Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

I always go on (and on…) about how I chose a 12″ powerbook because it was really portable and had decent battery life. Thinking about it, it isn’t that much more portable than a bigger powerbook or macbook, but it has better battery life than those with bigger screens. Now that I have a new battery in here I have to gush about how nice it is to have really useable battery life. Last night I watched a film (well a long TV episode) on battery power, listened to about an hour of radio paradise over wifi, and then here I am this morning, blogging, surfing and doing some web development and still have a third of my battery left. All this time i’ve had wifi on, screen at full brightness and about 10 applications open.

If you can get it back into version 2.5 then the data belongs to plone, otherwise it never belonged to plone in the first place..

I’m still undecided and a bit lost about how i’m going to get www.dfrskatezine.com upgraded from 2.1 to plone 2.5

To recap:-

• I can’t really upgrade it in situ (although could be persuaded to try it if people think this is the best bet)
• portal zexp import didn’t work for me
• smaller zexp imports left me with broken stuff.
• it is on a shared instance so the data.fs file is too big to move realistically (once again, still an option if encouraged)

so…I’ve started creating some zpts that I can use to dump content as xml files (e.g. all_articles.xml, containing title, content, url and any other data I need to move - kind of RSS on acid). Not quite XMLforest, but I haven’t got my head round that yet as I live in the skin layer mostly. The masterplan is to then use some python foo magic to populate a fresh 2.5.most_recent_stable site from this XML.

Obviously I need to handle the images and other files seperately - so far I have used a skin script to generate a file containing wget statements for each visible/published image on the site and download the images with a mirrored folder structure, along with an accompanying xml file with the captions, descriptions and paths. I intend to rebuild my products from scratch (pop my zope 3 cherry even?) so I don’t necessarily need my existing products to be 2.5 compatible.

Think i’m going about this the wrong way? Please let me know! Please also bear in mind that while I am a keen student, I am mostly a GUI guy (+ basic archetypes development), and am easily confused by your crazy python talk, and have been made weak by your excellent installers, to the point that I haven’t got a clue how you would go about installing or upgrading zope if it requires me to do anything more than click buttons

An asp/ MS Access web app of mine suddenly stopped working, and was throwing an error:-

Microsoft JET Database Engine error ‘80004005′

The Microsoft Jet database engine cannot open the file ‘C:\foo\bar.mdb’. It is already opened exclusively by another user, or you need permission to view its data.

I knew that it wasn’t opened by another user, so it must be related to the permissions. I remembered the previous day I had run “compact and repair” in the Access GUI to bring the database size down. Running this as administrator via the GUI in situ on the server seems to remove the permissions for the IUSR_(your server name) account. You can add permissions back in for that user via the security tab for the file (if you have access to the server gui).

One way to avoid this is to run the compact and repair procedure from an asp script like this one. This seems to do the trick without breaking anything

After attending the excellent recent Skillswap on security by Oliver Humpage at the Watershed in Bristol, I am feeling more paranoid than ever about security on public wifi. We are all being encouraged to use wifi and work from wherever you want, but little advice is given about how to avoid transmitting your unencrypted usernames and passwords over the network.

By default the average user will not be using any encryption - virtually everyone using ordinary email (i.e. using a desktop mail client) transmits their username and password when they check their mail. During the presentation Oliver demonstrated how applications such as dsniff can be used to sit and gather unencrypted data on a wifi network - this is not difficult to do.

Being already paranoid, I tend to use a web proxy over ssh to surf on public wifi, but I have a whole load of other applications running -IM, skype etc that I suspect also transmit unencrypted data that needs securing, which may or may not be tricky to do over ssh. Apparently a VPN is the way to go.

I decided to try the new java gmail app on my sony k750i. It installed OK, but when I tried to connect it was telling me I did not have the “appropriate certificate”. After abit of googling I found advice on this forum thread to navigate to the following URL on my phone browser:-

https://www.verisign.com/cgi-bin/support/rootcert/getrootcert.cer

I did this (even though I am reluctant to take the seven hours it takes to type in a URL that long on my phone) and it gave me a certificate to accept. The app now works a treat

I have to admire the commitment and effort of Christian Scholz with the videos from plone conf (and subsequent sprints) he has been producing under the banner of COM.lounge TV. These things are appearing online at a prolific rate, it’s difficult to keep up! From my experience with helping Nate to video a few things at snow sprint 3, it takes a lot of organisation, time and effort and… free disk space to get these things edited and online in any decent amount of time, let alone to produce them with professional quality like these ones. I think “videocast evangelist” Robert Scoble could learn a thing or two from Mr Scholz.

Six simple steps to make the plone 2.5 navigation portlet get it’s knickers in a twist:-

1. create a folder in the root of a plone site
2. in folder contents in the root, move your folder to the top so that it is the first item (after “home” if you have that enabled) in the navigation tree
3. in the new folder create a new page and set that page as the default view
4. in the ZMI enable “Folder” as a type that can be used for a default page (see this is where I should have known something bad was going to happen)
5. go to the root of the site and set your new folder as the default view of the portal (i.e so that the homepage of the portal is in fact the default page in your new folder one level deep - believe it or not I had a reason to do this)
6. Hey presto your new folder falls to the bottom of the navtree - no amount of reordering will persuade it otherwise! You can try swearing too if you like, that won’t work either

An off-hand comment I heard about PloneFormGen while I was at plone conference has possibly just payed for most of the conference and travel expense to get to Seattle. I can’t remember where I heard it, but someone mentioned that it was a nice product. I stuck it on my mental to-do list to try it out…

I’m currently working on a site that is close to going live and I had an email waiting for me from the client on friday, saying something like “by the way, can you change that join button so that it sais join our mailing list?” The conversation that followed let me establish that in fact what they wanted was a custom contact form with a few extra options. Usually I would then proceed to hack the contact form and mail script around to achieve this - knowing that I would have to be careful not to lose my customisations if I upgraded or reskinned the site, but this time I decided to try PloneFormGen.

Now that really was painless, really easy to figure out (i’m one of those people who you have to threaten with physical violence before I will RTFM). Thumbs up to Steve McMahon for a very useful product

Connecting Bristol are talking about a map project to show areas of free wifi in Bristol.

I intended to do a comprehensive wrap up of our trip to plone conference in seattle (and stopover in new york), but it is still a bit of a blur, and i’m still jetlagged (ok, i’m just a lightweight, i’m always sleepy). I need to have a look at all the presentation material and my notes, so I promise to write something up and provide some feedback to the presenters in the next week.

The major insight (plonewise) to come out of this week is that resistance to Zope 3 is futile, in fact i’m quite excited about the idea now