pwrusr.com

Today I was reviewing some XHTML syntax. This post is a placeholder for me to remember wich ones are CSS block elements and wich ones are CSS inline elements.

The difference between the two is, according to the specifications, that a block-level element can contain other elements (block-level and inline elements); an inline element can only contain one or more inline elements, but not block-level elements.

The block-level elements:

• h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h5
• p
• div
• blockquote
• ul and ol
• forms

The inline elements:

• em
• strong
• cite
• a
• img

a cool example: 

<p>

     <strong>

          <em>

               <a href="http://www.pwrusr.com/">pwrusr.com

               </a>

          </em>

     </strong>

is a site for 

     <cite>power users!</cite>

</p>

an important rule: symmetry aka we have to strive to keep opening and closing tags ordered simmetrically.

I just reached OSCON website and I discovered that this summer, from July 20 to 24, 2009, there is an exciting party!

The OSCON is a famous annual event, dedicated to the Open Source "movement", held by publisher O’Reilly Media and sponsored by some great industry names like intel and Google.

O’Reilly is the good guys that somehow sponsored the creation of the famous Linux Network Administrator Guide (that unfortunately I still had no time to finish…). They may also be considered "innovators" from the point of view of book licenses, since they kinda invented "Open Books", a precious pearl of knowledge on the web, now released as Creative Commons (check and download from here: http://oreilly.com/openbook/ ).

This year, OSCON (Open Source CONvention) is held at the heart of the Silicon Valley, on sunny San Jose, CA, place known also as intel’s HQ.

Well, intel may not have a lot to party, since EU Commission just fined them an incredible €. 1.06 billion, but other than that, intel demonstrated a lot of open intents, like kernel mode-setting key-aspects contribution, unbelievable boot times for netbooks (see moblin.org and Samsung netbook bootup youtube video) and other interesting technological goodnesses. 

OSCON is not just tons of conferences, it’s also where interesting open source projects gains (deserved) mainstream visibility, so Sourceforge.net readied the "Community Choice Awards", a program aimed at allowing you to push your favorite open source project up. Through that site you can nominate the open source projects you like the most and then hope they get selected and presented at the OSCON.

Nominations will be accepted until May 29th, so you are still in time to nominate your favorite projects too! Winners will be declared July 23rd. Note you can cast one vote for every category, and since there are 12 categories, you can wisely choose 12 projects!

Here are some of my favorite 2009 open source projects.

Best Commercial Open Source Project: Alfresco Labs

Best Project for the Enterprise: vtiger

Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything: jfusion

This is upcoming and shocking news for the UNIX-world, DB-World, Virtualization-World, Enterprise-software-world, developers-world …

Essentially, the future IT world, is going to be influenced by the choices made by another big software giant like ORACLE, today a SUN-illuminated ORACLE.

The April 20 2009 ORACLE-SUN acquisition is probably going to change the IT World, this is almost a matter of fact, since now ORACLE is becoming the de-facto biggest sponsor and contributor of the open source world.

Till now, ORACLE pursued the "Microsoft way": cleansing and purging every possible competitor, with big bucks (and it seems they largely succeeded with their former acquisitions).

At present, ORACLE made a new demonstration: successful open source can be "bought", even if it is a direct competitor (probably because successful open source moves a lot of money?).

I don’t feel comfortable to argue about the future, but it’s just natural to think about the LAMP-stack, and if it is going to become LAPP-stack in the future!

But I suspect ORACLE plans aren’t to kill mySQL, maybe they’ll relegate it to a "developers experiment", with an "enterprise version", who knows?

ORACLE seem actively involved in the open source, with btrfs filesystem development and previous contributions to ext4, but here I also see two possibly-related projects: ZFS and btrfs. What road will ORACLE choose to pursue?

Another interesting overlapping project is virtualization: ORACLE pushes XEN, and SUN have its own XEN setup on Solaris, so they’ll probably merge the two, but what will happen to virtualbox is not known (SUN acquired innotek and made its own Xvm Virtualbox virtualization solution for the desktop and the workstations): another important choice for ORACLE here.

Another interesting and debatable argument is licenses: it seems now a matter of GPL vs CDDL, and probably ORACLE will have to make some important choices even on this field.

Other than that, my personal concern is non-existant, since I have no direct nor indirect and am in no way related to any (I’m just a GNU/Linux power user): for me they’re two big companies merging, one heavily hit by the downturn and the other still sane, so, for me, this merger is probably a good thing; also, maybe the one makin’money will teach the other how to better monetize, whatever it will cost.

P.S.: I will still sporadically read Jonathan Schwartz’s illuminated blog, given the new situation.

Recently I was evaluating the final Alfresco Labs 3 document management nifty program, inside my little, trusty (and quite overloaded…), Ubuntu home server. I experienced a lot of problems related to the 8080 port, because Zenoss defaults to that and Alfresco wants that too.

I searched for some info on how to change alfresco default 8080 apache tomcat port and here’s what I found (from alfresco wiki page):

Edit those files and change 8080 to something else (like for example 8099):

• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/conf/server.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/urlrewrite.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/pagerenderer-config.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/webscript-framework-config-test.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/webscript-framework-config.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/webscripts/org/alfresco/indexall.get.mediawiki.ftl
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/custom-repository.properties and add an entry to overide the default: repo.remote.endpoint.url=http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service

They say the following about this mess:"It is planned for future versions to allow for central configuration of the port. It is not fixed yet, when this will be included."

I tried the modifications, but essentially I screwed my alfresco setup (more on this later maybe), so I removed and purged my alfresco.

I then decided to search for some info on how to change the default Zenoss 8080 port, and so I found that editing /usr/local/zenoss/zenoss/etc/zope.conf

and uncommenting line 840 with:

port-base 1000

1. Avoid changing Alfresco’s port mess.
2. Proceed with the Alfresco installation process.

Hope that helps!

This is service post n°1.

I’m putting this as a placeholder to remember the modifications I made today on this blog.

1. I removed my email address from the about page and added a contact page on it’s place: the reason for that is that spammers became cuter!
2. I replaced the social bookmarks plugin with the new and less obtrusive "Addthis" button: even if I’m intentionally sponsoring a brand, to me it seems more fun and BTW it’s free!

To make my contact page consistent with the template layout I added the following css code to the template’s css:

/* modifiche contact form */

#wpcf label { clear: both; display: block; float: left; width: 150px; }
#wpcf input { float: left; width: 200px; padding: 1px; margin: 2px 5px 2px 0; }
#wpcf textarea { width: 350px; height: 100px; padding: 1px; margin: 0 5px 10px 0; }
#wpcf #contactsubmit { margin-left: 250px; width: 100px; }

That’s it for now.

Yesterday and Today I had a complex and clever Document and Business Process Management course, so I woke up early in the morning and drove 100Km away (totally I drove 400+ Km in two days for this course).

Yesterday, other than the full session-day, I returned home at about 10:00pm, hungry, tired, and, despite that, still able to update my site and then put my head on the pillow around midnight (just for the case, my new site is amitex.it - web and open source services and solutions!). Too bad that the combination of my recurring insomnia and the preparations for the day after, kept my head buzzing and running, and so, I started thinking if everything was perfect-ready for the day after, namely today, so, at about 1.00am I came at the conclusion that not everything was fine: my laptop missed an XP VM for the demo (my laptop seems to reserve a special place for Ubuntu and the course was about a native Windows Software). I then jumped down from my bed and powered my laptop up in the middle of the night, I wgetted the Sun xVM Virtualbox bins from their site and installed it; at the same time, I scp-ed my 12Gb, devxpvm1 from my Ubuntu server, through my crappy-limited 100Mbps lan, to my laptop.

The connection was damn slow (scp said something about 24 minutes), it was 1 and something am in the morning and I had pointed my alarm clock to 5.45am. WTF?!

Well, if I would’ve been lame enough, I would’ve taken the course without laptop (and related jerk expression…). Hopefully, this wasn’t my case, since the at command came in my help!

The at shell command, for me, is a recent re-discovery (I surely used it in the past). It allows you to temporarily schedule an imminent task to run once and only. Next reboot, no trace of previously scheduled tasks. Too bad I wasn’t remembering the right at syntax, so I launched it and lamely typed on its prompt what I wanted the laptop to do (well, I just wanted for it to shut down automatically after a safe time slice, in such a way for it to complete the scp transfer).

Basically, I launched:

sudo at 2.30 (+ root password).

at>halt
at>stop (noob…)
at>quit  (lame…)
at>exit (downgraded-pwrusr-jerk)

…and nothing happened…I wasn’t remembering how to confirm my scheduled task! (FYI, I just wanted for it to shut-the-f#-down…err, to halt). So I opened the man page, but nothing (maybe I eventually was too tired to "RTFM" AND "connect-and-understand™").

A fast, random (and nervous), google search, pointed me to an unexpected IBM doc, alleging somewhere that CTRL+D was the right key combo. I said nervous, because at bash linux terminal command ain’t easy search!

So, essentially, I found CTRL+D was the key-trick…I pushed down the combination, but nothing happened; I then tried the CTRL+SHIFT+D combo, and it happily worked :)

Then I went to sleep, and finally slept. In the early morning, I found my laptop correctly halted: too bad today my laptop was just a dead-heavy 17" luggage: the demo went through the projector! (and not inside course-takers’  laptops).

Arghh…but let’s look at its bright side: I re-learned a way old (and pretty useful) command (and hopefully you too!).

Thanks to the community effort, debian 5 was finally born.

This is a stable release, code name "lenny", continuing the debian toy story naming tradition.

With this release, there are a lot of changes, well, not the kind of changes you would expect from a modern .6 Ubuntu desktop refresh, because one of the developer’s aim is the combination of hardware and software stability (and so in fact the debian developers deliberately pick packages one by one and test them a lot, before releasing to the public), but it is, by the way, a message about "we are confident on those packages and we can build up on those".

Before this release, lenny was referred to as "testing" on the debian repository, now it has become "stable".

Debian is useful for System integrators, System Administrators and others interested on building something on top of it (generally servers), since the distribution is very prone to customization, it’s normal to see packages like kernel 2.6.26, X.Org 7.3, K (KDE) 3.5.10, GNOME 2.22.2 etc.

Don’t look at them like old packages, those packages are really and thorougly tested and debugged. If you really need a linux-based, fully featured desktop distribution, get Ubuntu instead: it is built around debian and the next minor update is going to offer some intersting new features and improvements; you may also wish to try debian squeeze (if you are a debugger/developer) or sid (if you are seriously confident with linux); you can do so just by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and changing all the "stable" keywords instances to "testing" for squeeze or "unstable" for sid (this is the edge of the edge of the new stuff, but dependencies sometime happen to break).

I suggest you to try debian64 for server-like production tasks and experiments; download debian from torrent sites to relieve some traffic from official servers and remember that, if you can spare some bucks, support the debian community by donating (especially if you make money on top of it).

Welcome debian stable!

Recently I encountered a whole load of problems related to Joomla and my new business open source web site.

Here I’m gonna post some general info and experiences, useful to troubleshoot possible joomla problems, especially related to when you’re unable to login to the administrator backend (I know how it feels, just free your mind: computers are numbers and circuits).

What I am sharing here is my reaction to frustration, with suggestions and feedback received from the official joomla! forum and the official joomla! italian community (thanks - you know who you are).

please check here: http://forum.joomla.it/index.php/topic,56790.0.html and

and here: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=431&t=262426

The first thing I feel to suggest you is to check configuration.php and .htaccess files on you site’s root.

It’s important for configuration.php not to contain any blank lines; also, check this file in respect to the Linux/UNIX text file conventions. On Windows, text file lines’ are terminated with a CRLF, on Linux/UNIX instead, the lines of a text file are terminated with just a LF (for a tutorial on what that means, check here: http://usertools.plus.net/tutorials/id/22).

The .htaccess (on the contrary of configuration.php), may contain blank lines, just make sure that, if any, they respect the ‘foretold Linux/UNIX text file conventions (lines have to be ended by LFs); also, check and make sure the rules are correct and there are no hidden CRLF after the rules declarations (in case of doubt, restore the original htaccess.txt from an untouched joomla! build).

From my experience, those checks helped me solve my admin loop, cannot login problems; an obvious way to avoid this kind of problems is to become a power user on the Linux side (aka pwrusr), but that’s a personal choice! If working directly on your joomla! site with, say, Ubuntu, these problems would’nt have ever happened to any of us (I admit it: I was jerking on my site with my powerful Vista64 gaming rig).

Another useful thing to check for, is to make sure you have the right PHP version: make sure your host is serving you with PHP 5 (since joomla was made with it). How to discover if you have PHP5 if you can’t access the admin backend? Well, upload on your site’s root the uncompressed file JTSPOST (here: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/jts/frs/), and open the address corresponding to the copied file’s name. Once you open it up, it’s gonna give you some useful info about joomla! and your server, included what php version you have.
Please remeber that if you happen to fix your problem, then remove JTSPOST from your server’s root, because if you forgive it there, you may leave a possible information security hole.

OK, so, going on, as I said, I checked the joomla! official forums, and referred to them for other possible problems and related suggestions, wich I will report here for the sake of completeness (note that I edited some parts for some added clarity):

Suggestion n.1)

1. edited the file administrator/components/com_login/admin.login.php to comment out line 69 (//LoginController::display() )
2. browsed to the login page.
3. [tried to login] and got an ‘Invalid token‘ message.
4. Reedited the [administrator/components/com_login/]admin.login.php file to remove my comment at line 69.
5. Refreshed the login page in my browser and got the normal login form.
6. Logged in [successfully].

 try this and if it doesn’t work, then:

Suggestion n.2) [user inoxfire]

1. edit file administrator/components/com_login/admin.login.php [to comment out line 57, // JRequest::checkToken('request') or jexit( 'Invalid Token' );]
2. browsed to the login page.
3. [tried to login] and got an ‘Invalid token‘ message.
4. Reedited the [administrator/components/com_login/]admin.login.php file to remove my comment at line 57.
5. Refreshed the login page in my browser and got the normal login form.

 try this and if it doesn’t work, then:

Suggestion n.3)

1. Log into phpMyAdmin and navigate to the jos_plugins table.
2. Look for the "User - Joomla!".
3. Ensure that it is published as mine was not (set published to 1 just in case).
4. [Look for] in row "Authentication - Joomla"
5. Ensure that it is published as mine was not (set published to 1 just in case).

 try this and if it doesn’t work, then:

1. first check your Super Admin status:
   [Open PHPmyAdmin] in the "jos_users" table set SuperAdmin to:
   - field "id" - value "62"
   - field "gid" - value "25" or "26".
2. in the "jos_core_acl_aro" table find row for "62":
   - field "id" - write this down (should be 10 normally) - this is the "aro_id".
3. in the "jos_core_acl_groups_aro_map" table find row for "aro_id" = 10
   - "group_id" should be "25" or "26".

BONUS:

If, for some reasons, you need to reset your joomla! admin password, or if you need to offer admin access to somebody else, or for whatever the reason, please change it by doing so:

1. Open PHPmyAdmin.
2. access your joomla DB and goto table jos_users.
3. modify "admin"-row and set it’s password code to this: 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3 (it’s the equivalent of ‘admin‘).

(for more info and explanations, check this post over here: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=10985).

Hope this info is useful for everyone, and wish you all have a good time.

Today I was searching for a fast and easy way to burn an .ISO image from windows, nothing more natural, you’d say: grab NERO Bloating Rom and burn ‘ur iso, except that:

1. NERO is a complete commercial burning software suite, and (rightfully), you have to pay a license for it.
2. I just needed to burn a pretty standard ubuntu ISO image!

Well, the easier method I found was to download and install Mr. Alex Feinmann’s ISO Recorder, insert a blank CD and then right-click on my ISO; from the contextual menu I choose "Burn something" and some minutes later I was done!

Sorry I couldn’t donate, right now I couldn’t spare any bucks, but take this post as good reference and, hopefully, someone is gonna send some coins in my place!

SUN ’s Virtualbox virtualization solution is a respected open source virtualization product, wich today received a major update, reaching version 2.1, dated 2008-12-17 (see here for changelog).

This new version brings, other than the usual (and abundant) bug fixes, major upgrades for the MAC OS X port, like 64 bit guest OS support and Hardware Virtualization support (VT-x and AMD-V); other new features are Nehalem core i7 virtualization enhancements, native VMDK/VHD support (VMWARE hard disk images and MS Virtual PC disk images), including snapshots, Experimental 3D Acceleration via OpenGL and (for me this is by far the most desirable update),  a New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows).

Finally SUN figured a way to get rid of this ugly thing. Thanks engineers!

If you already use it, chances are you’ll be automatically notified when the update is ready, else, proceed to Sun’s VirtualBox official website, choose your version and manually start the download.

EDIT: image updated: it was overlapping.