuffs this up. Also, the exact spelling of Pidgin is rather irritating to me. I like an easy-to-spell word and often I catch myself typing "pigin" or "pidin" now. Maybe I'm just dyslectic, dunno.

Everything ran perfectly for a couple of hours, then I tried to set my status (it incorrectly set me as auto-away again) and it crashed. When I tried to launch it again, I got this error message:

charlvn@nova:~$ pidgin

(pidgin:26548): Pango-WARNING **: Error loading GPOS table 4097
Segmentation fault
charlvn@nova:~$

I moved all the configuration (~/.gaim) in case that got corrupted somehow but no change. Maybe I should reinstall? Really, really irritating. At least it seems like Gaim is still running. Any advice about solving the above error would be appreciated though. It seems like I might have to upgrade Pango or glib for this but I wonder why it only started to happen all of a sudden. Weird! Will update this post with the fix if / when I find it. :)

Update: I made the incorrect assumption that ~/.gaim was the place it stores its configuration files since there was no ~/.pidgin. However, after doing a sudo updatedb; locate accounts.xml I found that the right place to look is actually ~/.purple. I simply deleted that directory and Pidgin ran again. It kept producing the Pango warning but it runs nevertheless.

However, running it while ~/.gaim exists now lets it pop up a migration error message and exit. I just moved ~/.gaim to somewhere else and it worked fine, although of course not importing any settings. After ~/.purple has been created in the first run, you can move ~/.gaim back if you like.

Python Pownce API Library

I have been using Pownce for a couple of weeks now. Although I like the concept of mixing microblogging with files, images and links, I don't really like the design (in terms of the look and feel) of the site too much.

One major let-down was their apparent lack of an API. It turned out that they do actually have an API, but that it's "hidden". Their desktop client makes use of it though. Naturally, people started to reverse engineer it and now we have an open source Python Pownce library already available.

I checked out the latest sources from the subversion repository but disappointment awaited me. The library requires the use of the httplib2. Although there is a package for Ubuntu Feisty, there isn't one yet for Dapper it seems.

I then tried on FreeBSD. I managed to get the py24-httplib2-0.3.0.tbz package installed. Afterwards, it complained about ElementTree being missing, so I installed the py24-elementtree-1.2.6 package but it still complains:

[charlvn@nebula /usr/home/charlvn/temp/pypownce]$ python pownce.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "pownce.py", line 32, in ?
    import xml.etree.ElementTree
ImportError: No module named etree.ElementTree

I guess there must be something wrong with the package. I then created a little script to see if I could use ElementTree on Dapper. I installed the python2.4-elementtree package and also no luck. Really weird.

I wish I had more time to hack on this right now but I have some script.aculo.us drag-and-drop thing to work on now. Will post again if I get success. Any advice would be highly appreciated though.

Update: I used Google Code Search and tried replacing import xml.etree.ElementTree with from elementtree import ElementTree. Worked great on both FreeBSD and Ubuntu. I also had to replace import email.encoders with import email.Encoders and then every occurrence of xml.etree.ElementTree with ElementTree further down in the script. I dunno wtf is up with email.mime.base (actually email.mime in general) or which would be the right package to install for that. I installed py24-email-3.0.1 on FreeBSD but no luck. I searched on Google but it seems like everybody is using the same old email.mime.base. Bah. Luckily py24-feedparser-4.1_2 sorted the feedparser dependency. I just commented out the mime.base nonsense and managed to retrieve some of my profile data using the library. Now just to figure out how to post new microblog items. :)

An Inconvenient Truth

I have been working like a mule this week (going to bed before 02:00 in the morning local time is becoming a rare occasion on this side), so finally I decided to watch a DVD of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth to relax for a change.

This whole discussion kind-of tears me in two. First of all, please allow me to say that I do not like Al Gore. I am suspicious of him for various reasons. Firstly, because he is a politician, and politicians can generally not be trusted. They seem to make a living out of fooling other people.

Secondly, I just don't feel any kind of spiritual connection with him. As a matter of fact, my inner feeling strongly warns me against him. And since I (try) to listen to my feelings, I really have no trust in him whatsoever.

It goes without saying that I heavily oppose pollution. I really care about the environment and since I believe that we are part of nature, we must use it responsibly and protect it as far as possible. Technology that pollutes the environment is old-school, crude shit. Modern technology is (or at least, should be) sophisticated enough to be effective in keeping the environment clean. However, greed often drives people not to upgrade because they want to add yet another billion to their yearly profit.

In many countries like South Africa, forestry is (mostly) done responsibly and in a sustainable manner. However, in many other countries this is sadly not the case. I can find no excuses for these people. That's just terrible and it has to stop.

However, there are a few things I have my doubts about. If the melting of the ice is such a problem, why have we not seen a significant increase in the level of the ocean yet? If you look at the figures of how the temperature is increasing and the ice is melting, I'm sure we must have seen a change by now.

Apparently low-lying countries like the Netherlands will be covered with water if things go on like they are now. Well, if they were smart enough to keep the water out for hundreds of years, I'm sure they'll be able to make a plan now. What they did with water management is flipping awesome. The Netherlands is probably the #1 country in the world when it comes to water technology so maybe their role will become very important in the years to come.

Also, there is a predicted shift in the earth's magnetic field. In other words, the magnetic north pole is supposed to become the magnetic south pole, and vice versa. Many of the natural disasters such as extremes of weather, earthquakes, etc could be attributed to this as well.

Al Gore states towards the end of his movie that the world managed to solve the hole in the ozone layer. I'm not so sure about that. In the southern hemisphere, we had unusually high radiation levels the past summer. Maybe some people are right; maybe the hole doesn't even matter that much. Because if the ozone layer has been strong the past summer, there's something else that is seriously wrong!!!

The earth indeed does have certain weather cycles. This fact cannot be entirely ignored. Although we might be part of the problem, we should keep a clear, scientific point of view on this. I don't care if I am one of the "skeptics", but only a fool believes everything they hear.

Now this really does not matter much to me. We are "teh suck" when it comes to protecting the environment. I am certainly not going to stand around and say all of this is a load of nonsense. I am really happy that these issues are receiving a lot of attention now, and so far I can't see how any bad can come out of it, so I'm all for it.

We are polluting because we are burning coal and abusing uranium. What about some solar panels and wind turbines? What happened to that uber-leet South African solar panel technology that was invented? When will it hit our shops? Or will it be like the coal-to-petrol technology where we are the last to benefit from our own developments?

Furion Radio

This morning at around 07:00 UTC there was a global message on Furion about the new Furion Radio. I joined #furion-radio and saw there is a bot called Spike running, posting messages about what's currently playing on Furion Radio. For example:

Spike Now playing on 850TheBeat: Digger - geek love
Spike Now playing on 850TheBeat: George Thorogood - Who Do You Love
Spike Now playing on 850TheBeat: Various Artists - 08 - Larry Young - Alive
Spike 850TheBeat is currently broadcasting live! Listen in @ HighSpeed: http://75.142.6.98:8000/live Dialup: http://75.142.6.98:8000/low
Spike 850TheBeat is currently broadcasting live! Listen in @ HighSpeed: http://75.142.6.98:8000/live Dialup: http://75.142.6.98:8000/low
Spike Now playing on 850TheBeat: Smashing Pumpkins - Rocket (Pure Acoustic)

I think this is brilliant use of IRC as a syndication medium. You can listen to the internet audio stream and then at the same time see what's up and even discuss it on IRC.

The only pity is that 75.142.6.98 is not a South African IP so I can't listen to the radio through local-only ADSL and ridiculously expensive international bandwidth costs make this a little unpractical.

Hyves

Sorry for being so extremely silent the last while. I am currently berried under work so don't expect too much for the next two weeks to come. However, I've got some super stuff to blog about afterwards.

I started to appreciate Facebook a little, believe it or not. Facebook has a lot to offer for developers; the possibilities of creating your own apps are virtually endless. As soon as I have more time I would like to look into that.

Today I registered on a similar service called Hyves. I mainly did this to communicate with my friends and family in the Netherlands, where it is even more popular than Facebook in South Africa.

So far I actually prefer Facebook. Hyves provides some similar functionality but Facebook has so much more to offer. I also think that Facebook's design is, in general, a lot cleaner and aesthetically pleasing.

I find both Facebook and Hyves to be very slow. This might just be my international internet connection (I am in Africa after all) but other overseas sites load a lot quicker. Of the two, Hyves is definitely (by far) the slowest though.

At least there's one positive thing about Hyves; the profile page IRIs look a lot better! For example, the IRI of my Facebook profile page is http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=549116014 while the IRI of my Hyves profile page is http://charlvn.hyves.nl/. :P

The Ultimate Search for Bourne on Linux

Check out the latest Google easter egg: The Ultimate Search for Bourne (see the blog post on googlesystem.blogspot.com for more info). I was extremely excited when I heard about this so immediately went to check it out. I tried to open it using Firefox 2.0.0.4 on Ubuntu Linux 6.06, and got this message:

Sorry, but THE ULTIMATE SEARCH FOR BOURNE cannot be undertaken in Linux.

Really big disappointment. But, why not? I am running Flash fine over here. What else do they require?

And after all, we Linux users know all about Bourne cause we use BASH (although of course that's a word play on Stephen Bourne, not Jason Bourne). I wonder what kind of error it would give me if I was using BSD?

Muti.co.za on Facebook

Muti.co.za now has its own Facebook Profile! Every time a new link is submitted, a status update is sent to Facebook with the link's title. Therefore, if you add Muti as a friend, you will see the latest links on Muti along with the status updates of all your other friends.

I think Muti is probably the African social website with the biggest amount of delivery methods. Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, IRC, Jabber and probably many more to come so stay tuned for more updates!

muti now IRC and Jaiku enabled!

muti now has two new hook scripts!

The first is an IRC bot. Just use your favourite IRC client (mIRC, XChat, Irssi, etc) to connect to irc.furion.org and enter the channel called #muti. This will connect you to one of Furion's servers. If you would like to select the server yourself or read up a bit on the network, please see Furion's website or for more information on IRC in general please check out IRChelp.org.

When a new link is posted to muti, you should see the muti IRC bot send out a message to everybody in the channel.

The second is a Jaiku muti microblog. This does for Jaiku users what the Twitter muti microblog does for Twitter users.

But, this will probably only be the start. There's already many new ideas brewing to enter other communications mediums; will keep you updated! :)

urlTea

I don't really like web address shorteners such as the very popular TinyURL.com because you lose all the semantic value of the original address. However, at times it can be rather handy if the address needs to be displayed to users (for example, in offline media) and the original address is excessively long or really poorly designed.

Although there are quite a few of these services around, my favourite so far is urlTea. The front page is really well designed and gives you everything you need at first glance without all kinds of stuff you don't need (like advertisements, etc).

They also offer a bookmarklet and, get this, a Jabber bot! Just add teabot@urltea.com as a contact and send the Teabot the IRI you want shortened. It will then send the shortened version back to you. For example, this post's address is http://urltea.com/xjn.

Well done to the urlTea team - you rock bigtime! I have always loved tea and now I have a new kind of tea I can add to my highly recommended list!! :)

Also check out their Twitter microblog and their very simple API. What would we call something that uses this API? An automatic tea-maker? A tea peculator? Will have to give this some more thought. :)

"Environmentally Friendly" Electric Hand Dryers

Every now and then I get into a public restroom and see an electric hand dryer together with a label telling me that it's an environmentally friendly and healthier equivalent to paper towels. Bullshit.

Forestry activities in South Africa are normally quite sustainable. Paper towels made from the trees are also very healthy because, after you wiped your hands off on a clean paper towel, all the germs are in the towel. If you can throw the used towel in a good waste disposal facility and the towels are burned afterwards, the germs all die and the carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere to be recycled by the trees.

Electricity in South Africa mostly comes from coal and nuclear reactors. Both are not renewable energy sources. The electric hand dryers here could never claim to be environmentally friendly. In addition, they are not healthy either. They blow the germs on your hands all over the place into the very air we breathe. Quite disgusting, actually.

So, please cut the crap. Can those electric hand dryers and bring back the paper towels. Thanks.

myXchange Meeting 25 July 2007

Many thanks to the following people for attending the previous meeting on the 4th (in alphabetic order):

Jayx found us a great new venue. It's the conference room at the Builders Exhibit Centre! Here is a map:

Here's all the details for the myXchange 25 July Meeting:

Date: Wednesday 25 July 2007 from 18:30
Location: Conference Room, Builders Exhibit Centre, George, South Africa

Please check out our website and kindly add yourself to the wiki page if you would like to attend. The comments are open for any questions you might have. :)

PHP 4 out of the door

As a PHP developer, I also frequently have to put up with old servers that have not yet upgraded to PHP 5. 5 offers so many improvements on 4 that it isn't even funny.

Today I checked out the GoPHP5 initiative:

PHP 4 has served the web developer community for seven years now, and served it well. However, it also shows its age. Most of PHP 4's shortcomings have been addressed by PHP 5, released three years ago, but the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5 has been slow for a number of reasons.

PHP developers cannot leverage PHP 5's full potential without dropping support for PHP 4, but PHP 4 is still installed on a majority of shared web hosts and users would then be forced to switch to a different application. Web hosts cannot upgrade their servers to PHP 5 without making it impossible for their users to run PHP 4-targeted web apps, and have no incentive to go to the effort of testing and deploying PHP 5 while most web apps are still compatible with PHP 4 and the PHP development team still provides maintenance support for PHP 4. The PHP development team, of course, can't drop maintenance support for PHP 4 while most web hosts still run PHP 4.

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

It is our belief that this will provide web hosts reason to upgrade and the PHP development team the ability to retire PHP 4 and focus efforts on PHP 5 and the forthcoming PHP 6, all without penalizing any existing project for being "first out of the gate".

They are already enjoying good support from projects such as Drupal and phpMyAdmin. Although not listed, I know that MediaWiki (the CMS the Wikipedia runs on) has dropped support long ago already.

If you need to run both PHP 4 and PHP 5 together and you have an IP address to spare, set up two instances of Apache, each running a different version of PHP and binding to a different IP. Not the most efficient, I know, but it's a way.

SHA256 Checksums on Ubuntu 6.06

I just managed to download DesktopBSD 1.6 Release Candidate 2 (DesktopBSD-1.6RC2-i386-CD.iso) this morning. On the download page they provide the following SHA256 Checksum:

96da627976836dc3e8106b2e75f8f1d8da4fbc374e6febb4d3bf1b910b5227ec

It seems like Debian has the sha256sum utility included in coreutils and FreeBSD has the sha256 utility but on Ubuntu 6.06 I found neither the utility nor the right package to install it, even after a lot of Googling.

I did find a package libdigest-sha-perl though so decided to give it a shot. After reading up on the relevant docs the following script emerged out of my favourite text editor (Kate atm):

use Digest::SHA;

$filename = "/home/charlvn/isos/DesktopBSD-1.6RC2-i386-CD.iso";

open($handle, $filename);

$sha256 = Digest::SHA->new(256);
$sha256->addfile($handle);

print $sha256->b64digest . "\n" . $sha256->hexdigest . "\n";

Ok, this script is probably crap, but my Perl skills are somewhat limited.

I ran the script and it generated the following output:

47DEQpj8HBSa+/TImW+5JCeuQeRkm5NMpJWZG3hSuFU
e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855

The base 64 digest is too short but hex one looks like the one posted on the site. However, they don't match. I just gave up and generated an MD5 hash the old way and Googled for it. Found a forum post containing exactly the same hash (8ff9ba0f925099573cee37a97cdbdf4e) so my download is probably fine.

Does anybody know of a solution?

Asianux

I have just been checking out Asianux. Now check out this screenshot on the Wikipedia. That X configuration window looks suspiciously much like Windows, even at a distance.

mycomputer
mydocument
Net Neighbour
Recycle Bin
ControlPanel

Of all the cheap Asian product knock-offs, I really did not expect them to create a Linux distribution that just looks like an interface knock-off of Windows. :)

But really, what's up in Asia? Why don't they start their own top original brands like the rest of us? C'mon people, we know you can be your brilliant selves. Just stop trying to copy the rest of us, for crying out loud! And if you do Linux, be original; definitely no Windows knock-offs, thanks! That's bad taste in anybody's book. ;)

Ubuntu Replaces Debian at Hetzner ZA

I have long taken Ubuntu has a distro aimed at the desktop market. For the server, I would stick to Debian. Ok, so Debian stable is "stale" but at least it is stable. For a production server, it sounds good to me.

I recently checked out Hetzner's South African root server offering. The standard options are Ubuntu, CentOS or Fedora. Yeah, Fedora doesn't really look like it belongs on the list next to CentOS, but the fact that they have Ubuntu without Debian on the list is rather weird to me too. Their equivalent in Germany has Debian as well as Ubuntu but instead of CentOS and Fedora they have SuSE. *Cough, cough*.

I have been seeing more and more production servers running on Ubuntu. First it conquers the desktop and now apparently the server market too. :)

This cold weather... :S

It is really, really, really cold right now. At the moment, in George, the afternoons are rather nice after a lot of sunshine. But the mornings and the evenings are still pretty bad. For example, this morning I could hardly work because my fingers got too cold to type.

Don't believe me? Check this out. Here I was a couple of months back:

And here I was yesterday evening:

Get the point? :)

myXchange Meeting 4 July

We didn't have a meeting last week because of the recent Geek Dinner and some people said it would suit them better this week so we will be having the myXchange 4 July Meeting:

Date: Wednesday 4 July 2007 from 18:30
Location: Upstairs at Harrys above Spar in York Street, George, South Africa

If you would like to know what this is all about, please check out our website and remember to add yourself to the wiki page if you're interested in attending (or just contact me if you have trouble doing that).

Jayx found a very nice venue for us that we can use in future but we'll discuss this further at the meeting.

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