dae's weblog

Right. How am I going to explain this?

When I woke up this morning, I found something on Twitter about a new system called TweetBoard. I heard something about Alpha invites, allowing me to test their new service free of charge. Alpha is a geek word for experimental software. First, there’s only an idea. Then comes the Alpha release, Beta release, then the Release Candidate (RC) and finally the Ready to Manufacture (RTM). TweetBoard is still Alpha software… Good to know!

It took a while before it got to me. TweetBoard can best be described as a bridge between Twitter and your blog. I sent an Alpha request by using a specially formulated tweet:

Requesting an invite for Tweetboard Alpha (http://tweetboard.com) by @140ware, for my site: http://www.daepunt.com

If you want to have a go at this for your own blog, copy the request tweet e x a c t l y, but don’t forget to replace the URL of my weblog with yours. About a minute or so later I received the following message:

@daepunt, your Tweetboard Alpha invite request has been approved. Find installation instructions here: http://bit.ly/1JtNr

I followed the instructions. My weblog runs on WordPress and the instructions said that I should make a Text Widget and copy/past a piece of JavaScript in it. I did that and it worked, but it left me with an ugly and empty Text Widget, so I pasted the code in the footer.php instead and now it looks nice and clean. If you check out the left side of my blog, you’ll notice a coloured tab and if you press it…

Once your BlackBerry BES Server is up and running, there are many reasons why you’d like to change the Service Account afterwards. One of those reasons could be that you didn’t pick a separatre BESAdmin account during the initial installation. Taking care of that (even afterwards) is probably a good idea.

Research in Motion describes in article KB04293 how to take care of this (click the link for KB04293).

As I mentioned earlier, the posts on my weblog automatically get tweeted to Twitter, as well as Facebook, Plaxo and Hyves. I felt sorry for my LinkedIn account. I’m not keeping it up to date with status updates, because I refuse to enter the same information in all those networks manually if those clever computers can’t do it for me. And that hanged today as Guido Jansen shows us in a presentation how to connect your twitter timeline to LinkedIn status updates. The system responsible for this is ping.fm and while I was there anyway, I decided to take care of MySpace as well

Meaning: the posts on my weblog are automagically reposted to:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Plaxo
4. Hyves
5. LinkedIn and
6. MySpace

Right! That saves a lot of time and this way everybody gets to read the stuff they’re interested in on the network of their choice. The only thing left on my wishlist is Hyves. Hyves doesn’t like Twitter’s #hashtags, which currently results in hashtagged tweets not being posted to Hyves. Ping.fm is able to remove hashtags (as it does with LinkedIn), but it has no support for Hyves yet (or the other way around).

If you want to compare Google, Yahoo and Bing, try taking a blind test at http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

Enter your search query and vote for the result that satisfies you most. The site will then reveal which search engine was responsible for which result…

There are lots of websites (including dae’s weblog) that allow you to log in using your Facebook account. It’s strange you get a pop up window that hardly shows you the URL, which means you don’t know if you’re really submitting your credentials to Facebook, unless you check it first. And since the Facebook window doesn’t use an SSL-certificate, your name and password are sent over the network in plain text anyway. Wouldn’t it be better if this window featured an SSL certificate and a bigger URL bar, that shows exactly where your name and password are going?

If you put your ear to the railroad (make sure there’s no train coming!), you can hear what’s going on. That’s exactly what Laura Chappell did to “hear” the traffic that crosses your network as soon as you use Twitter. She captured all traffic (in so called WireShark Trace Files) and she wrote two amazing reports about it (one about Twitter in general and one about TweetDeck). The available trace files will help you to follow her steps of research. Try it yourself! Interesting!

Chappell University Projects Page

Imagine: You’re runing an Ubuntu box with a modem connected to it. You don’t want to use it for dialing out to the internet (that’s how it was done last millennium), but you want to set it up as a dial-in server. It’s strange, but most of the online manuals I found don’t cover this, so I will.

You need to configure a PPP dialin server and we’ll do exactly that in the next few steps:

1. You need mgetty. Install mgetty by using the following command:
   

   sudo apt-get install mgetty

2. Copy /etc/event.d/tty1 to /etc/event.d/ttyS0 (ttyS0 = COM1; ttyS1 = COM2 etc). The last line of /etc/ttyS0 contains a line that goes like:
   

   exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

   Change it, so it says:

   exec /sbin/mgetty -s 57600 -D /dev/ttyS0

3. If you have an /etc/ppp/options, back it up by using the following command:
   

   sudo mv /etc/ppp/options /etc/ppp/options.bak

   and make sure /etc/ppp/options looks like this:

   lock
   10.0.0.1:10.0.0.2 #The first address is the address you can use to access your server and the second address is the one that is asigne to your PC after the connection comes up

4. Make sure to create an /etc/ppp/options.ttyS0 with the following content:
   

   10.0.0.1:10.0.0.2

   That’s it. Nearly done.

5. The last thing on our list is to define dialin users in /etc/ppp/pap-secrets. Remember: this file is (or should be) protected. Use:
   

   sudo nano -w /etc/ppp/pap-secrets

   to change it. Make sure it has the following line somewhere:

   user        *        password        *

   Example:

   johndoe        *        secret        *

Done! Let me know if it worked for you.

As I logged on to my WordPress Dashboard this morning, I found out that WPML version 1.0.2 had been released! Unfortunately the automatic upgrade didn’t work in one go. Automatic reactivation of the upgrade plugin failed, but when I manually activated it afterwards, it worked. It looks a tiny bit fast than the old version… Now I have to go and see if I can find the Change Log. WPML is a WordPress plugin that allows you to make your WordPress multilingual. Not its content (although there is a built-in option that allows you to have your posts translated by a human in exchange for a little money), but the plugin is a technical solution that allows you to translate your posts and everything else that’s required to make your visitors experience your blog in their language.

Click here for the WPML website