neverslair-blog.net: Latest News

An IT Guy's view into Neverslair

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Sat, 01 May 2010 16:49:00 -0400

Since i moved in this year with my new place, its been a quiet year for the blogging. one thing i always wanted to do since i got here, was taking a few pictures for my buddies around the world, so they could have a look at what it is that im talking about, when im mentoining Neverslair. A Lair, Freely translated stands for: "A lair is usually thought of as a cave or den, used by ground dwelling animals." and as the beast in me is quite IT focused, this just makes up the right name for the place. if you have any questions of the technical, cultural or whatever kind, feel free to ask em.

What is your Favorite Coding Music?

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:32:00 -0400

The right choice of sound background for programming sessions can be essential, especially if they just go longer than 1 hour straight...
Imagine youre spending time to explore Django Possibilities, Hack yourself a new Typo3 Extension, or adding a new Kernel module for your favorite no name, cheap pcmcia Wireless LAN card...
Doing that straight for 6 hours or a longer ammount of time, you need to overcome sleep, avoid being disrubted by too rocky music, or too many spoken words.
Whatever some peoples might say, the best time for coding is the night, hence youre not disrubted by phonecalls, or outside influence like social stuff, thus the music needs to be good to listen too even at low levels of volume, one could always turn over some headset or earphones, but in general having earphones on your head for longer than 6 hours, believe me, is not a good idea.
I'm myself a big fan of three main �categories� of music for coding.

i usually start with something rather energic, like demoscene radio, it is noisy, without being disrubtive, besides im a sucker for oldschool computer stuff (collecting those old boxes myself...)
when the hours pass by, i slide over to last.fm, and search for the term chillout, shows you a whole new listing of good music, thats not as noisy as demoscene radio, but rather relaxing.
Last but not least, i switch over to some classic music, hector berlioz made some great operas, or go with some verdi, or haydn, operas are not as relaxing as chillout, thus wont get you sleepy, yet they tend to get my brain in a thinking state (id call it the extra push youd need for late hours or long coding sessions...)

The new OpenSuSE Studio in Action

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 02:04:00 -0400

I have had a chance to take a look at the new OpenSuSE Studio, which is Novell's new approach to Web 2.0 Technology.
Creating your own Distribution online and then just mount it up on your VMWare or Virtualbox, or boot it as a livecd has had quite an appeal to me, over all, the tool looks very promising, works without a problem, i had a few slow moments caused by the ajax included in the webpage, but nothing major, no crashes so far, and the test drive technology, which enables you to run your image before actually downloading it is one neat way to use java servlets. the size of he default images is quite promising, not as bloated as what i was used to by OpenSuSE, available as packages we have 6 different base profiles, shell only, jeos (OpenSuSE's minimal System), a minimal x windows system featuring icewm as window manager (i still wonder where fvwm 2 went...), a base gnome system, a base kde 3 system, and a base kde 4 system. packages can easily be added via the web interface, which proofs to be a good web version of yast, same logic as with yast also applies to it, you can add, remove, check dependencies etc... The web interface itself is very intuitive, i just found my way through it immediatly. with a few clicks, you can configure your lan settings, your firewall base rules (only two rules available so far... i hope there will be more of them when OpenSuSE Studio will be made public...), bootup themes, languages for the console and x. another neat feature is the possibility to add your own packages and files to your profiles, imagine a presentation livecd, a vpn server or client preconfigured, a testset with a database and webserver... and many more options there. The Web interface also gives you notices and tips on things you do or could do when building your profile, e.g. vmware tools and tray icons are available by click when you do a vmware image, and when selecting a database, it tells you, that you will have to add your own mysql dump file... even adding shell users got quite simple, you just click on the add link or icon, and you will have another users settings that you may change to your likings... overall the new OpenSuSE Studio has quite a potential, which, if right promoted could bring Novell up to some new Flair. I have made a small screencast and a gallery of the look and feel of the whole process, check links below for more information on it.

neverslair hacks - useing jquery with wt_gallery

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:30:00 -0400

Every coder knows this problem, you are using your javascript library of choice, and need a picture gallery, now there are many galleries available for typo3, each one with its own nice lil features and gimmicks, each one using its own javascript library of choice. I am currently using jm_gallery on my page, but since that one is totally missing ajax stuff, and i wanted to play around with the functions anyways, i decided to test around some galleries on my local development web. There are quite some galleries with ajax support, but none of em actually let me choose different javascript libraries. There is also perfectlightbox and kj_lightbox2, those are pretty nice, but not exactly fitting my needs with the read-images-from-folder thing. Soon i had wt_gallery on my view, cause it nearly fitted all my needs, it let me choose which javascript library i actually want to use for what, and supports folder readout, cat view, list view and single view. But since i am using jquery for javascript stuff on my web, and had already jquery_thickbox installed, and wt_gallery only support kj_lightbox2 or perfectlightbox, i decided on hack the jquery_thickbox support into it. And here is how it is done

1. install jquery_thickbox on your system
2. install wt_gallery on your system
3. edit the file typo3conf/ext/wt_gallery/pi1/class.wtgallery_pi1.php and search for the following code:

if (($popup == '1' || $popup == 'imagelightbox' || $popup == 'perfectlightbox') AND !file_exists('uploads/tx_wtgallery/popup/'.$filename_cached)) { // Generate Popup Cache file if needed Replace it with: if (($popup == '1' || $popup == 'imagelightbox' || $popup == 'perfectlightbox' || $popup == 'thickbox') AND !file_exists('uploads/tx_wtgallery/popup/'.$filename_cached)) { // Generate Popup Cache file if needed Then search for:                         } elseif ($js_popup == 'perfectlightbox' AND t3lib_extMgm::isLoaded('perfectlightbox',0)) {
                                $content = '';
                        $content .= $imagetag;
                                $content .= ''; And place right under it:                         } elseif ($js_popup == 'thickbox' AND t3lib_extMgm::isLoaded('jquery_thickbox',0)) {
                                $content = '';
                        $content .= $imagetag;
                                $content .= '';
                        }

4. edit the file typo3conf/ext/wt_gallery/ext_typoscript_constants.txt and search for the following code:

# cat=plugin.wt_gallery//300; type=options[0,1,wallpaper,imagelightbox,perfectlightbox]; label= POPUP - Activate popup: Ratio of the thumbnails (De)Activate Popup (Default 1) (Example 0 for off, 1 for on, wallpaper for showing orignal picture, imagelightbox for using kj_imagelightbox2, perfectlightbox for using perfectlightbox) and replace it with: # cat=plugin.wt_gallery//300; type=options[0,1,wallpaper,imagelightbox,perfectlightbox,thickbox]; label= POPUP - Activate popup: Ratio of the thumbnails (De)Activate Popup (Default 1) (Example 0 for off, 1 for on, wallpaper for showing orignal picture, imagelightbox for using kj_imagelightbox2, perfectlightbox for using perfectlightbox and thickbox for jquery_thickbox) Thats it, after recacheing the extension, you have enhanced the feature config_popup.show = 1 under constants by the choice of thickbox, which activates the jquery_thickbox. You may find more on my hack (e.g. prepatched files and a diff) at the typo3 bugtracker: http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=8849 I hope you enjoyed my lil tutorial, and i wish you further happy hacking

Relaunch of Neverslair

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:07:00 -0400

Yeah, we are back!
After over a year with the old design, i finally decided it was time for something new. The new outfit brings in some new features, for one, we are smaller, the total page is bout 4 times smaller than the old one for the browser (that is you, the viewer). secondly, i took the time to go with all common standards for web page design, and once again we look the same in all browsers on all os. As a regular reader of neverslair, you might have seen, that the search menupoint is gone, i replaced it with a searchbox, which is now available on all pages. also for bloggers, the login is no longer some link going to another page, instead the whole login procedure is accessible from every page on the right side of the page. I replaced the timtab calendar on the frontpage with an actually less buggy calendar in the archive view. For the fans of magic bookmarks, daniels dev corner has been fixed from all http bugs. i have removed the nice urls from the page for now after running into caching problems there, but stay tuned, those should be on soon again. i hope you like the results, always feel free to leave me comments, or mail me. Your Oliver

MEDIEN.KULTUR.RAUM goes online

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:36:00 -0500

After quite some development time, i was able to bring the page of the medien.kultur.raum online, it is the page of a local club, that is giving courses in literature and media themes. If you are interrested in courses concerning photography, writing, social science and related things, feel free to go to http://www.medienkulturraum.at I made the page for a personal friend of mine, since i wanted to get some of my work experience as a web developer enhanced, the whole page has been developed in the free open source cms typo3 (www.typo3.org), thus once again showing, what is possible with typo3.

Developing PHP & Ajax with Delphi 4 PHP

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:38:00 -0500

This is an application i just came across while surfing the web for Typo3 tips and Tricks.
From what i can see, its very impressive and i have to give it some further tries, autocompletion for code, drag and drop for elements, and the possibility to have a database form application hooked within a few mins. Every web developer knows, that most of the time you sit there with your text app and web browser, searching for information or code, that does what you want to do, this application eases up the whole web development process, so that you might have to search the web a little less than usual while doing your development.

YouTube DirektDelphi 4 PHP AJAX Conversion

German "Chaos Computer Club" reaction on new "Admin-tools" law in germany

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 12:08:13 -0400

Since i went to register for the CCC Camp 2007 i stumbled across, lets say, the Reaction of the Chaos Computer Club on the new german law, that forbids the use of Security Tools except for registered Companies, the registration is done via the german "BSI", the german .gov security buerau.

Have to have the right tools for the job

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 15:21:00 -0500

After a long time, i am on the search for some good gnu/linux tools again. best would be a collection of tools, which are opensource and freeware, so i run a search on known things i was missing under gnu/linux for a while...

a tool for editing files from an ftp on the fly
a tool which acts like homesite for gnu/linux
something dreamweaver'ish
a good chess program, which does play without online partners

I searched for a pretty while, but found exactly what i needed. the first one, i had a look which i did a preview for a long while ago, the cool is called nvu, and it may be downloaded from www.nvu.com, it offers all those nice little gimmicks, you might expect from a common html editor, it has preview mode for the page, has its own css edito built in, which lets you design css code with a few simple clicks, it lets you insert elements on your page without having to type down every statement, comes with a site manager, which lets you simply connect to a place on the internet and directly edit your sources, and then publish your changes with a single click on the so called publish button. not to mentoin, it has a possibility to add functionality via plugins, just like you would do it with firefox by using xpi files. nvu has come a long way, since the last time i looked at it, and i think its time to put it into the mainstream development. Secondly, for pure editing of all kind of sourcecode, there is a multiplatform editor called jedit, which might be found at www.jedit.org. it has lots of features out of the box, you might best compare it to editors like pspad or ultraedit, its big difference to these kind of editors is, that it also, like nvu, has support for all kinds of plugins and themes, and compared to nvu, there area already dozens of plugins available for it, e.g. on the fly editing from internet sources. There are not many chess games out there, that are free and support playing without an online connection, the best i have tested so far is jose, which might be found at http://jose-chess.sourceforge.net/ It has a nice table setup, you can see your opponents movement and prediction, it tells you field numbers and has the necessary timer. i have to say, gnu/linux is getting better pretty fast, and it gives me a good feeling, that even projects, that where started as a case study get improved very quickly.

The Chaos Communication Camp 2007

Shadow333@gmail.com (Oliver Leitner) — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 21:00:00 -0500

And finally, it is time for that great event again, after 4 years of abstinence the chaos computer club announced the next chaos communication camp for the august of this year. and of course, i will be there, sharing my knowledge with the public, and getting some new ideas about it. i am hoping to meet some of you guys there as well, after all, this is the largest hacking event in europe, and all that open air. still thinking about a topic i may talk about, what would you prefer to hear on an event of that kind? the location has slightly changed, its now near an airport outside of berlin, and not anymore at the beautiful place at the lake, i will be missing the chance to cool down at that lake greatly, after all the german summers can be pretty hot, the last time we had some fireguards put us up with some extra water to cool us all down. this is not a business type of a meeting, its more like an open event, where everyone may join in, doesnt matter of his direct relation to the community. so see ya'll at the campside. yours oliver