Redesign Wizard Of POS
After the latest release of Movable Type, I wanted to have a look at the new Widget functionality. The result: a redesigned version of The Wizard Of POS:
After the latest release of Movable Type, I wanted to have a look at the new Widget functionality. The result: a redesigned version of The Wizard Of POS:
A few days above 30° and Holland grinds to a halt. I wonder what would happen if they would also have two months of really hot weather…
It has been very quiet on this site, and that usually means that I am working on something. And indeed, I am working on the new site for Fimcap.
Besides that, the temperature in Lleida, almost reaching 40 °, makes that I don’t want to spend too much time behind the PC, but rather stay in the water of the swimming pool. As you might be worried what is going on here, I deceided to write a little bit about the new fimcap site.
We decided to implement the new site using the eZ Publish CMS, which allows for multi-lingual content and custom defined content types. This flexibility of course has a price: a steep learning curve. The basics are quite simple, but problems start when you want to modify templates. You literally can control everything, but you have to find the right template. Each page is made up from dozens of little templates, each of which can reside in several places.
Let me explain that in more detail. If you do a fresh installation, your site is configured to use two sets of templates: standard, which contains some bare-bones unstyled templates that make sure eZ Publish outputs at least something, and base, which adds a little bit of style. Of course, for your own site you want to use your own design, and you can either replace the base design, or add your own design, which is what we did. Now every time a template is called, eZ Publish first looks in the Fimcap design. If it can’t find a template, it will search in the base design, and finally it will fall back to the standard design. So if I want to modify a template, I have to search in that order as well to find the currently used template. After a working for some weeks with the template system, I finally got the hang of it, and am able to find the correct templates quickly…
In case you’re interested in the progress we’re making, have a look at new.fimcap.org.
Our old APS camera has become useless now that we have a brand-new digital camera. It has been lying in a drawer for some weeks now, and I know that I will never use it again. So I decided to sell it before it becomes completely unvaluable.
If you are interested in this camera, you can bid on it on eBay.
After reading the lifehacker How I work series, I thought that it might be interesting to write down my own way of working for the readers of Brain Tags.
As most people I have two sites from where I work: in the office I sell and support the products of ICG software, and at home I run BryteNet, do some web development, blog and keep in contact with me friends all over the world. At both places I use a Windows XP desktop PC, equipped with:
textarea fields, but uses a full blown desktop client.Just in terms of raw weekly hours, Google is definitely number one. In addition to regular old searching, I use it for looking up definitions, as a calculator, and for checking stuff like maps and weather. I do love the Google.
Furthermore I use Harvest to track my worked hours.
All other sites enter in RSS-Bandit, which is my dashboard to the world. It shows me tech news, news about my friends, search results on topics I am interested in, comments made on my weblogs, replies to comments I have left on other blogs…
I have a Palm Zire 31, which I keep synchronized with my two workstations. I always have all information at hand, whereever I go.
FC Barcelona is champion of the ‘Liga’. If you know me only a little bit, you know that I couldn’t care less, right? I only like sports the moment I practice it myself, but do not care about what others are doing. I like playing soccer with friends, though I am a terrible player, but get really bored when looking soccer on the television, to the point that I usually fall asleep.
But when FC Barcelona is involved, I have no choice. Living ‘only’ 160 kilometers from Barcelona means that Barça is part of daily life. It is as simple as that, and there is no way around it! Each and every day they appear on the TV news, whether they are preparing for a big match or simply because the players went for a walk.
Yesterday evening hell broke loose in Lleida. After the match everybody went out on the streets to celebrate the victory. There were fireworks, drums, people shouting and singing, but most of all car horns. The streets in the center had collapsed of all the cars driving around like crazy with Barça flags out of the windows.
I don’t mind what Barça does, but I always appreciate a good party!
The steward seriously missed his calling. The man was a stand-up comedian, and a dang fine one at that. I haven't laughed so hard in ages. That whole safety thing you have to suffer through every time? He turned it into a comedy routine: “Please pretend to pay attention while we explain the safety features of this Boeing 737. I know, I can't believe it either, but there's a safety card in the seat pocket in front of you. No one ever reads it, so I'm not going to even bother asking you to. At this time, you should have your seatbelts on, your tray tables up, and your seats in their upright and most uncomfortable position. This is a no complaining, no whining, no smoking flight. If you absolutely must smoke, I suggest you avail yourself of our smoking area out on the wing...that is, if you can manage to get it lit. While you're out there, feel free to enjoy our inflight movie, Gone With The Wind. We don't expect a loss of cabin pressure today. If we did, the three of us would have called in sick. But if we do lose pressure, masks will automatically fall from the ceiling. After you're done screaming, simply put the mask on and breath normally, like this: [Darth Vader Imitation]. Please put your own mask on before helping your children...or those who are acting like children, such as your husband. Now, since we've been cleared for take-off, I'd like to ask you to lean over and please press your face against the window so that all those other bankrupt airlines can see that we have a full flight. Neener, neener! And thank you for flying Southwest today. Remember, no one loves you, or your money more than Southwest!"
[Found at: Signal vs. Noise]
When we were close to Andorra this weekend, we hopped over the border to do some shopping. We were looking for a new digital camera, and finally bought the Pentax A10. Of all cameras that matched our requirements, small form factor, minimal 3x optical zoom, quality optics system, the Pentax was the only one offering a usefull additional feature: stabilisation. The problem with small cameras is that it is very difficult to hold it steady, especially when using the zoom function. Stabilisation makes sure that pictures are still sharp under these conditions.
The coming days I will try out our new camera, so you might expect some changes on my photo page again.
Found this piece on OpenBC. If they actually hired this man, they did the right thing.
This is an actual job application that a 75 year old senior citizen submitted to Wal-Mart in Arkansas. They hired him because he was so funny.
NAME: George Martin SEX: Not lately, but I am looking for the right woman (or at least, one who'll cooperate) DESIRED POSITION: Company's President or Vice President. But seriously, whatever's available. If I was in a position to be picky, I wouldn't be applying here in the first place. DESIRED SALARY: $185,000 a year plus stock options and a Michael Ovitz style severance package. If that's not possible, make an offer and we can haggle. EDUCATION: Yes. LAST POSITION HELD: Target for middle management hostility. PREVIOUS SALARY: A lot less than I'm worth. MOST NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT: My incredible collection of stolen pens and post-it notes. REASON FOR LEAVING: It sucked. HOURS AVAILABLE TO WORK: Any. PREFERRED HOURS: 1:30-3:30 p. m. Monday,Tuesday and Thursday. DO YOU HAVE ANY SPECIAL SKILLS?: Yes, but they're better suited to a more intimate environment. MAY WE CONTACT YOUR CURRENT EMPLOYER?: If I had one, would I be here? DO YOU HAVE ANY PHYSICAL CONDITIONS THAT WOULD PROHIBIT YOU FROM LIFTING UP TO 50 lbs.?: Of what? DO YOU HAVE A CAR?: I think the more appropriate question here would be "Do you have a car that runs?" HAVE YOU RECEIVED ANY SPECIAL AWARDS OR RECOGNITION?: I may already be a winner of the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, so they tell me. DO YOU SMOKE?: On the job - no, on my breaks - no. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE DOING IN FIVE YEARS?: Living in the Bahamas with a fabulously wealthy dumb sexy blonde supermodel who thinks I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread. Actually, I'd like to be doing that now. DO YOU CERTIFY THAT THE ABOVE IS TRUE AND COMPLETE TO THE BEST OF YOUR KNOWLEDGE?: Oh yes, absolutely. SIGN HERE: Sagittarius
After having our own stand on the CeBIT for two years, we have decided not to go this year. The reasons are the high cost of stand space, the length of the show and the decreasing number of business visitors. Though I always liked going to the CeBIT, this decision saves me a lot of time, as I don't have to prepare the stand, and will stay at the office during the two weeks that I normally need for the CeBIT. One of the things I will be doing during these weeks is contacting visitors of our stand during the previous years and polling their interest in our products.
On the other hand, I won't be able to roam around to find interesting new products as the Ultra-Mobile PC. But I will try to spot new POS products through press releases and corporate sites, and publish these on the Point Of Sale weblog.
Edgeio is a new service to create classifieds directly from your weblog. It automatically organizes entries tagged with listing on the Edgeio site, and allows visitors to search and comment on listings. The concept sounds very interesting to me, so I decided to try it out.
The only thing I have for sale at the moment are web server accounts, so I created three posts on the BryteNet blog describing the three web hosting packages BryteNet currently offers. I tagged all posts with the keyword listing as well as some additional keywords. After that I signed up at Edgeio, claimed my blog and noticed that the posts were already appearing on the site, including a thumbnail made from the image I used in the post. Though they offer the possibility to encode the list price in the blog post as well, I had not mentioned the price, so I edited my Edgeio entries to list the corresponding price. Conclusion: it is very easy to get listed on Edgeio.
After that I went to the customer side of Edgeio, to see how my listings would appear. One great feature of Edgeio is that you can enter your location, and it will filter the listings based on the distance you have chosen with an AJAX slider. I started by putting the slider on 'Lleida' to see only listings from my home town. As expected, there are only a handful of bloggers here, only my own listings showed up.
I moved the slider up to 'Catalonia'. To my surprise, I found that only one other Catalan blogger uses Edgeio, offering jobs in Barcelona. There are quite some bloggers in Catalonia, but apparently none of them has found Edgeio yet. I continued to 'Spain' finding three more offers, bringing the total on an amazing eight!
It is clear that Edgeio is not ready for prime time yet. Though it is easy to get listed, not many bloggers use the service, and therefore it is not worth the effort at this moment to search for listings on Edgeio.
I have been playing a little bit more with eZ Publish for the BryteNet site. One little disappointment was that I could not generate friendly URIs like http://brytenet.com/forum/, but I have to work with URIs as http://brytenet.com/index.php?/forum/. According to the eZ people this is because BryteNet has set up PHP as a CGI process and not through Apache’s mod_php, which understands the accept_path_info function. The Brytenet servers implemented PHP as a CGI process for security reasons, and there is no way to change this in an easy way. I still don’t understand why this is such a problem, as other PHP applications such as WordPress are able to produce friendly URIs.
Anyway, maintaining a site’s content with eZ Publish is very easy. I have been able to set up the whole content structure in no-time, and even made some changes to the default templates. Templating is more daunting, as the template language used is very, very complete. For the moment I have only made some small changes, and have concentrated myself on the actual contents of the site.
Today I also created a Dutch version of the BryteNet site, which was done within 5 minutes! Now I am translating all content, which is done in a very clever way. A single object (text, folder, image,…) can have several translations, and depending on the way you access this object, one version or the other is shown. So going to http://brytenet.com gives me the default (English) view of the home page, while http://nl.brytenet.com will show me the Dutch view of the same object. Very neat! I still have to translate the FAQ section, which for the moment will show the default language, even if I request the Dutch view.
When all has been translated into Dutch, I will add Spanish and Catalan too. And probably about the same time I will start tweaking my templates to change the components shown and the layout of the pages. The nicest job, making a unique design for this site, I will keep for the last, as it is the most logical order, and to have something to work to.
The last weeks I have been very busy with the new BryteNet site. The old site had been created in a couple of minutes 'just to have something', and never changed afterwards. It was really time for a complete site overhaul. When planning the datacenter move, I decided not to restore the old site, but to put a simple page with the main properties of the hosting packages and contact information instead. That gave me the chance to built the new site properly.
My first concern were the existing users of the server. I quickly installed ClientExec and created accounts for all users, so they can manage their helpdesk tickets and billing information. Installation was very easy, and within an hours I had everything set up. I still want to change the templates to fit in the new BryteNet style, but that can wait 'till later. I did modify the template to include the Google Analytics code. After all, I still want to know what is going on…
The next step was to restore the BryteNet weblog. Since the new server has Fantastico installed, I only had to fill in some details, and WordPress was installed. I copied the plug-ins I used to the right place and restored the database to get the old content, and I was finished. 29 minutes was all I needed!
For the rest of the site I had chosen the eZ Publish CMS. While eZ Publish is probably way too big for such a small site, I wanted to use it for its execllent multi-language support and since it can do literally anything. So I can manage all aspects of the site (product information, contact forms, customer forum,...) with a single tool. eZ Publish also has a weblog module, but for the moment I have chosen to stick with WordPress.
I had looked at eZ Publish before, and have big plans for it for future projects, but without a concrete implementation, it is difficult to find out what the possibilities and limitations of this CMS are.
Installation was a breeze, and I have been able to activate the features I wanted to use at the moment. The templating system is very powerful, though I find it still difficult to find the right template when I want to change a part of a page-layout.
A little disappointment was that eZ Publish is not able to generate friendly URI's when PHP is implemented as CGI rather than with mod_php. For security reasons PHP is run through CGI on the BryteNet servers, resulting in the appearance of index.php? in the middle of the URI. It is something I will have to live with…
Another problem I still have to solve is that the automatically generated menus only contain folders, and I haven't found a way yet to include links outside eZ Publish in the menu. I have found something on the subject in the eZ forums, and will tackle this problem soon enough.
The next big thing I am going to work on is to give BryteNet an unique face. At the moment the three components of the BryteNet site (eZ Publish, ClientExec and WorkPress) still use their default design, which I only modified a little bit. I om going to generate a completely new stylesheet for those sites, so they will have more or less the same look. I started my work with designing a new logo, and am now working on the colour scheme. I have some ideas on how the result will be, but am still experimenting with those ideas.
Stay tuned for more news…
I have to identify myself in order to get Internet access?! How on earth do they think to stop terrorism by asking for identification for terminal access, while I can have a wireless connection without identifying myself?
It has been some time ago since I last posted, so I thought I needed to spend some minutes to explain what is happening.
As usually when a site does not get updated anymore, I was simply too busy. First of all, I have been traveling. And in my case, travelling usually means working many hours (yes, I considder a diner with my client ‘working’) and a lack of Internet connections. This time my hotel did have two PC’s in the lobby which I used occasionally, but I would have preferred an affordable (free?) WiFi connection in my room.
Besides travelling, I am preparing a datacenter move for the BryteNet server. As this is the first time that I am doing such a thing, I want to prepare it very well and get all the details right.
That’s it for the moment. Until later…
As most of you know, I hate paperwork.
So when after a lot of effort I received my residence permit in 2002, and it appeared to be only valid for 4 months, I quickly decided that it was not worth the effort. Fortunately, coming from another EU country I have the privilege to not really need it in daily life, so there was no problem. I can use my Dutch documentation for identify myself.
The only thing I can't do is to buy expensive goods as a new car or a house. I had forgotten completely about these limitations, until we started looking for a new car last summer. We did buy the car on MJ's name, but I decided to go for it again and hope that they would give me a longer lasting residence card. That was in August 2005:
August
I started by obtaining the necessary papers and filling them in. I also tried to phone to the immigration office to get an appointment for delivering these papers. After two weeks, I got my appointment, which fortunately was after the business hours of my office.
September 8
After leaving the office I went to the immigration office to deliver all papers I had prepared: a special form, copies of my passport, copies of my current, expired, residence card, copies of my last salary statement, an extract from my record in the town hall…
Fortunately I had understood the cryptic instructions correctly, and all papers were in order. They told me that they were going to study my request, which was going to take them a full month!
November 9
Time to find out whether they had approved my request. Unfortunately, this can't be done with an appointment, so you simply had to queue up at the immigration office. I told my boss that I was going to arrive late, and joined the queue two hours before the office was going to open. I only had about 20 people in front of me. I already knew from last time that I would have to spend the whole morning in the queue if I would not be there before they open their doors. After spending three hours on the street, and waiting 20 minutes more inside the office, I finally got a bunch of papers back; my request had been approved. I had to go to the bank to pay the administration costs and then to the police office to get my residence card. I payed directly, and decided to visit the police the next day, since the queue was too big already.
November 10
I told my boss that I would arrive late again, and joined the queue 90 minutes before opening time; the queue at the police station is smaller. This time I only had 12 people in from of me. After waiting two hours on the street, I was allowed to enter to show the papers I received at the immigration office and place my signature and fingerprint on a special form so they can create my residence permit. They need one full month for doing this.
December 30
Because of the cold and the amount of work I had in December, I didn't go to pick up my residence permit until three weeks later. Once again I told my company that I would arrive late and once again I had to queue on the street, but this time only 45 minutes. Almost five months after filling in the forms I finally received a little card, which fortunately is valid until 2010.
Renewing my residence permit has cost me €7, but most of all a lot of precious time. I spent about 6 hours waiting in queues on the street, 45 minutes in queues inside offices, and have been out of office during 3 hours. To me that sounds like I have wasted a lot of time for a simple administrative request. I mainly have been transporting papers from home to one office, and from one office to another; something which could easily have been done by mail. I know that I have to show up in person to get an identification document, but does this have to be for each and every step??? And why do they need a full month to check my history and approve my request and a full month to print out a little plastic credit-card sized pass???
As most of you know, I hate paperwork.
Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do.
[From Guy Kawasaki]
Our house is one of the few places on earth where you can still find a television without remote control.
We have been thinking about upgrading it to one of those modern TFT or plasma screens, but have been waiting for affordable models that incorporate Digital Terrestrial Television. Until today…
DTT is available for some time now, but television sets are still running behind on this. This morning I ran into a very good offer for a Nokia Mediamaster 110 DTT set-top box.
I connected and configured it well within 5 minutes, effectively upgrading our old television set to a TV with remote control, teletext and 20+ channels while we used to have 8 channels.
This small device just saved me a lot of money!
I know many blonde jokes, but this blonde joke is by far the best!
A typical winter day in Lleida
phpCOIN is the software used by BryteNet hosting to manage orders, invoicing and the helpdesk.
Tuesday a vulnerability has been discovered allowing atackers to execute remote code on the server.
When a fix was published I immediately installed it on the server, but the site had already been hacked. To make matters worse, the fix files contained errors, which made that phpCOIN did not produce any output.
My server error log showed me where the errrors were, and by adding some parentesis I could fix my site.
The official fix files are now three days old, and still contain these errors. There are more and more people running into this problem asking for wroking, so I uploaded my fixed files for download.
Note that the original fix file contains more files, so you need to install those files first and then overwrite the three files with errors with my copies.
[Update 2005/12/19]: The official fix files have been updated, so my files are no longer necessary.
It looks like Yahoo! is testing their mobile search bot, resulting in some page requests with a very weird agent string:
Nokia6682/2.0 (3.01.1) SymbianOS/8.0 Series60/2.6
Profile/MIDP-2.0 configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0
(compatible; Windowns CE; Blazer/4.0; PalmSource;
MOT-V300; SEC-SGHE315; YahooSeeker/MA-R2D2;
mobile-search-customer-care AT yahoo-inc DOT com)
Now that is a very interesting device!
Yahoo! has been able to combine some of the most popular mobile phones into a single device and run several operating systems on it simultaniously!
Now that I have left Bloglines and use RSS Bandit, it came to me that Bloglines is still fetching all those feeds in my name.
So if Feedburner reports 9 Bloglines readers, I really should subtract one of them, since I am not using Bloglines anymore.
Of course I could go back in and delete all my subscriptions, but nobody ever does that, do you?
I wonder how many of Bloglines' reported tens of thousands of people are zombies like me, still subscribed to feeds but not actually using Bloglines anymore to read them. And does Bloglines disable accounts after a certain period?
Of course the same goes also for other web-based feed aggregators.
I have been looking at Google Personalized Homepage (GPH) before, but quickly decided that it has no additional use for me.
GPH offers you the possibility to add content (RSS feeds) to the Google Search home page, which is fine if you only use three or four news sources to stay up-to-date. But if you use several more news sources, you probably already use a feed aggregator to read them, and don’t need the GPH.
I did like the idea of seeing the weather forecast on the homepage, but unfortunately neither Lleida nor Harmelen are available in the configuration of this widget. Microsoft does this better on their Start.com portal, since it does have information for Lleida, and correctly recognizes Harmelen to insert the weather forecast for Utrecht.
Today Google published an API for GPH, which hopefully will set a lot of creative programmers to work. At this moment I am only interested in two widgets: a better weather widget and an e-mail linked to my normal POP3 or IMAP mail, since I normally don’t use GMail.
I have switched my RSS reader from the web-based Bloglines to the PC based RSS Bandit.
I have always used Bloglines, since I wanted to access my feeds from anywhere, but recently came to the conclusion that I only read feeds from exactly two PC's.
Whenever I am traveling, I hardly have the time or possibilities to connect to the Internet, and usually only read my e-mail.
Bloglines has many features, but misses one: the ability to work off-line. One of my wishes was to be able to search through feeds while being off-line, which by nature is something Bloglines cannot offer.
Another, less important, feature I missed in Bloglines is a three-pane view: folder-headline-text. A three-panel view saves time when going through a big list of headlines.
While I am still tweaking RSS Bandit to my wishes, I am quite satisfied with it. I get through my feeds faster and can spend my off-line time reading as well. RSS Bandit has a nice little feature that lets me upload the feed list and the read status to a FTP server, so I can continue where I left off on another PC.