I had downloaded the Source Sniffer from OpenNTF a while back but never had the chance to mess with it. So, today I installed it and I'm very impressed. This is an awesome app when you have to search for something and don't have access to tools like the Ytria and Team Studio set of tools. Another bonus is it's available right in the Domino Designer client, just a button or right click away when you need it.

Another cool feature is the "Unused Variables" tab. It shows you all the declared variables that are not used. I don't like to leave these in an application, so this is a very welcome feature. Also the "Get All References" functions, these let you pick a design element from the Applications pane or from the Source Sniffer tab and it will show you all the references within the application for the selected element. Very cool! I'm sure there are even more features that I just haven't found yet.

The documentation for Source Sniffer is very good, it walks you right through installation and use. I've only used this for an hour or so and so far I really like it and think it will become an invaluable tool. So, go check it out, I bet you'll like it also.

Today Bob Balfe posted about his top 10 Open Source developer tools, so I thought I would follow suit. Here are my top 10 open source developer tools not in any particular order:

• Eclipse - This is a great open source programming tool. With it's many plug-ins you can develop in just about any language. I use it for Java, PHP, HTML, CSS and SQL programming. As Bob mentioned there are several commercial applications built on top of Eclipse and I thought I would mention another such as XMind
• TextWrangler - This is a feature rich text editor which has formatting capabilities for most web languages. It's a great tool to just look at something real quick when you don't need a full on IDE
• XMind - This is a great Mac OS X mind mapping package. While any mind mapping software is very useful for laying out the goals, requirements and steps needed to produce an application, I showcase XMind because it is for the Mac
• Ditto - This is an application that runs in the background and captures everything you copy to the clip board. No more need to open a text editor to paste the things you copy so you don't loose it. I find this tool invaluable and use it daily. Not to mention, it's great to copy something I'm changing and then if I screw it up I've got a backup readily at hand, but this one is Windows only. For Mac the only one I've found that's worth anything is QuickSilver but it's kind of heavy duty just for the clip board manager, I never could get into all the keyboard shortcuts
• The Gimp - This is an outstanding image editor. If you don't want to fork out the cash for Photoshop, the Gimp is the best alternative
• WinMerge - This is a differencing and merging tool for windows. It allows you to compare the text of 2 different sources. This is an invaluable tool for finding the difference between two Text, PHP, Java or HTML files. However, this one is Windows only. For Mac take a look at DiffMerge
• Firefox - An outstanding open source browser, combine it with Fire Bug and the Web Developer plugin and you've got a very powerful web development tool
• Balsamiq Mockups - This is a great low fidelity prototyping tool. While this isn't really open source I'm listing it here because you can use the web based version or the trial. It doesn't allow you to do some things, but it will work
• DimDim Web Conferencing - While not really on par with GoToMeeting it will work for screen sharing. You can't take control of a remote machine with it, but for getting several people together to look at a computer screen it's hard to beat. You can also setup your own DimDim server, however the support for this is very much lacking, I never could get it to work as I tried just for something to do one rainy weekend
• Google - This is an invaluable tool for finding solutions to problems, inducing ideas and finding new techniques to try

Some honorable mentions that may/may not be open source:

• All the Elgugi Software Products - These are great tools for a development shop, driving ideas, features, collaboration and community knowledge
• W3Schools.com - A very good reference for CSS, HTML and Javascript
• ColourLovers - A good resource for coming up with appealing color palettes
• Apple Time Machine - A great backup utility. Can't say how many times it's saved an image or PHP file I screwed up

I know some of the things I listed aren't really open source but may just be free or just great tools that are worth the money. But all of these things I've listed get used a lot on all of my computers and are some of the first things I install on a new computer. So, I hope you enjoy these tools and while you're here, share your "can't do without" tools.

I've been using the Blogsphere template since it first came out and haven't looked back. BlogSphere and the OpenNTF mail template are the templates that really opened the world's eyes to OpenNTF and the benefits of an OpenSource community for the Lotus faithful. However, since version 3.x of blogsphere there have been a couple of bugs that really bugged me. These bugs didn't really hurt the overall feel of Blogsphere but are really just little annoyances. Now what brought these bugs to my attention is that I'm currently redoing the look and layout of keithstric.com. This current look has been here for a couple of years now and I'm tired of images getting cut off because of the layout being too narrow. Also, because of the set width of the layout, on my big iMac screen I've got an awful lot of wasted realestate. What really inspired this was the new look of Chris Toohey's site. I think the layout and overall look of his site is great. Good work Chris! I hope you don't mind if I steal borrow some of your layout ideas?

The first one is the Download permalink on search results. Seems the TAG_BSPlinkURL function in the RenderEngine.Tags script library had a typo on line #13: "TAG_BSPlinkURL = cfgDoc.cfg_Basic_HomeURL(0) + "/download/" + blogDoc.PermaLink(0)" should read "TAG_BSPlinkURL = cfgDoc.cfg_Basic_HomeURL(0) + "/downloads/" + blogDoc.PermaLink(0)". While this really isn't that big of a deal, it was frustrating at times when looking for something.

Another bug, but not really a bug, but just had to do with the page template. In the search results, it didn't show the content of the post, just a Blogsphere tag, which to the average user doesn't really mean that much. But that tag doesn't exist, hence it only showing that tag and not the content of the found entry. The tag that was being used is "<$BSEntryBody$>". I changed that to use the "<$BSEntryHTML$>" tag instead.

Next up, and this one I can't seem to get to work at all, is the display of all the static pages. Just like with downloads, you should be able to display an excerpt of each static page in a blog like layout. This was returning an error for the comments rss which is something I'll get to in a minute. But, I never could get the static pages to display like I want, but that's certainly something on the agenda before the new layout goes live.

Last one, in the RenderEngineCommentsEntries function of the RenderEngine.RSS script library, line #9: "numofentries = configDoc.cfg_rss_RSSFeedEntries(0) * 5". The field cfg_rss_RSSFeedEntries doesn't exist, so this was causing an error to be returned. For some reason this error occured when you tried to navigate to the view containing the Static Pages. I just changed this to read: "numofentries = 50". Now, I know I shouldn't hard code this, I should just add a field to the configuration document for this, but I guess I'm just lazy and don't want to change too much in the template in order to make upgrading to the next version easier.

Please don't take these bugs as me bashing Blogsphere, I think it's a great product and I look forward to continuing to use it in the future. I just thought folks that are using blogsphere may be experiencing some of these same issues and would like to fix them. But while you can't see these fixes at this moment on keithstric.com, they will be implemented when the new layout goes live in a few days (I'm not very fast with tweaking CSS).

The other day while looking for a Mind Manager replacement I stumbled across XMind. This is an Eclipse based application that has all the features I frequently used in Mind Manager. I had tried using Mind Meister but I just couldn't get past the way you modify your mind map, it just took too long.

But the feature set for XMind is great, it includes many features that you only find in the "pay for" apps. Best of all it's Open Source. Some of the features I've found most useful in starting to migrate to XMind are:

• Import of Mindjet Mind Manager maps, among others
• Using the "Summary" connector - This allows you to group entries with a "}" and add some text to it
• Double-Clicking a connection gives you a text box to provide a description of the connection
• The User Interface is great and easy to use
• Maps are defined as work books which you can add multiple sheets to
• Easy to add custom graphics
• Attach any type of file to the workbook
• It's easy to customize the look and feel of your map
• Floating topics with their own style

Now I know you're saying that this isn't anything new really, and you're probably right. But to find something of this calibur that runs natively on Mac OSX thats also Open Source, to me that's a big deal. But I got to looking and there are versions that run on virtually every operating system out there. But my mind wanders and starts to imagine that since this is Eclipse based, could it possibly be included as a Composite app within Lotus Notes? That may be something that is doable, but I just don't have the time at the moment to investigate it, but I think could be something pretty cool.

My overall impression of XMind is a good one, it's Eclipse based, has a great UI, a rich feature set and is Open Source. So check it out, it's a good tool that fits the bill for a Mind Manager.

OK, we've had the Mac now for exactly a week and since my wife drives into the office I have been using it for my day to day work and I'm still impressed with how well it runs and multitasks. I've made myself an account on the machine so I can install the tools I need, customize the desktop, setup a virtual machine to run Domino 8.5 in, etc. and not affect her OS experience. I'm still having to fight with the keyboard (doesn't have the 10 key keypad) and the Control, Option/alt, fn and Command keys. For those readers that may have just moved to a Mac and can't figure out some of the keys I've come up with this little chart for use in Lotus Notes (running in a terminal window):

Windows Key	Mac Key
Ctrl-Shift	Control-Option-Shift
Home	fn-left arrow
End	fn-right arrow
F9	Can't seem to get any of the F keys to function in Lotus Notes
ctrl-c	Control-c
ctrl-x	Control-x
ctrl-break	??? Someone???
shift-end	fn-shift-right arrow
shift-home	fn-shift-left arrow

I have found some pretty cool tools that I've installed and find useful that work the way they are advertised to work:

• Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2 - This lets you connect to a PC running terminal services
• GeekTool - Put text and images on your desktop that refreshes how-ever often you tell it to
• Open Office - The OpenOffice productivity suite
• And of course Firefox - The Firefox browser

I'm also looking for a screen capture program somewhere along the lines of SnagIt and an Image editing program. I was looking at The Gimp but it requires X11 and I'm not sure it's installed or how to use it on the Mac, but I may delve into that at a later date. Are there any apps (preferably Open Source) that you can't do without on your Mac?

After using the huge 24" screen on the Mac it's hard to go back to my 17" dual monitor setup. My monitors are getting old and just aren't as bright and clear as the Mac, not to mention I like all the realestate of the 24" monitor. Working on the Mac, I really want one for myself now...

This article over on Business Week states what I've been preaching to small companies for quite a while now.

JasperSoft is thriving as other vendors struggle because it provides software at a lower price than competitors. In fact, JasperSoft supplies the basic software for free, making money by selling support services or additional features. Its annual fees can be as much as 85% to 90% lower than its competitors. "We're seeing more interest from companies looking to replace an older software product they can no longer afford," says Chief Executive Officer Gentile.

Open Source software has a lower TCO than proprietary systems. Of course, if you have a medium sized company or plan on using all the features of an Open Source platform, I highly recommend you purchase the support to help solve problems when they arise and to support the Open Source company to ensure future support of a product you're starting to become dependent upon.

These Open Source companies are able to provide free software because they can keep their staff low and there is a wealth of developers improving their software for free, these new features and fixes can then be incorporated into new versions. The staff can then be dedicated to helping the paying customers who call in for support of their software.

JasperSoft can afford to sell its reporting and analytics software for considerably less because it relies on what's known as an open-source model of development, wherein the source code—essentially the blueprint of a software program—is openly shared. The company's product benefits from the input of some 90,000 developers worldwide who volunteer their time writing code to enhance the program, though few work for the 80-person company.

With these economic downfalls and with more companies looking to Open Source software to help shore up their budgets could this be the beginning of more software products moving to an Open Source paradigm? If so, the people questioning whether there is room for growth in the Open Source market, do they question because they really don't see the potential or because they have an alternative agenda? I think you know what I think.

I believe that Open Source is the way of the future and that everyone that don't embrace it in some form or another will be left behind. It's already been proven that the Open Source paradigm can be profitable (i.e. Red Hat, Apache, MySQL, Google, etc.) as long as the old ways of thinking a software company should be run are left behind. But no matter what I think the future of Software will be in the future it'll at least be very interesting to watch and be a part of in the years to come.

Here's another freebie for you. A simple little app that doesn't even save any documents but provides a means to lookup users to see what groups they're a member of or to lookup groups to see who is a member of them. It'll use the Domino Directory on whatever server the database resides. Pretty simple really. But you can find it over in the downloads section.

Enjoy!

I've recently become addicted to Boston Legal. I really like that show, I don't think anything on TV has ever made me laugh so hard. But here's a clip that was on last week (I think) that I thought hilarious.

On another note, I've been very busy of late. I've redesigned our flying club's website. It was in dire need of a face lift and to be brought current with features like internet voting, online dues payment and that sort of thing. That has taken me a lot of time to get it all working and rolled out so that the club members would find the site useful. But the site is running on Joomla! 1.5 and I must say that Joomla! is a great opensource product. Out of all the PHP CMS type sites I've messed with this one is much more elegant, easy to use and more robust than all of the others put together.

I've also been working on the website for Mike's RC Hobbies which is running on Zen Cart, which seems to be a great opensource shopping cart and supports many payment type options, templates and configurations.

That's about it really. I haven't been doing much new development for Lotus Notes apps so I haven't really had any new epiphanies of late, which is kind-of a bummer as I really enjoy coming up with new ideas and trying to incorporate them in my applications.

So, until next time.....

I've posted a little DB I developed for copying databases over in the downloads section. It works OK, especially for the price

Enjoy!

I forgot where I saw this tool but I believe it was on one of the Lotus community blogs. I've been using WinMerge now for quite a few months and I think it is a great tool. It allows you to compare 2 text files with each other and it highlights the differences between the 2 files and allows you to merge the differences. Pretty cool! Now I'm sure it probably does more, but this is the main feature I use it for.

If you get a chance you should check out WinMerge as I'm to the point now that I don't know how I ever got along without it.

From Slashdot. Best Buy is now selling Ubuntu Linux. That's pretty cool .

It appears that Micro$oft may be loosing more market share than they care to acknowledge due to the flub known as Vista. I've used Ubuntu Linux for a while and I like it. It's easy to install, use and has a beautiful UI, especially if you decide to use Beryl. I think Ubuntu is a quality product that is probably ready for main stream, at least for people who expect their PC to take care of business but have no interest in games. I hope they do well. But I've posted a couple of times about Ubuntu before.

As far as Vista goes, hopefully Micro$oft get's their game together and fixes it's shortcomings. But I would be remiss to say I wouldn't be thrilled to see them loose a lot of their market share to Linux and Apple

I downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday and so far I like it. I was pleased to see almost all of my extensions were supported in version 3 with the exception of Colorzilla, at least as of yesterday, today it seems that it's supported

So after using this for most of the day yesterday and this morning I think (I may be wrong) but it seems to be faster than version 2. I also like the clean look of the default theme. But I think the biggest thing about this release is the address bar thingy (that's a technical term ). It not only shows you your history, but you can add/remove bookmarks from the address bar and as you type the address it drops down and shows you all the addresses that you've visited as you type, narrowing down as each letter is typed (does that make sense?), like a type ahead box. Very cool

I also found another interesting add-on called Tab Scope. Now I don't know if this really has a good use but I think it's neat none-the-less. When you hover your mouse over a tab, a little screenshot of the tab pops up. You can enlarge it, navigate forward and back, refresh the page or close the tab. Pretty cool but it may take a little use to find a real need for it other than being cool.

There was also talk around the blogosphere that Firebug wasn't supported in version 3, well good news, it is now! Here are some other extensions I use and they all work in Firefox 3!

All in all I think Firefox 3 seems to be a good release, at least so far and how much can you really tell in a day of use. But if the reputation of Mozilla is anything, I bet Firefox will continue to be THE browser of choice (at least by me).

OK, I posted a discussion post over on OpenNTF in the BlogSphere project about the Post title not showing up in Google Analytics. This happened after I upgraded to the 3.0.1 B8a version of BlogSphere and I moved my Google Analytics code over to the Configuration document. Well last night I got to thinking about where in the header the title tag showed up. So I got to looking and the title tag was at the very bottom of the head tag (hope that makes sense). I modified the RenderEngine.Blog lotusscript library, RenderEngineBlogHTMLHeader function. I moved this code up above all the script tags:

If permaLinkDoc Is Nothing Then
    RenderedText = RenderedText + "" + Chr(13)
Else
    RenderedText = RenderedText + "" + Chr(13)
End If

This seems to have corrected the problem and all the visits from today are now showing the post title.

I know I haven't written in a while, it's been hectic here. But I do have some news about Lotus Symphony . I picked up the latest copy of CPU Magazine and in the Bleeding Edge Software review section there was Lotus Symphony. I thought that was pretty cool

On to something else... In my previous post I talked about a bug with BlogSphere v3.0.1 B8a in the downloads section that attachments weren't showing up. Well it turns out that my page template was missing the crucial tag to include the attachments Thanks to Kevin Pettitt who pointed me in the right direction as I had been digging through the code. I also updated the Class-ExcelData.lss file that I attached to my previous post in the downloads section with the newer version.

In other personal news, I finally came up with a UI that I was talking about in this post. I ended up dropping the horizontal navigation as the customer didn't care for the initial mock up of this, which I guess as far as notes applications go is pretty new (I may be wrong). But they did like the ideas of bringing contextual data into a form (layers) so you don't have to navigate away from what you're working on to see a pertinent piece of information (Embedded Frameset). I would like to thank everyone that replied to my plea for help in that post.

So, until next time....

OpenNTF has a new look. Take a looksee.

I know I haven't posted anything in a while and I apologize about that, and with LotusPhere coming up there is a lot of excitment here in the Lotus Community. Unfortunately I won't be attending this year, but hopefully next year I'll be back.

I've recently started looking for ways to document and manage the functions and classes I use in almost every application I develop. I came across LotusScript.doc which does create some very nice documentation which is viewable on the web. I've been using MindJet Mindmanager to document my classes as it spits out a fairly nice outline with all the examples and everything (you can see an example here). But with LotusScript.doc it actually serves 2 purposes. It forces me to comment my code, yes I try but I'm not always diligent about putting in usable comments and it takes those comments and creates pretty decent documentation thus saving me time. Granted it isn't as pretty as a Mindmanager MindMap, but it does spit out very useful documentation.

I've also been looking for some kind of version control software for Lotus Notes and haven't really been that diligent in the pursuit, but came across Design Catalog by Tim Tripcony over on OpenNTF. Now I've just started messing around with it and am trying to get my head around exactly how it works and how it can help me keep a tally on the different versions of applications and design elements.

Another app that I've found is Code Library by Marko Bonaci. I actually found this app a couple of months ago and started using it here in the office. It's a great place to store re-usable functions and such so you can share it with other team members. It's more manual than Design Catalog but works none-the-less, you just have to stay on top of it when something changes.

I think these 3 tools are great for attempting to keep track of your code and provides a means for you to keep track of documentation, code and version control (though the jury is still out on this one). Now whether or not I'm diligent enough to keep up with them, that's another story that only time will tell. I hope everyone enjoys LotusPhere, wish I could join you.

While reading entries in my blog reader I came across an article (sorry, can't find where that post was from now) specifying some great Gimp tutorial websites. I've spent a little time browsing these sites and from what I've found there they are great sites with a lot of information and tutorials for using the Gimp to accomplish different tasks. Also, I was using Gimp v2.2 and discovered that Gimp v2.4 has been released. v2.4 has quite a few new features:

• A UI makeover since 2.2 which will allow you to change the UI to suit your preferences
• Ability to use Photoshop brushes
• Scalable Brushes
• Improved Printing
• For full details visit the Gimp 2.4 Release Notes

But back to the tutorial pages... I also found on one of the sites a bunch of free brushes which I started playing with and are very cool indeed. Of course the sites are broken into categories to make it easier to find what you're looking for and they both had a very limited amount of script-fu scripts, but did have some. You can also find Gimp tutorials on the Gimp Tutorials page.

But check out the new version of the Gimp. If you've been a longtime user then I'm sure you'll like the new version. If you've never used the Gimp before and have used photoshop, give it a try, you might like it, plus what have you got to loose?

Idea Jam is getting better and better every time I look at it. Today I noticed they've added a "Blog or Embed this idea" script. I've included an example in this post. Idea Jam was released on the 20th of this month (sorry for being late). I found this post over on Chris Linfoot 's site which I assume is a press release but I couldn't find it anywhere else. But a quote from that post I found interesting

The development team used the ideas entered by beta testers to improve Idea Jam’s features and functionality. We used the system to build the system,” says Bruce Elgort, President of Elguji Software.

That is just too cool, like a vault I saw built in a federal bank, it was built from the TOP DOWN, not the other way around.

I just read this over on Ed Brill's site. I think this is great news!. That post also states

This is but the first contribution in this effort.

Could this be an IBM movement of supporting and recognizing the contributions of all the great applications hosted over at OpenNTF? I hope so. Also, it could be that some of the developers for Lotus Products could start posting stuff that never quite makes it into their products? I really don't know, but I can't wait to find out.

I've been using Firefox for quite a while now. During this time I've found quite a few extensions that I really don't know what I would do without. So, without further ado here's my favorite extensions:

• Cooliris Previews - When you hover over a link a little icon appears, put your mouse on that icon and a fully functional pop-up browser appears showing the link you hovered over.
• ColorZilla - ColorZilla is an advanced eye dropper that allows you to choose colors on a web page. It'll show you the hexadecimal number along with the RGB value of whatever color you click on.
• Web Developer - Web Developer is an awesome extension that allows you to see the CSS of a web page (at least this is what I use it the most for), outline tables and table cells, see image details and more, a must have for anyone who does any web development
• Firebug - Another awesome extension that is a must have for web developers. This is basically a DOM inspector that allows you to monitor or edit any web element live
• Foxmarks Bookmark Syncronizer - This extension allows you to syncronize all your bookmarks across various machines
• Google Toolbar - Kinda self-explanatory
• Download Status Bar - Gets rid of the anoying download window and replaces it with a small bar at the bottom of the browser that shows the status of downloads, very handy.
• IE Tab - And finally, this extension allows you to change rendering engines of a web site to the IE rendering engine, another very handy extension.

There are a couple of others that I use, but for the most part the above extensions get installed on every machine I use regardless. I've also recently discovered Greasemonkey but I mainly just use the LDDMonkey script with it. I've also just recently started using the Adblock Plus extension but it does little bit too good of a job on blocking ads and makes me think things on my website aren't working

So, what extensions can't you live without?

A while back I was really into hosting my own email server. My preferred beast was XMail using Courier IMAP and SquirrelMail as the web interface. I even wrote a how-to on how to set all this up and get it functioning properly.

Well today I was looking at the referring sites in Google Analytics and found a forum post talking about setting up IMAP for using web mail. In one of the responses it mentioned RoundCube which is another open source web mail application which uses IMAP. Out of curiosity I got to looking at the screen shots of the user interface and it looks great, especially compared to SquirrelMail. Now, SquirrelMail has been around for quite some time and is a mature application, it does do everything it says it does and there are some great add ons for SquirrelMail. But, come on, for a product that's been around so long surely they could do something about the stock user interface? I've personally never used RoundCube, but from first impressions it appears to be a good web mail solution, but I may be wrong. It certainly has the nice looks, especially when compared to SquirrelMail.

Don't get me wrong here, since I haven't used RoundCube ever or SquirrelMail for about 2 years I really am in no situation to make comparisons of their current releases, but by just looking at the two packages I would rather use RoundCube. With the number of users that SquirrelMail has you would think someone would step up to revamp the UI, at least make it a little bit nicer? When I was running my own mail server, SquirrelMail filled my needs for a web mail client nicely and I don't want to take away from their reputation, but why not bring it into the current trend of nice UIs?

But take a look at the 2 screen shots and you decide which one you would rather work in.

Keith

My first ever published article now appears on IBM developerWorks. It's called BlammoSplat: Build a community Web site of Open Laszlo animations, Part 1. This is a big deal for me as it's my first article (of I hope many) and it's something I've worked on almost nightly for the past month along with Nicholas Chase who wrote the Java, XML and done all the OpenLaszlo stuff.

I also participated in the developerWorks podcast with Scott Laningham (also my first time doing a podcast) who was graceful and done an excellent job of making me feel more at ease with the situation, as I was pretty....what's the word....in a full blown panic about the podcast, as like any geek, I don't function very well in a social/community environment. The podcast isn't available yet but should be shortly.

So overall I think a pretty eventful day yesterday.

Keith

I found this tidbit on Lockergnome this morning. I think this is great news to hear that IBM is getting more and more involved in the Opensource community. But is that really a surprise for the company that has embraced sites like OpenNTF that they are getting MORE involved in OpenSource? I don't think it's that big of a surprise, but it is nice to see IBM get back in the Office Suite arena. I believe it's even more noble that they will be sharing some of the usability enhancements and initial code developed for Lotus Notes in order to improve the OpenOffice.org Office Suite which hopefully will take some market share away from Micro$oft.

If you're so inclined, you can see the text of the press release here.

Keith

I just read this post from Bruce Elgort that he is leaving OpenNTF and passing the baton over to Vince Schuurman. Bruce, you've done an awesome job with OpenNTF and we all hate to see you go, whatever your next project they are very lucky to get you as a spokesperson, I hope you get as much success and satisfaction out of your next venture. Vince, you have some large shoes to fill but I'm sure you can take OpenNTF on to the next level.

Keith

I came across this plugin called Browster. It works in both IE and Firefox. The way it works is, when you do a search, say on Google, it puts a little lightning bolt next to the link for the page, you hover your mouse over the lightning bolt and a fully functional browser window opens up to show you the web page. Once you move your mouse out of the pop-up browser the window closes and allows you to move to the next link. Pretty cool. Also, any link on a page, you can set the program where it will show you a lightning bolt, you hover over the bolt and it’ll show you the preview. I know today while searching on notes.net Lotus Developer Domain Developer Works it was quite useful, instead of clicking on each link I was able to just hover over them and see if it’s what I was looking for.

Give it a try, I think you’ll like it. It’ll certainly speed up your searching.

Keith

Browster

When you get some time visit desktoptwo.com. It’s a website that emulates a desktop with an e-mail application, rss reader, Open Office, an address book and some others. Once you register you’ll have a virtual hard drive and you can upload files and documents and then access those files and documents from anywhere you may have internet connectivity. It’s a pretty cool concept and I can see where it would be useful.

But when you double-click a .doc, .xls, .ppt file you uploaded to your virtual hard drive, it asks if you want to use a remote program to open the document. Click the “Remote Program” dialog and it’ll kick off a remote instance of Open Office. You must have the Java plugin installed for this to work, and you can then modify, edit and save the file. Pretty cool.

I haven’t taken a lot of time to mess with the site but my first impressions are very good. All of the applications are in beta, as is the whole site I think, but I believe it’s a glimpse of what’s to come. I guess someday everything will be online and we’ll just have our dummy terminals to use. But in the mean time give Desktoptwo a look and see what you think about it.
Keith

Desktoptwo

I’ve recently started using a few new tools for reading and posting blogs that I really like. I was using Mozilla Thunderbird to read the various Blogs and News sites I keep up with. However, the RSS Reader is So-So in quality but it does work and is in a convenient place for keeping up on everything. But I was looking for a more robust solution that was capable of categorizing, reading the comments or opening the site to the page in order to see everything. The reader I found is an RSS News Reader called RSS Bandit. It seems to be pretty robust and highly configurable. It also allows you to post comments from right within the reader window. If you like you can also open the post you’re reading in a built in web-browser which uses the same engine as Mozilla Firefox. I’ve been using RSS Bandit now for a few days and like it much better than using the Thunderbird one.

I’m also trying w.bloggar for the first time. I ran a quick test and it seems to work as advertised but I can’t figure out how to post to a site that you have to login to in order to see it. w.bloggar has quite a list of supported blog software that has the ability to use this tool. One of them being Lotus Domino Blog API. I think that’s awesome for Domino to have support in such a widely used tool. It shows that Domino may finally be starting to move towards the mainstream. I like the idea of using w.bloggar that way I don’t have to open the browser, login to the website and navigate to the posting area of WordPress which is kinda deep in the XOOPS admin menu. I’m not sure yet just what all I can do with w.bloggar but I guess I’ll learn.

Once I get a little more experience using these tools I’ll post a couple of reviews about them as I haven’t posted any reviews in quite some time, plus I imagine some of those reviews are a little out of date. So, until then…

Keith

I’ve been working on version 1.4 of the User Administration Utility and wrote an agent to automatically delete users who haven’t used their ID in however many days which is selectable via a radio button. Well, I had selected 30 days for testing purposes but haven’t worked on the agent in a little over 3 weeks. Well, I look today as I was working on the documentation for the project and all my test IDs were gone. I hadn’t used them since they were created so it had been a little over 30 days. So, needless to say that the agent does work as it should. Now, I just have to decide if that’s a good thing or not.

Keith

I found this page on Dell’s website. About the n-Series PCs with no operating system installed Dell says this:

Are you looking for a desktop on which you can run Linux® or other open-source operating systems? Look no further!

Dell’s new open-source n Series desktop solution provides customers with a DimensionTM E510 desktop without an installed or included Microsoft® operating system. With the n Series desktop, customers have the flexibility to install an alternative operating system (such as a version of Linux® ), and help reduce the price of this system. In addition, the n Series desktop comes with a non-formatted hard drive ready for your custom installation. Dell’s n Series desktop ships with a copy of FreeDosTM , an open-source operating system that is ready to install.

I think this is really cool of Dell to do this. I did read somewhere that Dell has a $100 Million investment with Red Hat. Now I’m not sure this qualifies as OpenSource anymore, but it’s certainly interesting non-the-less.

Keith

Dell, OpenSource

I’ve created a new How-To on migrating from a weBLog blog to using the WordPress 1.5.2 blog. Both of these are XOOPS modules and thus the How-To is not geared for just a standalone install of WordPress.

Hope you enjoy the new How-To and find it useful.

Keith

I guess it would help if I posted a link huh?

I found a cool website called OpenSourceCMS. This site lets you demo all the different OpenSource CMS projects. I wish I had found this site sooner as I’m getting tired of XOOPS. I want to get away from these squarish looking systems which are limited in some form or another. Like XOOPS don’t have a weblog, so you have to install a seperate module and there are only a couple available and none of them do everything I want. So you have to compromise on features, which well…. SUCKS!!!

So, I’m once again looking for a new CMS system for my websites. The OpenSourceCMS should help quite a bit, hopfully. Will have to try it out and see what’s what and then make a decision. The limiting factor on choices when I picked XOOPS was I couldn’t find all the OpenSource CMS systems out there. But now that’s a different story. So, hopefully I’ll be able to make a good decision and move forward and stay on one type system.

Keith

OK, I figured this out. While looking at users inside of groups on my windows machine, I noticed that there was a samba domain SID for my entry and it didn’t match the domain SID. So, I un-joined (???) the domain and re-joined and I can now login. This is certainly a bonus. It took a few days to figure it out, but I’m glad it was so simple.

Keith

Man, after getting the initial configuration of OpenLDAP working I slowly started incorporating it into my home network, website, etc. Now all this was pretty painless with the exception of getting it to work with Samba. I have found quite a few quirks.

• You must include machine accounts in the people ou
  Now, I had these in their own ou but that has now changed.
• You must include the samba3.schema file in slapd.conf
• You don’t need the registry patch for Windows XP if you are using Samba 3
• You must run the smbpasswd -a username command for all the users. This adds all the objects to the person object in LDAP.
• You must also run the smbpasswd -a machinename$ command for all the machines.

So, after doing all this I tried to login from my windows machine and was informed that I didn’t have a machine account in the domain. I ensured that there was in fact machine accounts in the people ou and that they had all the pertinent objects. Which, they did.

But I still get this error message:

May 28 09:32:58 servername smbd[4869]: [2005/05/28 09:32:58, 0] rpc_server/srv_netlog_nt.c:get_md4pw(261)
May 28 09:32:58 servername smbd[4869]: get_md4pw: Workstation COMPUTER-NAME$: no account in domain

So, I’m not sure what is wrong. I will do more research and see if I can figure out what’s happening. But everything I’ve found so far says to make sure the machine accounts are in the same ou as people. Which they are. Kinda weird if you ask me…

Keith

I’ve been playing with setting up OpenLDAP to handle all authentication on my network. Everything has been fairly simple to setup and I understand the basics of how this is supposed to work. However, I’m having trouble importing my groups. I found a migration tool from PADL Software Pty LTD which is really good and it creates ldif files from your existing /etc/groups, /etc/passwd, /etc/networks, etc. files. This is really cool as I was dreading having to create these myself as that leaves a lot of room for error.

I am however having issues importing / creating groups in the ldap directory. Here is the error that gets produced in the log file when trying to create a group:

May 20 14:19:27 sturgeon slapd[18477]: conn=111 op=1 ADD dn=”cn=test,ou=group,dc=strick-net,dc=com”
May 20 14:19:27 sturgeon slapd[18477]: conn=111 op=1 RESULT tag=105 err=65 text=no structural object class provided
May 20 14:19:27 sturgeon slapd[18477]: conn=111 op=2 UNBIND
May 20 14:19:27 sturgeon slapd[18477]: conn=111 fd=12 closed

I also get this error if I use phpLDAPadmin to just add a group using the posixGroup template. Oh and by the way phpLDAPadmin is an AWESOME!! tool, much more user friendly than a command line or other LDAP clients I’ve looked at.

I can’t figure out why this is happening. I have found numerous posts on the web concerning this but no answers and it seems to only happen with SuSE Linux. I have narrowed it down to 2 possible schema files, rfc2307bis.schema or nis.schema. These are provided by default when you install OpenLDAP via the SuSE installation package.

I’ve tried modifying them to include “cn” as being required and removing userPassword as being optional but I still get the same results. So, if you can provide any help trying to resolve this issue please let me know.

Keith

Update 05/22/05: In the /etc/openldap/schema/rfc2307bis.schema file the posixGroup object reads:

objectclass ( 1.3.6.1.1.1.2.2 NAME ‘posixGroup’ SUP top AUXILARY
DESC ‘Abstraction of a group of accounts’
MUST ( cn $ gidNumber)
MAY ( userPassword $ memberUid $ description ) )

It should read:

objectclass ( 1.3.6.1.1.1.2.2 NAME ‘posixGroup’ SUP top STRUCTURAL
DESC ‘Abstraction of a group of accounts’
MUST ( cn $ gidNumber)
MAY ( userPassword $ memberUid $ description ) )

This corrected the issue

I’ve posted a review of XOOPS. That’s the new portal/CMS system for keithstric.com. So far I really like it. So give it a read and post your comments or rate it yourself .

Keith

I’ve started investigating a project called Project Honeypot. I was made aware of this project from this entry on Ken Nerhood’s website. Here is what the Project Honeypot webiste says Project Honeypot is:

Project Honey Pot is a distributed system of decoy email addresses website administrators can include on their sites in order to gather information about the robots and spiders spammers use. We collate data on how addresses are harvested, distributed, and eventually spammed in order to understand the entire spam cycle.

I believe this project just started up a few weeks ago so they haven’t really collected that much data yet. Also, I’m not sure how this will end up working. They say they will pursue legal action against spammers under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.

This could end up being very costly unless they have lawyers who are willing to do this pro-bono (?). Unless of course they are just presenting their data to the local DA who then pursues the legal action. I think the overall idea is alright, and if they’re able to do what they say they can do then in the long run it should make a difference in the amount of spam being sent and the mindset of spammers.

I also sent an e-mail to Chris Linfoot who if you don’t know, is an everything spam guru. I’m curious to know his take on this project.

Keith

Update below with Chris’s comments…Here is what Chris has to say about the project:

This is new to me but seems like a somewhat flawed idea. It will not
stop spam or even slow it down (I do not suppose it is intended to do
so directly), though being able to track down address harvesters may
be academically interesting.

I think the notion that harvesters are the top of the spam food chain
is somewhat naive. The people doing the spamming and more usually
selling the spamware, not those harvesting addresses, are at the top
of the food chain and most of them are already known - that is what
ROKSO is for (http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso).

If you are really looking for startling revelations about the location and identity of spammers, just look at the bottom, right of the Spamhaus home page at the section entitled “Top 10 ROKSO Spammers” -
there’s about 90% of your spam load right there and I didn’t need a honeypot to find out.

Keith

I’ve posted a new review about an opensource project called eGroupWare. This is a pretty robust groupware application. So, go check out the review and the project.

Keith

I’ve recently started looking at Gallery 2 (G2). It appears to be MUCH more polished than Gallery 1. The setup is a very nice wizard type setup. The entire look of Gallery 2 is very clean and very polished. I think the Gallery development team has done an awesome job to date. However this is still in Alpha testing and is stated that currently there are some security issues and should not be made available to the public, so, I followed their advice.

While messing around with it I found a couple of things that don’t work yet.

• The [list] feature in comments doesn’t work. It doesn’t show any text you enter between [list] and [/list]
• You can’t embed it into any CMS / Portal packages yet
• The blocks configuration section doesn’t seem to be working. You get some strange error. I haven’t really done any digging on it as it is in Alpha testing

So, what little I’ve messed with it, the list of things not quite right is kinda short. I didn’t test all the different modules which are available and with the exception of the blocks module all the ones I’ve tested have worked fine. Here are some of the features I’ve tested and all seems well:

• Search feature works pretty good. The advanced search doesn’t really offer that much as far as being advanced. Just lets you expand your search, doesn’t give any options like ignoring words, searching for phrases, etc. Of course for a picture gallery I’m not sure if that would be appropriate.
• The formatting of how many images appear on a page works good
• There are a bunch of modules you can activate and deactivate including some shopping cart type modules, search, import, create an album on user creation (yaaa) and many others
• Very clean, professional look
• Extraction of EXIF data from photograph. You can also define which data to extract or not extract
• Choice of 4 different image / graphics toolkits
• Ability to configure which icons to use for the different file types

An impressive list so far. Since G2 is currently in Alpha Testing they will not provide an upgrade path to upgrade your G2 gallery to the next alpha or beta version. Which is kindof expected. So, if this is a preview of what’s to come for Gallery I’m sure the finished version should be awesome. Great job Gallery development team.

Keith

I’ve written a new review for tsWebEditor. tsWebEditor is a very robust opensource web editor project that supports a whole large list of scripting languages. I’ve been using it for a little while and I really like it. So, check out the Review.

Keith

I’ve recently started using the Gentoo File Manager on my Linux box. It’s a good file manager and is just a front end to command line commands for file manipulation. I’ve written a review about it. So far I like it, if you try it I bet you’ll like it too..

Keith

I’ve written a new review about Comet WebFileManager which is a web based file manager. It’s written with PHP and is pretty neat. I think that this product would be perfect for a hosted environment as it is user driven and the user can only see what the administrator allows the user to see. So check it out and let me know what you think.

Keith

I’ve recently started using Mozilla Thunderbird as an e-mail client in a last ditch effort to find an e-mail client that I like. I wrote a review of this product in which I described a bug about folders not showing any messages and some messages showing no text. Well, I was browsing the Mozilla Thunderbird Forums this morning and came across the fix for this frustrating issue. What you do is, close Thunderbird and then delete the following files:

• c:\documents and settings\username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default.???\Mail\Local Folders\*.msf
• c:\documents and settings\username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default.???\panacea.dat

Open Thunderbird and check it out. I was then able to see all the messages in all the folders and of the 10 or so messages I opened and couldn’t read before I could now read.

So, this is a pretty easy fix to an extremely frustrating bug.

Keith

I found this post on Ken Nerhood’s blog about a product called phpGedView which is an online Genealogy application. I’ve been messing around with it and I must say it’s very slick indeed. Has alot of features and is pretty smart. For example, I started with me on the family tree, I listed my mother and father, well the tree automatically updated and when I went to my mom or dad it showed them as husband and wife. I really like that, there are also obvious links for adding more children to the family or additional spouses and the resulting children which phpGedView keeps seperated by father. It comes with 5 or 6 different themes, has a user management system or can be incorporated into phpNuke, postNuke or XOOPS.

All in all I believe this to be a pretty good product. I’m not sure yet how you would incorporate more family files into the product or how well it would handle the user security between those files, which might be pretty interesting.

But I’ll probably have a review written in a day or so about this product, but, since I haven’t used many genealogy programs in the past I don’t know of how much use someone could get from the review.

So, until next time….

Keith