Joe Fleming dot net

Back in September when Trello announced their launch, I immediately knew it was going to be amazing. Part of me just loved the interface for its simplicity and exceptional responsiveness. But more than that, the idea really was pretty simple and quite powerful; organize all your ideas into cards, and organize those cards in to lists. Think an online version of post-it notes with valuable communication tools on the back. Check out the introduction video below.

Back when I was still on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), I had near endless problems with PPTP VPN access using the network manager. I wasn’t alone, and I guess I was pretty fortunate that it worked at all. My problem with it was that routes never worked correctly so ALL of my traffic was routed through the VPN. To be honest, they DID work, but the connection ALWAYS dropped off after a minute, sometimes less, so it was hardly usable. This was exceptionally annoying since everything worked just fine in 8.04 (Hardy)!

Thankfully in 9.04 (Jaunty), things seem to be working again. In fact, as I type this, my traffic is being sent from my local connection, even though I’m connected to the VPN at work. Since this still seems to be a big problem for many people, I thought I would post what worked for me.

UPDATE 2009-10-01: I’ve just gotten Air running on my Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) install. Apparently Adobe updated their installation instructions to include all the required steps now. Good for them! So, this post isn’t really useful anymore, but I’ll keep it around anyway, just in case.

There I was, running 64-bit Ubunutu and trying to get Adobe AIR to install. The problem is, AIR is written for 32-bit systems, so it needs some extra help installing on 64-bit Ubuntu. I managed to get it running, with a little help from Adobe’s site and grabbing getlibs here (their link was broken), everything looked good. That was, until I tried to install an AIR application.

In an effort to save time when I put together sites for people, I’ve been working on a universal engine I can use. It is modeled loosely off the MercuryBoard code and, for the most part, has served me pretty well. Recently, I’ve tried to revamp it with more object oriented code, integrating PEAR and a few other niceties. Still, the more and more I use it, the more I realize it saves me very little time. In fact, it actually costs me time when I have to go back and update the sites. It seems, sadly, the idea of a flexible CMS or framework is just too abstract for my skills.

I’ve spent some time reading about Symfony, which looks like an amazing project. I’m positive I can make it do anything I would need, but the learning curve is pretty steep and I’m worried that the time I’d take to learn it wouldn’t really pay off in the end. I like a lot of the concepts, but I’m just not completely sold on it.

So what does that have to do with WordPress? Well, I’ve recently revisited a project that I spent some time with in the past but never really did much with. That project is Drupal.

I recently got an email saying that I had a new user register here. Out of curiosity, I checked who it was, but neither the name nor the email was familiar to me. The username was alina77vere9uk and the email alina77vere@gmail.com, which to me looked like the kind of email address that you’d see on a SPAM email, so I tossed it into Google to see what I’d find.

Sure enough, I’m not the only person who’s had this user register. As pointed out over at the Cubelodyte’s lair, this is mot likely a bot that is registering on Wordpess blogs all over the Internet, and while it’s not posting any comments, it’s highly likely that it’ll release some kind of SPAM payload at a later date. So, if you see this user register on your WordPress blog, go ahead and delete them before then SPAM hits the fan.

Well, as you can plainly see (assuming you’ve been here before), the site has gotten a facelift. Now that Aaron has his blog up and his looking really nice, I felt compelled to try and jazz up mine a little too. It’s not done, but it’s nicer than it was. I’ll probably add a touch of color to the theme, but it’ll work for now. BTW, it’s based off the Milc 3.5 theme. The code isn’t super pretty, but it was a good start.

While I was working with the design, I realized that I needed to send over my old bit of code that opened links in new windows. As anyone trying to make valid XHML pages can tell you, the target attribute is no longer valid, so if you want pages to open in a new window and you still want your design to validate properly, you have to do a little scripting. I actually found this script a couple years ago to make MediaWiki links open in new windows and it’s served me quite well ever since.