Welcome to blog.alley.se at WordPress.com. Now the blog has a new location. I happen to be moving pretty much stuff away from my own domains and to other services.

Actually this allows me to spend more time with the content and less time upgrading and servicing web applications. I am afraid that this blog will not make it very long and by upgrading the old systems when not writing feels a bit tough. So I moved it here. It feels good.

I am emptying the bucket and spreading it out.

If you want to see what I am doing and read something about me, check out my twitter or the about page at antonlindstrom.com where I connected my tumblr.

I am going to tell you a little bit of what I have been doing lately. First of all, I have graduated from upper secondary school and have worked for about four weeks at a place like some sort of janitor. But what I am going to tell you something about is my website work.

I have been working on a website for a diving club in Lidköping, the site is built in PHP5 and I think it is the best site I have ever done. I know that there are alot of things that I can improve but right now I am pretty pleased. The site includes image uploading, adding news and dives (trips to places to dive). The site is called, l-sdk.se.

The site is built around the MVC pattern and is object oriented. When I have thought out the system I tried to come as close to the way Rails have done when it comes to adding pages and such. I feel that I have succeded in a way that there are not in any way a problem to add pages but instead it is fast and seamless. The system is also built around a configuration file in which the user sets variables, time settings and webmaster information.

The system is nowhere near complete but in about 2-4 weeks I think I might have come somewhere near a 1.0-stable version. That is also when I will release it here for others to evaluate and maybe to help me improve the code.

Ohh, by the way. I got into the Network- and System administrator program in Skövde.

Now, why have I stopped blogging?

It was mainly because there were some problems with WordPress, I got some errors when logging in and administrating this blog. Now the problem is solved by upgrading the K2 style which this site relies on.

Hopefully this will put me back to blogging again. Probably not as serious as before but blogging.

I like to see you stop by again!

As you may have noticed there have been several hours of downtime and problems with my blog. The problem right now is that my original theme is away, I forgot to do a backup on all my things and some of the contents of the blog is now gone. Backup is vital! I have full backup on all my things since a week or a little bit more but all things before that are unfortunately gone.

I am going to try to get the ship back on track and fix the theme as soon as possible. I will try to find the images for the posts as well but it could be lost.

Update

So, I found a backup of my theme (thank god!) and most of the things are like it used to be. The main problem right now is that the new WP 2.5 media uploading mechanism refuses to upload my images so I can not upload the old images via the administration interface, which sucks. For me this upgrade was not very important and I did not need to do it but I did and it is now upgraded, some problems still exist. The main problems I have are that when I log in the page shown is a blank page and the upload problem described above.

I am sorry for the trouble I caused with the site, I will be more careful with it in the future and do some regular backups.

Someone else who got problems with the WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate?

After 2 years of hard work the program has finally reached a stable version, the webmail client has a very nice interface and comes with some new updates for the stable version. I am proud to be a RoundCube user, it is small, scalable, lightweight and neat. The interface is good-looking and works like a charm with AJAX.

Some of the new updates in 0.1-stable are:

• An interactive installer script
• Remember decision to display images (annoyed me very much before)
• Improve message compose screen

More updates are found at the Trac Changelog

Unfortunately the RoundCube 0.1-stable is in PHP4 which means that the PHP5 support will be added after this release. It is kind of sad that they did not code this release in PHP5 so it would be easier to configure and more powerful.

How to upgrade from existing installation

The easiest way to do this, is read the README, where it says to replace some things;

1. Replace index.php
2. Replace all files in folder /bin/
3. Replace all files in folder /program/
4. Replace all files in folder /skins/default/

And then it is all done, your RoundCube 0.1-stable release is ready to rock (mostly receive mail though)

Thoughts

Why do I use RoundCube? The main thing is that it looks and behaves nice, it is also smooth and fast. RoundCube is not so old yet, so some problems is bound to occur. The thing I would like to have is a filter option in it that will take care of my Postfix filters, I know that there are plugins for this but I would like to have them there from the beginning. Yes, better plugin implementations would be nice as well, take over the easiness of WordPress to add plugins.

I have not tried the RoundCube Installer script but I would like to know if it is working well and if it is as good as it should be.

Do you have webcamera at home for no use? The camera is never used but you have thought about getting some home surveillance? If you want to do something with your old camera you can with almost no money at all set up a server which uploads pictures to an FTP server and you can see what is going on on your street when you are out traveling or at your work. Remember not to misuse the setup for illegal purposes, do not blame me when someone said that you should not have sneak peeked at your neighbor with a webcam!

You will need:

• A webcam (Linux compatible)
• A copy of webcam
• A web server

If you’re on Debian or Ubuntu you can simply install webcam with:

~$ apt-get install webcam

To configure the program we change the config file (.webcamrc), use your favorite texteditor:

~$ vi .webcamrc

Add the following:

[grab]
device = /dev/video0
text = "MyCamera %H:%M:%S"
fg_red = 255
fg_green = 255
fg_blue = 255
width = 320
height = 240
delay = 3
wait = 0
norm = pal
rotate = 0
top = 0
left = 0
bottom = -1
right = -1
quality = 100
trigger = 0
once = 0
[ftp]
host = example.com
user = youruser
pass = yourpassword
dir = /var/www/cam/
file = webcam.jpg
tmp = uploading.jpg
passive = 1
debug = 0
auto = 0
local = 0
ssh = 0


Replace example.com with your own hostname, youruser with your username and yourpassword with the password at your FTP server.
In your console, type:
~$ webcam
And the program will be started, this should do it and if you have done this right you will be able to see an image from your webcam at http://example.com/cam/webcam.jpg

All done! Tell me, what did you point your camera at?