Campaign for the right to create, forward and follow links
Posted by ITechLog in Itechlog News on January 20th, 2010
There has been a talk for while about news agencies blocking bloggers, aggregators and search engines from indexing their content. This has started to become a reality when the Times Online decided to block the news aggregator site newsnow.co.uk. In response Struan Bartlett the founder of NewsNow started the right2click campaign. Watch his campaign video.
Linux ClearOS to rival Microsoft’s SBS
Microsoft has dominated the small enterprise market with its out of the box feature rich SBS (Small Business Server). Linux has always trailed behind it and although most of the technology to rival Microsoft has been in place, it has always been a mammoth task to setup a server from scratch to do that. ClearOS came to fill in this gap.
“ClearOS is a powerful network and gateway server designed for small organizations and distributed environments. Though ClearOS comes with an extensive list of features and integrated services, the solution is easy to configure thanks to the intuitive web-based interface.” (extracted from Clear Foundation website)
Take a look at how ClearOS’ features match the MS SBS:
| Microsoft SBS
Centralized Authentication (Active Directory) |
ClearOS Linux
Centralized Authentication (LDAP) |
The Linux Magazine published an in depth article comparing and explaining this “new” Linux distro.
Microsoft’s attempt to bribe its way to the top
Posted by ITechLog in Itechlog News on December 11th, 2009
Once again Microsoft is showing it’s dirty claws. According to a report in the Financial Times (also mentioned in the KPMRS Blog), Microsoft is planing to offer to pay publishers to remove their content from Google in an attempt to make its search engine Bing (no link on purpose) the #1 search engine.
According to the FT, one website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”. – extracted
I cannot believe the greedy minds in the media industry are already thinking about embracing it. Again Microsoft has gotten it all wrong, will they ever learn? Attitudes like this will only promote two things, firstly the dissemination of online content theft, were people will republish full content of paid websites to drive traffic to their sites/blogs and secondly it will take away the choice that users now have of using any search engine they like. This is so “un-internet”!
I agree with the comment on the KPMRS blog by blogger Greg (null pointer) who said:
“How about instead of Microsoft spending millions to make their search results appear (artificially) better than Google’s, they spend that same money to create better search algorithms? That’s real competition!” – extracted
Google Chrome Beta for Linux
Posted by ITechLog in Itechlog News on December 8th, 2009
Google has announced the release of a beta version of its browser Google Chrome for Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/OpenSuse).Here are a few facts from the Google Chrome team:
60,000 lines of Linux-specific code written
23 developer builds
2,713 Linux-specific bugs fixed
12 external committers and bug editors to the Google Chrome for Linux code base, 48 external code contributors
(Mis) understanding Social networking
Posted by ITechLog in Social Networking on December 3rd, 2009
Can you imagine if you were to be made accountable for every joke and funny comment you made when hanging out with your friends? Life would really stink. I have recently seen a lot of people getting annoyed with, or embarassed by their friends on Facebook, Orkut and the kind. Why do people take social networking so seriously? Is it a problem understanding written communication or is it that our malicious minds just expect the worse from people? Or is it a simple lack of good old common sense? I think it’s all of it, and if you just add a bit of insecurity to the pile, social networking can become a pain. I have come to a few personal decisions regarding social networking and there’s no harm in sharing them.
- The benefit of the doubt: A difficult concept in today’s society. People are not as mean as we expect them to be, so give your (or someone else’s) friends the benefit of the doubt, take it with a pinch of salt. Relax.
- The e-persona: We all have it, yes we ALL do. That sarcastic, naughty part of us that comes alive when we go online.
- The intonation (or lack of it). This one goes with #1 (not what you are thinking, e-persona). Most languages base the entire meaning of a sentence in its intonation. So when reading something, try not go with your very first impression, especially if it’s a negative one.
- TWRTCS: stands for “Think Write Read Think Correct Share(or not)” – it’s a friendship saviour. I can’t number how many times I have written something really funny (at least I thought it was) but didn’t share as a public comment, because I just took time to read it again before sending and saw it could be misunderstood.
- Avoid work colleagues (specially your boss): You really don’t want your “private social life” to paint a different picture of you to your boss. It’s not about being fake, but they may not chose to give you the benefit of the doubt and may think that your e-persona is the real one. If you do have your boss on your social network just be very aware of what you write. Unless she/he are really cool!
- Privacy: Don’t write on someone’s wall about something that is more of a private issue, either yours or theirs.
- Get a life: Being in touch with friends on social network sites is fun but it can take over your life, and turn you into a very annoying “comment on everything” kind of person.
Add to it if you like….
Google Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
Posted by ITechLog in Easy Tips, Tutorials, Web Services on September 18th, 2009
Great tips on the use of Redirect 301 and rel=canonical among some other good stuff.
Open .eps files on GIMP for Windows
Posted by ITechLog in Easy Tips, Open Source on September 18th, 2009
As usual this post is a self help note, but as it’s public I hope it helps someone else. If you want to open .eps or .ps files with GIMP on Windows you will need to install Ghostscript (download it from http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/). After successful installation you will need to create an environment variable called GS_PROG on Windows. To do this just follow these steps:
- Right-click on the ‘My Computer‘ Icon and select properties
- Click on the advanced tab
- Click on Environment Variable button
- Under either User variables or System variables click on “New”
- Set Variable name : GS_PROG
- Set Variable path: C:\Progam Files\gs\gs864w32\bin\gswin32.exe – this is where yous gswin32.exe resides, make sure you type the correct path.
Click “OK” for everything and then open GIMP, you should now be able to open .eps and .ps files
Extra information: .EPS/PostScript (.PS) is a file that may contain 2D vector graphics, bitmap images, and text; includes an embedded preview image in bitmap format; often used for transferring image data between different operating systems. Adobe Illustrator, Acrobat, Photoshop or CorelDraw are the kind of programs that normally use/open these files.
YouTube UK pays up to show Music Videos
Posted by ITechLog in Web Services on September 3rd, 2009
After reaching a deal with PRS for Music and agreeing to paying up an undisclosed lump sum of money, YouTube UK is now able to resume playing Music videos for its users. Neither sides have revealed the amount of money paid by the Google owned company but it’s large enough to backdate payments until January 2009 and last until 2012.
Both companies were quoted on the BBC technology website saying:
A spokesman for PRS for Music, formerly known as the Performing Rights Society, said: “It is a lump sum deal which seems to work for YouTube’s business model and offers recompense for our 60,000 members. We can be friends again.”
A spokesman for YouTube said the “tens of thousands” of videos which had disappeared “will come back over the next few days”.
Wordpress Media upload HTTP Error
Wordpress and Wordpress-MU have given me the HTTP error in the various installations I have performed and each time there’s a different cause. This post is nothing more than a personal notation for future reference but I hope it’s helpful to someone.
Error: when trying to upload media using the Wordpress Flash uploader it get the message HTTP Error
Disclaimer: before messing with your .htaccess file, make sure you have a backup copy of it in case it causes a 500 Server configuration error. If this happens just replace the .htaccess file with the back up version. Check your code for any mistakes and try again.
Possible causes:
- mod_security – basically all Apache servers will have it turned on, so you may need to turn it off for the async-upload.php file using .htaccess. The newer versions of WP have added this code already, but in case you mess up your htaccess file, here it is. Just add the following lines to the bottom of your .htaccess file in the root folder of your WP or WP-MU installation.
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>
- Access Denied Error 403/ Permission issue – another typical problem. Make sure that the upload folder is writeable by the server, you can set the permission to 754 and it should work fine. In Wordpress the upload folder sits under /wp-content/ in WP-MU it sits under /blogs.dir/”blog number”/files (default site blog number is 1 and the other blogs are numbered in ascending order of creation)
- PHP Upload limit – check you PHP.ini settings for the settings upload_max_filesize and post_max_size. You can change these directly in your PHP.ini if you have access to it or you can change it by adding a php.ini file to you root directory with the following code. The default is normally 2M but you can change it to anything at your own risk, you should not need more then 8M.)
upload_max_filesize = 8M
php_value post_max_size 8M
for anything above 8M you may need to add an execution time to the .htaccess code also
php_value max_execution_time 800
- Authentication Failed Error 401- I checked my server log and noticed that Wordpress was trying to access the 401.shtml error template every time I got the HTTP error during a media upload attempt. This normally occours if you are using password protection for the Wordpress root folder or the folder where your uploads should reside. You should disable the password protection on the folder i norder for the uploader to work.
Hope it helps. Please leave your contributions and bug reports so others can benefit from it.
