Most of the people I know missed the launch announcement and I’ve been bringing it up every chance I get. My friends over at Cards.ly just couldn’t find anything that worked well for them to keep all their ideas and tasks in order. I showed them Trello and they thought it looked great, and after using it for a while, now swear by it.

I myself hadn’t used it until this week when I needed to coordinate Jay’s visit down here. I wanted a place to keep track of what he wanted to do and what I needed to do to prepare for his visit. He also has a project that he’d like some help on so we wanted a place to coordinate on that as well. Trello has been great for all of these things, providing a responsive way for us to keep each other accountable and keep track of what needs to be done.

Joel Spolsky recently did a post on his blog about how Trello is different (for those that don’t know, his company wrote Trello). In it, he explains that the reason Excel became so popular is that despite it’s intended use as a spreadsheet tool for doing a bunch of math, it’s really just a data structure. That is, it’s a simple way to make tables. Hell, I’ve used Excel to do website mockups before, so I get that. Joel claims that Trello is also just a simple data structure, a simple way to make lists. I think he’s spot on with that, but it’s the tools that you get with those lists that makes Trello in particular really valuable. Click on a card and you get access to a broader description, checklists, notes, due dates, activity lists and even votes.

Since signing up three days ago, I’ve built 4 boards (collections of lists) and I intend to build a lot more. I’ve also gotten another developer friend of mine to start using it to manage his community project and he too really seems to enjoy it.

tl;dr If you want to manage tasks and anything else that could be a list, go sign up for Trello right now!

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.

First things first, in order to configure PPTP using network-manager, you’ll need to install the PPTP plugin for it.

$ sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp

After installing it, you will need to at least log off to restart network-manager. For me, I had to reboot. Before I did, I kept getting an error about a lack of secrets, which basically means that it can’t connect to the password manager. Rebooting fixed that.

Next comes the configuration. You will need to know the IP address of the VPN server you wish to connect to, as well as your username and password. For me, I also needed to add routes for the internal network, the network that the VPN was on (we have the VPN on its own subnet at work) and the external network that your work has assigned to it. Without those, the connection would never route properly.

If you’re reading this and you’ve come this far, I assume you already know how to get to the configuration, so we’ll just skip to some screenshots to help you along. That last step may be optional, but it was a requirement for my configuration to work. YMMV.

Now, select the VPN connection and check out the routes.

$ route

If all went well, you should see some new routes going to the VPN network and be able to connect to the network resources. Something like this…

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
10.242.1.0      *               255.255.255.255 UH    0      0        0 ppp0
some.domain     192.168.1.1     255.255.255.255 UGH   0      0        0 eth0
some.domain     192.168.1.1     255.255.255.255 UGH   0      0        0 eth0
192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     1      0        0 eth0
10.242.1.0      *               255.255.255.0   U     24     0        0 ppp0
10.5.1.0        *               255.255.255.0   U     24     0        0 ppp0
default         192.168.1.1     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

In my example, 10.242.1.0 is the VPN network, 10.5.1.0 is the internal network at work and some.domain is the reverse lookup of their IP address. Of course, 192.168.1.1 is the gateway for my local network. Look at all those beautiful ppp0 connections; working like a charm!

If it doesn’t work, try logging off and possibly rebooting again. If it STILL doesn’t work…. well, I’m out of ideas. There’s always Google and the Ubuntu forums. Good luck!

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.

Specifically, I was trying to get TweetDeck running. The application would launch, but none of the buttons would do anything. I also tried running AlertyThingy, which would open and allow me to start using it, but wouldn’t actually let me add any channels. I was pretty frustrated.

Then I got the idea to run it from the terminal and see if the application was spitting out any errors. It was!

$ /opt/TweetDeck/bin/TweetDeck
libgnome-keyring.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

OK, so apparently I needed to install the 32-bit version of the libgnome-keyring libs. Of course, I wasn’t sure how to do this; enter Google. Apparently I wasn’t the only one trying to get Tweetdeck running on a 64-bit Ubuntu system. I found the instructions on this blog, down near the bottom.

As I already have GetLibs installed I thought this should be fairly easy to fix by grabbing the missing 32bit libs

sudo getlibs -l libgnome-keyring.so

Still no luck - TweetDeck seems to be looking for libgnome-keyring.so.0

Ok then:-

sudo getlibs -l libgnome-keyring.so.0

still no work so I look in the lib32 folder and see that libgnome-keyring.so.0 is a broken simlink linking to the non-existant libgnome-keyring.so.0.1.1 so I try

sudo getlibs -l libgnome-keyring.so.0.1.1

and hey presto simlink is fixed. On running my shell script to start the SDK TweetDeck workaround it pops up asking for Twitter logon details and in I go, perfect.

Exactly the way it worked for me as well. So, now I’m using TweetDeck, and I have to say, the application is pretty awesome! And of course, if you’re on Twitter, hit me up some time ;).

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.

While it’s not nearly as flexible as Symfony is, it seems like a very useful platform for putting a site together. I followed a quick tutorial last week that outlined just how easy it was, and after reading through their Getting Started guide, I’m pretty sure it can be bent into anything I might need. To me honest, most of the sites I’ve put together didn’t really need much of anything.

But, again, how does this relate to WordPress? Well, I’ve grown tired of WordPress, and it seems like Drupal would make for a great blogging tool. I have no doubt that I could add a lot more than a simple blog should I choose to as well, which makes it that much more appealing. From what I’ve seen, it also runs significantly faster than WordPress does, which is always a nice perk.

So, in an effort to spend more time using and learning Drupal, I’m planning to port all of my WordPress posts to Drupal and use it exclusively to run this site. Worst case scenario, I end up with nothing more than a blog running on Drupal. That’s not too different that the blog I have running on WordPress now, so that’s not too bad of a worst case. Look for the change to happen soon (hopefully this week). You’ll know when it happens as it’s unlikely I’ll spend the time working on a theme just yet, so this site will live in default Drupal mode while I continue my Drupal education. Fun stuff!

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.

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.


function makeExternal() {
//make sure the function works
if (! document.getElementsByTagName) { return; }
var myRegExp = new RegExp("ext","i");
var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (var i=0; i var anchor = anchors[i];
if (anchor.getAttribute("alt") && anchor.getAttribute("alt").match(myRegExp) ) { anchor.className+=" external"; anchor.target="_blank"; }
}
}


You run the function at page load and selected links will now open in a new window. To make a link work this way, you add rel="ext" to the anchor tag, which is still valid because rel is a valid attribute. What's nice is this also sets up a relation between your page and the link; ext being short for external. The script parses all anchors for that rel attribute and if it finds ext in value, it appends the class 'external' and sets the target attribute of the link to '_blank'. It's a little hacky, but it works like a charm and any browser with a DOM that supports getElementsByTagName.

Note that you don't have to append any class name if you don't want to. I like that I can make the links indicate that they will be opening in a new window by using a little icon as you can see on this site. I like the icon MediaWiki uses a lot, but the way it uses (indicating that it's an external link) doesn't make as much sense as using it to show that a new window will open. That's my take anyway.

This isn't the only way to achieve this result, and Google will provide you with a million other ways, but this is what works for me. Just thought I'd share.