A blog on rails, php, computing, my bass guitar and stuff

You see all the nice (resized) images on my site? I’ve made a plugin for them to be generated. Want I wanted was to add an image in the wordpress editor. Give a height and/or width and that they would be resized automatically.

With proud I introduce my resize plugin: com_resize. Why the name? Because I’ve used the source code from on of my Joomla! mambots. Hence the name.

You can download it here. If you have any question: leave behind a comment.

For installing: just unpack it in the plugins folder and activate the plugin. Your server must have GD installed (or Imagemagick I believe). Maybe I’ll release a version with mod_rewrite supported images. But that’s only if I’m sore bored I don’t what to do else.

I’ve been using WordPress for over two months now and I’ve already written 24 posts! I thinks that’s a nice average.

When I look at my old blog: v2.vanutsteen.nl, I think my average there is about two posts every month or so.

The difference is that I’m now using WordPress instead of Joomla! And WordPress is sooo much simpler for a blogsite then Joomla! You can use Joomla! for your blog. Even with comments and all. But the way WordPress is set up, every moron (as me) can just start blogging. They made it really simple. And they should keep it that way! No fancy stuff in the default wordpress installation. If you want to get fancy, just install all plugins.

I’ve got to plugins installed. One for generating google sitemaps and another for caching my pages. The first one is a bit slow and I really don’t like it. The caching plugin (wp-cache 2) is really nice. Install, activate and go. And my website flies instead of crawling like it first did.

I’m using Joomla! during the day at my job. So Joomla! is buying my bread and paying my house and I know Joomla! through and through. I make webshops, coporate sites, intranets, etc. with Joomla!. But I wouldn’t use it for a blog. WordPress is the way to go!

edit: I saw I haven’t added the sitemap to the above image. So here goes:

• Red: WordPress
• Blue: Joomla!
• Yellow: Drupal

No, it wasn’t the fault of wine. It was my fault. I installed the nvidia drivers from the Nvidia website. Wine then couldn’t find the opengl library and segfauled. So after installing the drivers from the Ubuntu repository it worked again. Now I can play Unreal Tournament again.

Wine still segfaults on me with Hardy Heron! I’m gonna look if this still works:

Does not work (segfaulting):
mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
sudo -i
apt-get build-dep wine && apt-get source --build wine

This does work:
mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
sudo -i
apt-get source wine
cd wine-0.9.55
./configure
make depend && make
sudo make install

(for me)

When we play unreal tournament GOTY it always runs bad on newer machines. One of my collegues found it the problem was the smp support of UT. Disabling all cores except the first on solved the problem. In Linux that’s like doing:

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online

To get it back online:

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online

More on cpu hotplugging.

WordPress is a great blog application. It has some nice free templates and the default installation has everything I need without being bloated. I miss one thing: automatic resizing of images who are too big. So I plan on making it myself. Something like this but even simpler (as well in functionality as in configurability).

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is released. And they have already provided some netboot/mini images too. I was looking for the jeos images. But that mirror seems down.

Nice! Ubuntu rocks!

I daily read a lot of blog posts. To keep up with what’s happening in the ruby/linux community and what’s the latests buzz in the webdeveloper world.

I’m now using google to keep track of the RSS feeds. I’ve used some desktop applications in the past (like rssowl and liferea). I think I’ll switch to a desktop application again. Liferea has the nicest gui. So I think about using that one.

I also found Blam! and Straw. But blam looks very gtk1-ish and the news for Straw hasn’t been updated in 4 months and has no screenshots. And you have to have good documentation as an open source project.

My boss recently bought some inexio touchscreens. Including a nice little 12.1 inch variant. I thought about using it in my living room for controlling audio et cetera. But alas, a no go. Because there weren’t any linux device drivers available for it. So I played with the idea of creating my own driver for it.

Examples enough: usbtouchscreen and mtouchusb. But how to start (I have totally no c experience). I think the biggest problem is getting to know the kernel api. After reading through the source code of some modules I realised that a lot of the lines were kernel macro’s & functions and just a little bit of real coding.

Searching for tutorials produced some nice results. But a lot of the tutorials were of a real “hello world” level. And very few (no?) tutorials/how to’s rose above the mediocre level. Some few I found:

• www.linuxjournal.com/article/7353
• www.prabusurendra.com/tutors/lt2/lt2.html
• www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/drivers_linux
• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4786
• lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3 (chapter 13)
• usb-skeleton.c

Helpful, but not really geared towards my problem. So I ordered some books, asked the manufacturer for some info on the protocol (hope they will co-operate!) and spent a lot of time reading tutorials and source code.

But I still have a lot of questions. What is the best IDE (kdevelop I believe)? Why has no c IDE/editor descent auto-completion for kernel functions/macros? Where can I ask my question without being flamed to death?

When the driver is ready (or when the project has failed) I’ll post some tips and maybe a full blown tutorial on (not) writing device drivers.

I’ve been using GIT now some weeks (for my ultra-secret ruby project) and I must say it’s nice. Nothing more than nice. Just like svn was nice to use (compared to old-school full backups). When I first saw the GIT commands I was dazzling with confusion. But after two days you get the hang of it. I haven’t done anything special like branching so I can’t tell you about the advanced features. But the base is solid.

Ow, and github is really nice. I read somewhere that rubyforge now has git support too. Gonna check that out. But beating github will be difficult. Well, at least for now when Github is still free of charge!