Today and tomorrow, I'm on holiday from work. After having a pretty lazy weekend, I've decided to make my short holiday productive. I've installed Common Lisp and Ruby on Rails on my iBook, and have been playing around with Lisp, getting to know its syntax.

I've been cleaning up various directories full of text files on my iBook and have come to the conclusion that I have so many notes scattered around the place that I'm probably losing track of some things. The solution? A wiki. I'm playing with Instiki. It seems to meet my requirements, and was pretty simple to set up on OS X. Here are the steps I took:

1. Installing Ruby 1.8.5 from here
2. Installing rubygems from here
3. sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies
4. sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby --include-dependencies
5. unzip instiki 0.12.0
6. Run ./instiki

Then, pointing a browser at http://localhost, you'll be prompted to specify some details about the Wiki, and then be forwarded to the wiki's homepage:

Today I've spent some time implementing a new design for sorn.net which I came up with yesterday. I was trying to keep it plain and simple. I've spent even more time today reading through the archive of xkcd comics. I've read them all before but hadn't realised they all have funny ALT text as well. For example...

If you hover your mouse over this comic, you get the message:

RFC 1149.5 specifies 4 as the standard IEEE-vetted random number

Coincidentally, there are a random amount of recent blog posts, twitter messages and del.icio.us links displayed on the front page of sorn.net ;-)

This evening, I placed all of sorn.net under version control, using Bazaar. It was for three reasons:

1. I couldn't believe I'd not done this before
2. I wanted to see how Bazaar would handle a project of this size (206mb working tree)
3. It should hopefully make updating the site much simpler, as I simply push changes over SSH using Bazaar.

I've retrieved all of the older blog posts from the bBlog database they were in, and added them into the new blog, so everything should be back on track now.

I've been having problems caused by the amount of comment and trackback spam I have had in this blog, so I've decided to write my own blog software. I'm also doing this as an exercise in refreshing my PHP skills as I've not used it for a couple of months ans wanted to do some more object-oriented programming in PHP.

I've not moved all of the content across to this new system yet - just the 8 most recent entries in the blog. I plan on getting RSS, tags and comments working over the next week. Hopefully this will make a significant improvement to the load on the server.

Ever wondered how to get screenshots of web pages that show the whole page, exactly as it would be viewed in your browser, even though the page is too big to fit on your screen?

Today I found the perfect application for doing that...

Paparazzi!.

It even creates thumbnails by itself like this one...

Paparazzi! was inspired by webkit2png, and for those of us running Linux, there is a khtml2png available as well.

I installed the ShortStat Dashboard widget today as a handy way of viewing the amount of hits and recent referrers that my website is getting. It's a Dashboard widget that connects to the web server and retrieves information generated by ShortStat which you need to install on your web server.

Apple released the Safari 3 web browser for OS X and Windows today. Download it here.

Today I noticed the first Google advert I've ever seen on Twitter. I wonder if we'll be seeing more of them in the future? They're not exactly obvious, so I doubt that this is generating them much money at the moment. The mystery of Twitter's business model continues...

Logos with the text reflected below them are one of the popular "Web 2.0" styles, and they're very simple to create in Photoshop. This short tutorial will show you how to create a logo like this one:

There are plenty of similar tutorials out there on the web, but I couldn't find one that creates a logo that looks good on top of a textured or gradient background. This one work since it's background layer is transparent.

First of all, go into Photoshop's preferences and change your transparency grid colour to "dark". This will allow you to see your translucent white text more easily.

Next, create a new image with a transparent background. I played around with the image size a few times to find a size that would be right for my logo.

Now choose the text tool, with the "horizontal type" option.

Use the text tool to enter the text for your logo.

Create a new layer. This will be a transparent layer over the top of the existing one.

Now choose the text tool, with the "horizontal outline mask" option.

Enter the same text again, in exactly the same size, then use the gradient fill tool to fill the text with a gradient that goes from white to transparent.

From the Edit menu, choose Transform and Flip Vertical.

This will flip your text to make it look like a mirror of the text in the first layer:

Save your image as a PNG file, and make up a web page with a coloured background to test it with. Here is the result I got by following these steps:

I discovered today that Google's Personalized Homepage now supports themes. They have a few to choose from, and I think it makes the homepage look more pleasant than the basic white background/black text appearance it used to have.

On the subject of Google, they have also announced the Google Web History - this is like the Google Search History, but remembers all sites you've viewed and not just the ones that you found through Google searches.

The idea sounds cool although I'm sure some people will be worrying about privacy. It requires the Google Web Toolbar, so won't work in Safari. Safari users don't really need it, just like they don't really need Google's Desktop Search because Spotlight indexes Safari's bookmarks.

As Twitter is becoming the latest cool way of keeping touch with friends and generally yapping or moaning about stuff, I decided to take a look at a few desktop client applications for Twitter. I looked at four - two on the Mac and two on Windows: TwitterPost, Twitterrific, VisualTwit and Twitteroo. I thought Twitterrific on the Mac was the nicest of them all:

Twitteroo was the best Windows one I found:

I've eventually started tagging photos on my website, and it's taking a while to go over all the old ones. I've created one of those tag clouds which seem to be so popular these days.

Today I accidentally stumbled upon somewhere that is definitely not my kinda blog. Why? Because they are advertising on Google that their site is up and running, but when I try to view it I get an error message and I get it every time I click on a link. I guess it's just one more site aiming at the now moving target of Internet Explorer and not simply following standards. They could at least hold off their advertising campaign until they get their site working in a standards-comliant way.

I've switched to using Flock as my primary web browser at work now, mainly due to its close integration with del.icio.us. I have almost 700 bookmarks, and keeping them organised without a service like del.icio.us would be a nightmare. Flock is a slightly larger installation than Firefox, but it seems quicker. |

I've started experimenting with the Google Maps API, and overlaying information from my Pubzilla database. I must say Google's API is very easy to use, although I seem to have had less success in getting to work with Internet Explorer.

Yesterday I felt like a random night out, so got in touch with some people and John, Scott and I started off at the Three Judges which is a real ale pub. I tried three different ales: Highwood Harvest Bitter, Ridley's Spectacular, and Buffy's Hopleaf. We met up with Malcolm, Michelle and Miranda there then moved onto The Goat where we met up with David. Malcolm and Scott went their own way, the girls went home, and David, John and I went to The Clinic.

This afternoon I've been working on a "Pubs near this one" feature for Pubzilla, but being hungover I had difficulty remembering my basic trigonometry and ended up surfing Wikipedia for a while and discovering things like the Sinc function.

On Sunday night I ended up being too tired to The Shed and stayed in and messed around with Mono and XSP instead. Monday was my Mum's birthday so I went down to visit for a while, then struggled to get to The Stand without being too late for Dance Monkey Boy Dance. This is the first time I've been back at the stand after their few weeks off at the end of the summer. I've been working on a project involving CGI scripts running inside Apache web server on Microsoft Windows this week, and not having a good time. Apache randomly crashes and usually takes 5 minutes to pass requests onto the Perl script. I'm now building Apache 2 from source to attempt to work out what's going wrong. |

Friday was Stephen's last day at work and we had a good 7-a-side game of football at lunch time. photos of it are on his blog and here.

In an attempt to have a cheap weekend at home, I spent a lot of time walking around Glasgow taking notes for a website I'm putting together. I'm building up a database of coordinates and photos. Part of the site will have a map to show the locations of places. I've gone down the Google route with this, and the map can be moved by dragging it around. I was having a look at Google's UK maps this afternoon and can now identify 4 street names that are wrong:

1. "La Belle Allee" should be "La Belle Place"
2. "Duff Street" should be "Lynedoch Street"
3. "Dal Nan Each" should be "Woodlands Road"
4. "Inverquhomery Road" should be "Great Western Road"

I'm off to start tidying my room to make packing easier. I've not found a new flat, but will be viewing some this week.

It's been too long since I wrote anything here. I'll start with this weekend...

Friday: Dad's bithday - went to Elliot's on Bath Street for food. The food was amazing, and the live music was good too.

Saturday: Vikki's birthday night out. Vikki, some friends, Neil_ and I went to Arta for dinner, and stayed late for drinks too. This was my second day in a row of eating mussels in a restaurant... yumm!

Sunday: Went with my family to a garden party just outside Perth for my dad's cousin's silver wedding anniversary. I probably recognised less than 10% of the people who were there. It was a good day though, and draught beer on tap in your house is always a good thing ;-)

I'm now attempting to have a quiet week in. Tonight I'm dist-upgrading a debian server (to the newly stable Sarge). This box will be used for hosting sorn.net while I'm moving to a new flat. I was quite surprised to find that the version of PHP on MacOS X Tiger has no image manipulation support, so I'm currently installing MySQL on a Gentoo box for messing around with a database-driven website with dynamically generated images.
And now the biggest news for me this week (aprt from Sarge going stable) is: Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors

That was a totally amazing weekend: Gary's stag night in Edinburgh. Starting off at a pool hall on Morrison Street, followed by food at The Great Wall on Lothian Road, then I think the next place we went to was Finnegan's Wake - and excellent sauna just up from Grassmarket. Some of us made it as far as Subway after that... we seemed to get knocked back from elsewhere due to the size of our group which was a bit annoying. Finnegan's wake is actually an Irish themed pub, but it was roasting inside!

Followed last night by Kenny's birthday night out in Glasgow, starting off in Elliot's and finishing up in The Garage. Methinks it's time to avoid nights out for a while!

Sorn.net updates...
I must appologise for the outage from approximately 2pm yesterday until 3am this morning. Someone (unsure who since we had people staying over last night) had turned off my router (again). Today I'm going to move the router to another location, out of the way of fiddling fingers.

At the moment, www-2.sorn.net is hosted with a friend in Edinburgh, but within a week or so it will be moved into the same rack as www, and a few other sites that were co-hosted on the same box will also be moved here. Lets see how well the bandwidth stands up to it :-)

I've added a couple of new desktop screenshots to my website. There's someone new leeching the same large JPEG image from sorn.net again. I'll need to think up something more subtle to do to the image this time! Also, Loudounacademy.org.uk had a page of photos from the school. It seems to have been taken down now, but it's mirrored here on sorn.net now. Does anyone know where these pictures came from? We all know that the real Loudoun Academy website is here though ;-)

My new toy this week is Konfabulator (which you can see on my screenshots page). It lets you add useful little "widgets" to your desktop on Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX. It's similar to Karamba on KDE. Being able to import widgets between Karamba and Konfabulator would be nice.

Have you got a spare computer? I'm looking for a cheap (and quiet) second hand computer to use as a router between my network and GlasgowNet and BackNet. If anyone has a spare that they're willing to sell (something like a Pentium 166 is more than adequate), then please post in the guestbook.

I discovered that Sara and Aaron have a blog: http://glasgownews.blogspot.com... then I discovered a photo of Tina and me on it among lots of other good pics.

A couple of people have web pages where the background image is a large JPEG being leeched from sorn.net's server. I've changed some things so that anyone who views one of the leeching sites sees a photo of Celine Dion instead of the original image. Since it's a "hardcore" rock band page, I'm sure they'll be pleased. They might even copy the image to their own server instead of using my bandwidth! For anyone viewing the image directly, it appears just as it used to. I've also set it up so that if the browser's IP address is that which I believe to belong to the owner of the web page (or maybe his/her ISP), then the original web page is returned. I wonder how long it'll be before they find out.

To accomplish this, I added this .htaccess file to the directory containing the image:
<Files blood.jpg>
AddType application/x-httpd-php .jpg
</Files>

This causes PHP to interpret this file before sending it to the client browser. blood.jpg is actually a PHP script now, and you can find it's source here: http://www.sorn.net/misc/script.text.

I've been told there's a discussion about this at Overclockers.co.uk's Forums.

Slightly different weekend. No going out to pubs for a start. Spent most of Saturday afternoon walking around Glasgow, then went to see a play in the evening with Tina. It was excellent! Spent most of Sunday playing around with the website, and looking at what some previous versions of sorn.net had, like the blog. Still trying to get OSX to mount WebDAV shares from my web server, without any progress at all. |

Did you know that the fastest web searches in the world are done by pigeons? Neither did I until I came across that page on Google.

While on the subjects of pigeons in computing, Stephen sent me this link to a web page describing an actual implementation of RFC1149.

Did you know that the fastest web searches in the world are done by pigeons? Neither did I until I came across that page on Google.

While on the subjects of pigeons in computing, Stephen sent me this link to a web page describing an actual implementation of RFC1149.

If you read the Apache documentation, dynamic virtual hosting is simple, and having Apache act as a gateway or proxy to other servers is straightforward too. Dynamic virtual hosting is useful if you want to have lots of websites hosted on one machine - it allows you to create a rule that generates a document root based on the domain name ni the URL.

Now, if you want to set up a machine so that it acts as a gateway to some machines, and everything else is a dynamic virtual host, that's more complicated. I figured out how to do it and here's what I added to my apache.conf:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
UseCanonicalName Off
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks ExecCGI Multiviews Includes
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
VirtualDocumentRoot /export/home/websites/%0/web
</VirtualHost>

That sets up the default virtual host which will deal with the dynamic virtual hosting using a VirtualDocumentRoot. The %0 in the document root is replaced by the domain name used in the HTTP request. For example http://www.sorn.net/index.php goes to /export/home/websites/www.sorn.net/web

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.macmini.wireless.sorn.net
ProxyPass / http://wireless.sorn.net:84/
</VirtualHost>

The above section of the apache.conf file sets up proxying for one particular domain name to another machine on the same network as my Apache server. All requests for www.macmini.wireless.sorn.net are passed onto wireless.sorn.net for processing.

I switched my broken Linksys router from NAT Gateway to Router and back again, and now I can connect through it to machines on my 192.168.0.0/24 subnet. Hmmm... Maybe I won't need to replace it after all. Now to blog how I set up routing to my Apache servers with private IP addresses on that subnet...

I have a machine (home.sorn.net) with a public IP address (81.86.17.116) running an Apache server. This machine acts as a gateway to the other servers. I have a NAT Gateway (wireless.sorn.net) on the same subnet as the Apache gateway server which has got various ports set up to forward to port 80 on each web server on the private network. Setting this up depends on which router you use. If the Apache gateway machine is running Linux (or any other Unix-like system), you could make it do the routing to the private network too.

The Apache gateway server has had entries like this added to its apache2.conf file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.macmini.wireless.sorn.net
ProxyPass / http://wireless.sorn.net:84/
</VirtualHost>


And make sure these lines aren't commented out:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so

And finally, I have DNS set up so that a host name points at the Apache gateway server for each machine behind the NAT gateway. The host macmini.wireless.sorn.net has IP address 192.168.0.4, and www.macmini.wireless.sorn.net points at 81.86.17.116 (the gateway server). The above virtual host directive in the Apache config tells apache to redirect requests with this hostname to port 84 on the NAT router. The NAT router then forwards the request to macmini.wireless.sorn.net where a web server will server up a web page.

A side-effect of this setup is that Netcraft now things the server's OS is Linux and it's running Apache on Darwin. I'm sure some fun could be had with this type of setup with a Microsoft/IIS host behind the gateway.