Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

1. Hexpixels - an online collaborative magazine based on plone 2.1. The subject matter will be eclectic lifestyle stuff based around contemporary design/music/travel/writing. (No techie stuff). I intend to release both the skin and the content types as Products for use by the plone community.

Status (at time of writing): hexpixels.com registered, some draft designs exist courtesy of Iain Claridge. Started creating a skin and a product which will contain all the content types.

Estimated delivery date: sometime earlier this year

2. Skate Syndication site and CMS - a Plone based site that will both display inbound skate related RSS feeds and provide a CMS for outbound RSS feeds and other content. It would act as a CMS that other sites could use to create articles, news and events for use on their own site (maybe with some kind of functionality to create static files and FTP content to other sites in addition to XML content feeds)

Status: Got all excited about this the other day, now not sure whether I can be bothered …

today i’m bored of reading too many blogs. I’m current subscribed to loads -  I like to think that by doing this I keep up on the latest developments, but I get the feeling that as long as I stay subscribed to just a few of the blogs i’ll find out all the relevant stuff anyway, with the added bonus of not having to read the same stuff over and over.

EDIT: I removed some of this post that in retrospect was a bit bitchy.

There is more than one way to skin a plone. The simplest is to make your changes within the custom folder in the ZMI. You can also create "proper" skin layer through the ZMI. The best way however is to make a filesystem based skin in the form of a Product. In preperation for a plone skinning demo I one day intend to do (ahem.. originally some time in August, but not looking too possible to meet that particular deadline!), I ran through this howto. This really is the best way to do it for several reasons:-

1. it integrates with Plone really nicely so that your skin appears on the list of available skins within the plone settings.

2. you can work directly on the filesystem using your favourite editor.

3. if you break something whist creating your new skin, you can switch back instantly to plone default or other skin while you investigate what went wrong.

4. you end up with an installable product easily dropped into a plone installation.

This has also opened up a new possibility for one of my personal plone projects. The idea is to create a plone based collaborative online magazine. I’m now creating the skin as a product, and I also intent to create some content types to go with it. This means that I could release my end result as an online magazine product, including a skin, so may finally have something to contribute back to the plone community

a combination of having a toddler plus distributed family mostly on the other side of the country, some well away from viable public transport means that my wife and I need a car. we have a little beauty of a 1995 nissan micra - one of the cheapest and most economical cars we could possibly have, great in the city, if a little twitchy and noisy on the motorway. It is also jade green with turquoise interior so no-one can accuse me of posing in it.

we are also looking after a 1999 left hand drive new beetle, which is considerably more stylish and, yes, you could concievably accuse me of posing in it. but first you would have to catch me driving it, which is hardly ever, because being left hand drive on uk roads is a pain (especially in the city), plus it is a bit thirsty, plus i’m paranoid about scratching it, cos it’s not mine.

so.. money. the beetle needs insuring because the owner now lives abroad and he can’t insure it, so i’ve been trying to get some quotes, including starting a fresh policy for one of the cars. I’ve wasted nearly a whole days holiday on it. you see although I have 7 years no claims I can only use it one policy - the quotes for either car without no-claims bonus are sky high, even the cheap and cheerful nissan micra - roughly 300% what they are with the no-claims. on top of this my current insurer won’t touch the beetle because it is left hand drive, so I would have to cancel a policy I only took out in June, and those thieving insurers don’t give you much money back on a cancelled policy..

so where am I going with this.. nowhere, i’m just moaning about how cars bleed you dry….

This is one of the options on the grub bootloader - if you only have the one OS on there, you will need to press escape during the 3 seconds that the grub options display at boot up.

i’m currently building a bare-bones LAMP server using ubuntu 5.04. so today i’ve been getting to grips with apt:-

to enable all the ubuntu manged repositories:-

edit /etc/apt/sources.list - uncomment all the commented out URL’s

to search for a package:-

apt-cache search whatever

to install:-

apt-get install whatever

update: you can now use aptitude instead of apt-get. apt-whatever etc

I got an email the other day from a guy thanking me for providing instructions on how to flip your display back the right way up when you (or someone else) has pressed the key combination to turn it upside down. This happened to me, so I blogged it here in the troubleshooting section of this site. Looking at my logs I can see that that is a popular post, and the troubleshooting section in general gets a lot of hits.

The troubleshooting section, along with a few other obscure sections on this site, I deliberately keep out of the way, because I still like to think that some people read this site for general entertainment rather than just a techie resource, and getting emails like the one the other day thanking me for the help reminds me that it is important to keep that stuff up there in any potential migration to another blog system (wordpress or quills are the current candidiates).

On that subject I haven’t made any moves towards migrating the blog since I was on about it before. I decided quills wasn’t quite ready, and my ability to contribute towards getting it ready is hampered by a lack of spare time - I just want hypothecate in a state I can use it rather than having to maintain the software aswell. Wordpress is ready to go and i’ve already done an experimental migration, but i’m not sure what i’m going to gain by having a stop-gap system in place, because ultimately I want something plone based.

I guess it is a question of how selfish I want to be about this - although I benefit from other people doing the work and bugfixing on systems like quills (which has, incidentally, been handed over to the plone foundation now I believe - at least is about to be if it hasn’t already), I really should be contributing by using it and helping fix bugs…

I was getting an error message (’color_xterm’: unknown terminal type.) when trying to do, well virtually anything. This was because of shell stuff. Typing:

export TERM=vt100

solves it. I have been told that I can add this to some kind of shell profile script so I don’t have to type this every time I log in.

i’ve installed Ubuntu 5.04 "The Hoary Hedgehog" on my old laptop at home and have the following to report:-

• it recognises the belkin usb fast ethernet adapter I impulse bought
• the install was really easy
• (sure I had more to say - I will add to this…)

If you’ve ever heard the phrase Extreme Programming and pictured a load of geeks with laptops dangling from ropes over a ravine, i’d like to blame that on whoever invented the phrase. If you want to get a rough idea of what it really is, have a read of this post on Malarkey, or for a full explanation go here.

(we’ve been trying out this methodology at netsight)