R-Log » R-Log

Back Up And Running for 2013 !

Raj — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:07:00 +1300

Sigh. More ne'er-do-wells messing with my site. Kudos to my webhost for picking up the oddball behaviour. The site itself was fine but someone was exploiting a Pivotx hole for nefarious mailing & storage purposes causing the hosts CPU to spike.

Not a great first post for 2013 but its taken a fair bit of motivation to get back onto the blogging bandwagon.

Website Hits from Suspect Locations

Raj — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:20:00 +1300

Just trawling my site logs - traffic has slowed recently (a bit like my posting) - starting to get hits from China and the Ukraine originating from some odd source addresses. That doesn't sound good.

Better backup my site . . .

A Plug - The Corporate Woman’s Health & Fitness Journal

Raj — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:36:00 +1300

A plug for a friends new book - if you're into the fitness-thing then pop over here and check out The Corporate Woman’s Health & Fitness Journal.

A Plug - VillageGarden

Raj — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:35:00 +1300

A friend setup a website to buy/sell locally grown produce - pop on over to the VillageGarden and check it out.

SharePoint vs Drupal

Raj — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:29:00 +1300

This is a little biased (he's obviously an open-source LAMP fan; specifically the Drupal CMS) but the points he raises as SharePoint difficulties are similar to the ones we've experienced.

Pop over and have a read of Drupal vs SharePoint

We've had ongoing issues, particularly items 1, 2, 3, 4, 6:

1.Setting up a local development environment is difficult and expensive.
We solved (if you can call it that) by just giving admin rights to the dev SharePoint boxes - the catch is that opportunities to customize the environment for a developer decreases moving through Systest, UAT and Production so its very easy for things to get out of synch.

2.Setting up an efficient development/deployment process is cumbersome.
We don't have a fix - apparently you can develop automated deployments from TFS (Team Foundation Server - the successor to Visual Source Safe) for SharePoint but most project managers wouldn't wear the additional expense of a foolproof scripted deployment for a one-off project. So we manually move between environments and every deployment brings with it new and odd problems (often the fix isn't regression tested which means going from UAT into Prod can bring new and unforeseen issue; often not helped by inconsistances from item #1).

3.Theming SharePoint is extremely difficult.
Doing anything thats not out of the box seems to cost a lot of time and money - very little of which seems to be re-usable.

4.Many SharePoint modules (aka webparts) are quirky and don't work as expected.

5.Lists and libraries are quirky and also often do not work as expected.

6.SharePoint is slow and does not give you real access to the database that powers it.
In fact - reinforcing this point - messing with the back-end SQL database will render your SharePoint environment unsupportable. Microsoft patches and hotfixes may just over-write anything you've added above and beyond the standard SharePoint working databases. Without telling you. Nice.

The comment from another developer in the discussion thread is interesting too and nails why the SharePoint push is so strong for IT management in terms of a seamless user experience for their clients:

"I would love to dump sharepoint altogether, but users simply will not accept a detaching, editing, and attaching workflow for documentation management. They simply want to click and go. It wouldn't matter if a drupal site could serve them coffee and cake-- they simply won't stand for the attachment method of document management."

What the article didn't point out is that a growing number of people (particularly the younger generation) write on the web for the web (ie don’t use Word) so the DMS paradigm is becoming less relevant. Check out The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world.

All About Setting Up VPS Hosting

Raj — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:51:00 +1300

My sites relatively straightforward - however if you're after hosting with more than basic HTML then its worth looking into a VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosted solution.

This guy has knocked up a 20 step (each step is an article) process to getting your VPS up and running. Its worth a look - Set up an Unmanaged VPS for Newbies - The 20 Part Bible!

Google Wave

Raj — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:24:00 +1300

I've been a little slow catching up on some of the new emerging web technologies but someone said I should check out Google Wave.

The demo video is an hour long but its definitely worth sitting through - even if you only view it in little 5-10 minute chunks.

Makes me wonder what Microsoft and IBM have up their sleeves to maintain the relevance of their groupware products (Exchange and Notes).

The Doors

Raj — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:56:00 +1300

The front door - updates every 5 to 10 minutes

The back door - alternates between the catflap and french-doors

Pivot Upgrade Complete

Raj — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:33:00 +1300

Finally managed to upgrade to the new version of Pivot.

I ended up downloading my entire site, upgrading on my laptop and then re-uploading the entire site. The joy of completely relative links meant it all pretty much just worked.

There'll be oddball things going on for those few people that do visit on a regular basis until I iron out the kinks.

One thing to watch for is that it requires more memory allocated to PHP - the previous version of Pivot seemed to run with less than 8Mb allocated. The new one definitely needs more. Make sure whoever does you hosting is cool to fix this if you need it bumped up.

PivotX (Pivot v2) Has Been Released

Raj — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:21:00 +1300

PivotX has finally been released after two years of pretty solid development.

If you're after a web CMS/Blog-engine that is pretty simple to setup and use that doesn't require to much messing around with SQL or Unix then this could be what you're after. All you need is a PHP enabled web server and you're set to go.

Go on and check it out - PivotX

I'll have to set aside some time to upgrade as a fair bit has changed under the hood.

Google Ads

Raj — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 09:29:00 +1300

Trying out Google Ads to see if they actually generate any $$$ - so far they're pretty unobtrusive. I almost scrolled straight past them.

Pivot 2 is almost out

Raj — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:03:00 +1300

Pivot is a fantastic PHP based flatfile blogging engine - the new version is in development and the first alpha has been released. Check it out at PivotX.

My biggest gripe is probably a lack of any decent (and simple) plugin architecture like Blosxom. I really miss a simple category-tree like view.

Amazing - VectorMagic

Raj — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:26:00 +1300

This tool converts a bitmap into a vector image - take a look at VectorMagic.

Its pretty impressive for a web tool.

Websites as Graphs

Raj — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:37:00 +1300

Following on from the previous link about data visualisation - heres the phigmov site as a graph. Quite different from my previous static Blosxom site.

Pretty funky.

Hosting Problems

raj — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:31:00 +1300

Looks like I keep exceeding the SDF web quota so if you come to the site and see the generic SDF homepage that'll be whats going on. Might actually have to bite the bullet and move the site somewhere else. As part of my quest I came across Pivot which is a Blosxom-like PHP weblog engine that doesn't require a database backend. It appeals to my desire to not have to fart about with SQL just to publish content Now to find a half decent host (preferably in NZ that offers ssh, perl and php) that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Actually it might be Googles Coop - site bandwidth is apparently almost 50mb every few days which is pretty excessive for a small site. The only recent change has been the addition of Googles search engine. Might see what their tech support is like . . .

Google Co-op

raj — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 07:05:00 +1300

Ever since moving to static rendering on my perl based Blosxom site I've had a broken search function (Blosxom search is a perl module that interacts with the Blosxom cgi).

I finally found a nice and easily customisable alternative to 'rolling my own' - Google Co-op. Fill in a simple form, specify what you want to search and then customise the resultant search page by including the source for the form (about 5 lines) into your own page.

I haven't bothered to customise the results - I'm just glad to have a working site search

Smaps

raj — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 12:58:00 +1300

There are a couple of good mapping tools on the web for New Zealand - Wises and the AA are the first two that come to mind.

I've found them a little clunky particularly with respect to finding specific locations in NZ.

These guys have kind of turned mapping on its head - Smaps is a new system which does a dynamic lookup on a location - the more information you enter the more refined the search.

Very cool.

Google Suggest

raj — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 07:13:00 +1300

The web seems to be abuzz with Googles new 'gadget' - still in Beta but it looks promising - Google Suggest.