The blog, gallery, and webmail have all been updated this weekend to the latest version

I run Roundcube for my webmail system and this finally reached a stable release in early March.  Gallery runs my gallery and has also had a fairly big point release in the past few months, version 2 is really starting to come into it’s own and settle down.  And finally my blog runs on WordPress which had a point release in the past 24 hours

Tonight my server is being turned off until I get a connection sorted at the new house. Until such time e-mail and this web site are temporary located on a shared server.

I’ve moved the home page, blog, and a few others bit ‘n’ pieces, the gallery is 978MB is size so I’ll move that later (if at all). The shared server includes webmail so I’ve not moved roundcube over either.

All other services (test areas, other web sites, music etc) will stay on tuxx and will just be unavailable for the time being.

I’ve been using a customised version of the default WordPress theme for the past 2 years and finally got bored of it. Not only do to many other sites look the same but there were problems on small screens and it didn’t degrade as nicely as I would have liked.

Since I’m not a designer I’ve had to resort to using other publicly available themes. Most of the themes on the WordPress site have a defined width, and the others I just didn’t like. Wrong colour(s) or chosen theme. I don’t know why the designers have created themes with a fixed width, but what’s wrong with the side of the screen? Monitors are wider then they are taller.

In the end I found Clean and Mean. It has a simple design which was number one on my list of requirements, but like many others it didn’t use the whole screen. It didn’t taken me long to get it to use all the screen. The rest of the adjustments include putting the menu where I wanted it and getting the rest of the site to merge with the new theme, adding the bits I wanted and removing those I didn’t.

I’ve tested it against the major browsers and most people shouldn’t notice any problems (if you do let me know). It looks acceptable and is certainly usable on my O2 Xda Orbit which has a 240×320 resolution. There are a few bugs still to get and I’ll fix them as I see them or they are pointed out to me.

Edit: When I find a suitable image I’ll replace the background image at the top of the screen.

Yahoo! uses protection, as does anyone who uses vBulletin. I am of course talking about protecting your web applications and it’s users, and more specifically the logon processes for your application.

You could use SSL logins, but on a shared host this isn’t an option. One option left to you is to let the usernames and passwords flow over the internet in plain text. With a little javascript it is possible to put some security into the process. The rest of this post is about implementing this. Don’t worry if you have javascript disabled, it falls back to the original method of sending it in plain text.

Continue Reading “How Much Protection Do You Use?” »

I’ve only recently come across Lightbox JS and wanted to get it working here. There is already a WP lightbox JS WordPress plugin but unfortunatly it uses the first version of Lightbox JS and I wanted to use the more current version.  Not only does it look better but I believe it works better than the first version.

I don’t plan on using it with every image, the last image I posted full size and it fitted just fine.  I’ll use it when it makes it easier to see an image in more detail.  A perfect example is the image that I used in my Backup MX post.  A little fuzzy in the actual posting, but the full size image is perfectly clear.  To see what I mean click on the image.

I’m slowly moving over to a new domain – www.tuxx.org.uk for the web site and *.tuxx.org.uk for other stuff I do.

Please update your bookmarks and RSS readers!

One
As most of my friends and family know by now I’m searching for a job. In the course of doing so I have looked at a great deal of job adverts from a range of companies, most of which require some kind of experience. Now how exactly are non experienced people expected to get experience when you need experience to get a job in the first place?

You may like to point out that many companies run Graduate Recruitment Programs where you work in a range or areas within the company, but look close and they still ask for some sort of experience.

See why this bugs me?

Two
The other thing that bugs me is the login systems that are in use today. To put it simply there is no single login system that just works. The only one that comes close, and it pains me to say this, is Microsoft with their Active Directory implementation. I know that at the heart of Active Directory it is actually LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), but does this mean I can use it with my non MS application and operating systems easily. No. Unix operating sytems have NIS, but this doesn’t have a reputation for ease of opperation (or security for that matter). Web applications don’t get away with it either. Try and set up a web site that runs two popular web applications. I bet that the two wont have a common login system, and I further bet that it wont be easy to get them to work together. PHP Users is a project set up to solve this problem, but no one seems to be getting ready to use it once it releases full release stage.

I await that day when I can install a program or operating system, and once told where it can athenticate I am able to login with the same username and password as all the other programs on that system. Or I may not need to login as it will pick up that I have authenticated, the so called Single Sign On. No messing about, just “Authenticate using ‘auth.exmaple.com’ ” and away we go.

In pretty much the same theme as the last post I upgraded to Gallery 2.0.2 this evening.

Version 2.x is a major rewrite from pretty much the ground up so it’s been a learing curve getting used to how things work in the new version, least of all hacking my own wishes into the code. I’ve not had to actually touch any of the code for these tweaks, I’ve been able to do it through the themes. A good sign of things to come I hope.

The one thing I can’t get to work is the “Currently listening to”, in other parts of the site this is done through a script which I include in the footer page. The footer page is then included in the other pages as needed. This hasn’t been possible now that Gallery is using Smarty to run the themes.

By the way, I include the script in to footer as the script sometimes pauses while it gets the details from another web site. Putting it in the header as I used to do causes the whole page to pause and sometimes time out. In the footer 90% (the important 90%) of the page loads before it stops, and then I just use a

to position it at the top of the page.

Given that it’s new and so very different I’m running Gallery and Gallery2 along side each other for a few weeks. Not expecting to be uploading many pictures so it shouldn’t be a problem having to upload twice for a short period.