Squeg.com

I’ve been looking for an excuse to give a closer look to punBB for some time now. Yesterday, when I learned that ezboard glitches had killed a small message board I visit regularly, I lept into action.

I’ve been forwards and backwards through the software now, and read pretty much everything useful on their website. I think it’s safe to say that this is a a great, lightweight message board. It’s Fast, very easy to set up, and reasonably configurable. I’m running the stable 1.2.5 version.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, it’s free and released under the GNU Public License.

That being said, it could really use a few things.

1. Sticky Posts
2. The ablity to have more than one group with “Moderator” or “Administrator” permisions
3. The ability to send mail from the “server” instead of the “user” when using for email (so that the senders email was not revealed).
5. The ability to UNsubscribe from topics after you’ve subcribed to them

Polls and private messaging are also missing, but as this is intentionally a feature-lite product to keep it fast, I don’t mind leaving those out. For the record, there are a couple of user built mods for doing these things, but they sound slightly buggy and installing them means manually hacking the core files anyway.

I’m not certain if punBB will end up being the board we use, but I’d say there’s a pretty good chance. And as it is open source and sitting on Subversion, maybe i can add the features I think are missing myself.

If you’re in the market for that sort of thing, definitely stop by http://www.punbb.org/ and check it out.

— Update —

There ARE sticky posts, virgina. The feature is just a little difficult to find. As an admin or moderator, if you scroll to the VERY bottom of the page, there’s a link that says “stick” on the left.

You can also unsubscribe from topics, by looking for an unsubscribe link that’s listed just below the very last entry in the list.

Both of these are features that I feel would be more appropriate at the top of the page in an easy to spot area, but they’ll work as is.

Software developer/blogger, Angusman has updated his hack to the Wordpress dashboard page. His new version streamlines Wordpress’ functionality, while removing some of the extra stuff that clogs that page by default. I love his new design, but I actually found I missed the news items that used to be there.

Solution; I’ve hacked the hack. I kept his interface, made a few changes in the name of consistency and personal preference, and added a new “News Options” section. The news options allow you to selectively display a simplified version of the community news feeds and/or the Wordpress devblog.

A warning to the impatient, the inclusion of the feeds does add a couple seconds to the initial load of the dashboard page. If you like Angusman’s version because it’s so much faster, you should stay clear of my version for now. But if you just prefer the cleaner, more convenient interface but might like to view the feeds now and then, feel free to take a look. Perhaps someday, I’ll tweak the code so that the feeds are only loaded when you request them. That is, unless someone less lazy than me wants to do it first.

Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2

Dashboard File

Thanks to Scott over at Thought Mechanics for pointing out this interview with Thomas Friedman at Grist Magazine.

I don’t plan on becoming some kind of “link blogger” here putting up link after link to other people’s stuff. But Friedman’s ideas are interesting.

I liken his “geo-green” solutions to the national energy problems and US foreign policy to the call-to-arms made to the american people during the World Wars. He advocates a solution where the government asks people to buckle down and put in some hard work for the good of the country. He wants to use political power and national resources to jump-start the move away from oil and all the degrading compromises we have to make to get it. It’s patriotism used for good. It’s a saving your sugar, recycling your steel, and putting the women to work in the factories so the country can keep running while the men are fighting for our freedom kind of thinking.

More interestingly, his pro-environment, less-oil pitch isn’t aimed at the standard array of liberal environmentalists. It’s aimed at the conservatives, the business people, and the folks that want to see us keep our position as a political leader around the world. He believes his ideas can bring liberals and conservatives together and accomplish the goals of both.

In a political climate that seems increasingly divided, that pushes agendas by any means necessary, that breeds anger and resentment between our own people, I find it refreshing to hear a voice saying let’s change everything, let’s get people involved, and let’s bring everyone together to work on a solution that will benefit everyone.

At his inauguration, Bush said he wanted to unite the people of this country. I hope that he remembers those words as he serves out the remainder of his four years of service to this country. We need an agenda that’s not about right vs. left. We need a national cause that’s not about fear and destruction. We need to fight, not for control of the oil, but for freedom from it.

Software developers need to learn that some things should be truly random and others should only be “mostly” random.

I love the “random shuffle” feature in Musicmatch that will pick songs randomly from my playlist. But I’d sure love it more if it could remember not to pick anything that it’s already played today. I’d settle for not playing anything it had played in the last 50 songs.

Here I’ve got repetition twice in less than 15 songs and once, there’s only one song between the repeat. Someone should have thought of, and prevented, that.

Apparently, my office internet connection is sitting right behind the very last DNS server in world. Changes I made yesterday morning, finally just took effect sometime mid-morning today. Everyone updates before our server, and I mean everyone. I believe our server finally got it’s information from a machine in a remote siberian mining camp when someone dialed in to get their email.

What that meant is that last night when i went to bed, everything was looking great from my house. But this morning when I innocently went to check something trivial, i found my server completely out of whack. Broken links, time outs… weird “too many redirets messages.” It wasn’t pretty. My first thought was that the guys trying to get my webserver to connect to my mailserver (sitting at another provider) had messed something up big time.

We chased this and that around all morning until I finally realized that for me squeg.com was getting redirected the old server which was redirecting to the new server which was redirecting to the old server… Not good. But apparently, I, within the twilight-zone confines of my office, was the only experiencing the problem.

Tech support was very patient with me.

Which brings me to me point. Transitioning from godaddy.com to jaguarpc.com has not been painless, but the guys in the support trenches have already proved themselves to be infinitely more responsive and capable.

So Brandon, Alex, Les, Philip, and whoever else may have been working to make things right, thanks guys. I owe you one.

What makes a great host for a webserver? Apparently not the same things that make a great doman registrar. I’ve been using godaddy.com for several years to register my domain names (both private and business) and to host my email account. They’ve done a fantastic job and I’d recommend them to anyone for those services in a heartbeat.

I won’t be recommending them as a web-host, however. It’s been less than a month and i’ve already jump abandoned ship. Let’s just say i heard the words, “that should be working” and “we can’t support that” one too many times.

I’ve moved everything over to jaguarpc.com. They offer several things that godaddy didn’t in the way of geeky programming tools that i’ve been very curious about playing with. They also document how everything is supposed to work and give you technical support people that are allowed to say more than, “we’re not allowed to support that, but if you search on the web, we’re sure you can find something helpful.”

Consequently, the URL at the top of the page will be messed up for a bit while I get the old domain pointed at the new account.

Okay then. So there’ s nothing here to see, yet. But things are beginning to roll along nicely. There are a number of things in store for squeg.com. Most of them, however, will be utterly boring if you don’t know me. However, if you do know me and think that my various ramblings, digital photo’s, and whatsamahoojits might be interesting, feel free to stop by later.