Clarity’s blog

So, I have a new toy, a Bluetooth GPS receiver that works excellent with my Nokia E51. I got it off Ebay for 25 EUR, so it was cheap enough. So, for now I’m playing with it and trying different software.

Here’s what I have so far:

• the excellent Nokia Sports Tracker - see my walk on Golovec today -this might even get me to excercise a bit more…;-) Hey, gotta use whatever works!
• GPSed- you can track my current location here, or see my walk in Mostec
• Magnalox seems pretty fun too - the only one that I’ve found that actually enables one to play back the track - so you can see how fast one went, where one stopped, etc… Check out the Mostec walk!
• and a bunch of mapping software - Nokia maps 2.0, Google maps, najdi.si zemljevid,… Will try Garmin Mobile XT soon to see if it’s as good as they say. All the navigation software is payable though and quite expensive too, so I’m not sure if I’ll actually use it or not…

The web based stuff is kinda cool, but unfortunately nobody is offering a widget of sorts that I could put on my blog that could show the map with my tracks or current position… If i find some time maybe I’ll make something myself…

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Heh, as if there wasn’t enough chaos in my life at the moment, my server got hacked and the prick was rummaging around my accounts for 2 days. I’m trying to find out what he changed, if anything. If you find anything strange on my site, please let me know - rob (atbloodyspam) gmail.com

Thanks!

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I’ve finally managed to upgrade my blogging software to the latest version, and I hope this will fix the comment problems. I’ve used a different theme this time as well, just for fun. Hope you like it!
I know the photo is a bit cheesy, but this is the subject I’ve been really reflecting a lot upon lately, and obsessing about it and being thoroughly confused about it as well. hopefully I’ll write more about it soon…

Please let me know if anything is not working correctly!

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My blog is on hiatus. I’ve moved to a new host so while the DNS slowly propagates this blog exists in two different locations at the same time and if that wasn’t enough, the new host just upgraded their Rails software which broke my blog. Hopefully I’ve fixed it, but who knows. And I really should be preparing for tonight’s talk instead of fiddling with this crap…

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My blogging software has been behaving strangely, so sometimes comments would not work. I’ve tried changing some things, and I hope it will work better now. You can also try submitting again, sometimes it works on the second try.
Sigh…
I need to move this site to a new host, but I just haven’t found the time yet.

Update: I’ve moved the site to a new host, and I hope it will work better here. Please let me know if you are still getting errors!

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I’ve spend a few hours tinkering with Typo, a blogging software than runs on Ruby on Rails - something i’ve wanted to try for some time. The install didn’t go quite as easy as I’d liked, there was a bug in the latest version that had to be fixed, and my Apache configuration didn’t like it at all, but after some hours, it’s finally working. You can see the test blog here.
The design is the default that comes with Typo and I’d like to tweak it some more and Live Search doesn’t seem to work for some reason. I’ll leave that for another day.

It looks quite pretty, I have to say.

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well, the story with these hackers continues. I still haven’t found how they got in, but it seems it might’ve been through Webmin. As I was looking at things I noticed that a lot of software on my server is old, and there have been various security issues fixed in new versions (like apache, webmin,ssh).
I’m hosting on Adiungo and they have been mostly ok, except for when a similar thing happened about a year ago and now.
If you look at their hosting page you will see the following sentence:
Our service includes 24 / 7 support, proactive managed security updates and permanent server monitoring.

You want to know what “proactive managed security updates” mean to them?
response from support no. 1:

We would reccomend to reorder a package completely to one of our current packages: http://www.adiungo.com/hosting/. There you will be provided with latest versions of software.

That means starting fresh, setting everything up for all my sites, databases, creating new emails. Plus it’s almost 3x as expensive as what I have right now.
I tell them that this is not the best solution and this is not what I imagined managed security updates look like.
respone no. 2:

Yes, it would be a case in a standard situation, but the software on your VPS, including kernel is outdated and requires a complete update.

Ok, so then I say why are you advertising this if you’re not providing the service? At least then provide me with a new server but let me keep the same price - as it was done a year ago.
their response is a true gem:

Thank you for your request.

Please let us know what you feel,

Guess how do I feel about it? If I wanted to update everything myself I would not go for a managed package I would be running my own server. Hmm…

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My server is being hacked… Wonderful, just what I need…
I’m not yet sure how they’re getting in, but it seems it’s through apache somehow. They deleted all the logs, so I can’t trace them and since I don’t know how they got in I can’t plug the hole.

this completely sucks. I might have to take the server offline for a while until I figure it out.

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Today a friend wrote to me that he tried to sign up for a Dreamhost account via my link and noticed that if you enter the promo code 888 as I suggested, you do indeed get 80% off - so the whole year of hosting comes to 24$!!!, but that voids my referral fee so I don’t get anything. He suggested that perhaps it would be better to take off the promo code.

Hmm. What to do?

I thought for a while and then came up with this: Dreamhost allows you to create your own promo codes, where you specify how much discount the customers get, but the amount goes from your reward money. So, I thought, ok, let’s leave the 888 code up and create my own code that would split the fee 50/50. That was fair, right? After 888 code won’t work anymore, you can still use my code and get 50$ off. Not bad. But then I thought, hmm, why not make this into a practice a bit. 50/50 is comfortable, what about giving a bit more. Hmm… Tightness in my throat… ok,well, I guess I can give you guys 60$ off. So interesting to see where my limit would be and how tight I can be with money that’s not even mine, which I might never get (since there isn’t much chance of anyone signing up from my blog). Oh, and I can’t cash it anyway since they only use Paypal, I can only use it for hosting fees.
Guess what I ended up doing? Well, use promo code BUDDHA and you’ll see!

Hehe, ok, I’ll tell you - it gives you $97 discount which is all of my reward money. What do I get from it? Well, nothing. Isn’t it great?
And in case for some weird reason you would WANT to give me some money and you yourself pay MORE for your hosting, use code CLARITY which will give you $50 discount and I get the rest.

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I’ve kept coming across Prototype Javascript library while looking at different AJAX libraries, and although it looked really good and had amazing support in Ruby on Rails, it has absolutely no documentation and I wasn’t about to spend that much time deciphering how it works from the sources.
Now, a kind soul who did just that wrote an unofficial documentation for it: Developer notes for prototype.js. Excellent!
I’m thinking of using this for our electronic banking product I’m working on, instead of the spaghetti code that I cobbled together.
UPDATE: it turns out that prototype.js only supports IE 6+ and Mozilla browsers. For the work project I need IE 5.5+ support, so it’s a no go. So, I started refactoring my own code and as a by-product I’m learning tons of new stuff about Javascript and it’s OO stuff. Javascript refactoring has been very helpful as has been this: Javascript closures. I still don’t completely get closures I have to say, must look into it some more.

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I’ve been finishing moving one of the domain’s that i’m maintaining - buda.si - site of Slovenian Buddhist Society - to my new host - Dreamhost. I’ve been hosting Shambhala Ljubljana meditation group’s website there since May and I’ve been quite pleased. Their plans are really good and they keep improving them. Recently they doubled disk-space, so now I have 5gigs of space there - really nice for all the hosted dharma talks and videos, and they’ve just added unlimited domains and sub-domains on all plans. They have lots of software you can install just by one click, like Wordpress blogging engine, Wikimedia Wiki or Mambo CMS. The crucial feature for me is having a login shell - SSH access, as lots of shared hosting deals don’t have that.
They also have a nice reward program, if someone sign’s up using my referrer code, I get 97$. Also, in honor of their 8′th birtdhay, if you type in promo code 888 you get 80% of the first year for any 1-2 year plans - neat! So, if you’re looking for a good host and would like me to get some money as well, sign up!
I’m still keeping this domain at my current host, where I have a virtual server account - which means i’m root at this server and I can install software at my will and hack any configuration files by hand. Nice, but I’m wondering if I really need it.

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Oy, I couldn’t believe it.GMail now supports setting the from field in your emails to whatever you want:
Gmail: Help Center

I was thinking of hacking this via Greasemonkey but now I guess I don’t have to. And you can even set different emails and then choose when you’re sending what from address you want. Freaking cool! Now I can finally send email from my nice domain name, but still use gmail as my client!

Thanks Google!

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I wish all these different IM systems would start to interoperate. At the moment I have 3 different clients running on my computer - Windows Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Skype. I wish all my friends would migrate to just one client (preferably Skype, as I use that for outbound calling and my US number). However, from my cellphone I can login to MSN and Yahoo, but not Skype. Oh well…

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I’ve finally upgraded my movable type blog software to the latest 3.2 beta. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, so that I could enable authenticated comments, but I’ve finally managed to find some time today. I’m still not too happy with the layout but most things seem to be working ok. expect things to be in a bit of a flux for the next days. Let me know what you think!

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Hello wonderful LazyWeb,

I have a following request for you: a greasemonkey script for gmail, that would override send button on the compose email screens and would redirect mail to a custom script on a users server, who could then resend it and making it look, like it’s coming from your own domain address.

I’ve wanted this for some time and I’m sure Google will eventually offer this, but I just thought today, that with Greasemonkey we can actually make this happen. All my awakeheart.net mail already gets redirected to gmail, as I’ve found it to be an excellent email client. The only thing that’s bothering me, is that all the emails I sent, have @gmail.com address. Unfortunately I’m going for vacations for the rest of July, so I can’t hack on it - anyone interested?

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