Mont-rebei gorge

I already published this on my phlog and you know that I do not usually crosspost stuff, unless I crosspost stuff.

This is to say that you really should visit my gopher site at:

gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/chals/phlog

If you cannot browse gopherspace try this link (direct gopher proxy link to the above-mentioned post)

Anyway, I'm also uploading some of the pictures that I took (with a slightly worse quality)

Screenshot of the week 9

I had forgotten an important feature of GetSimple CMS. The Website Health Check that tells you in detail about the status of your website:

Screenshot of the week 8

This is the 8th installment of my "Screenshot of the week" series. Why do I regularly publish screenshots? Because everybody loves screenshots. Don't they? Well, at least, I do love 'em ;)

This week I'm going to upload several images showing the internals of GetSimple CMS. Getsimple does not use a database, this is called a flat file cms. I was looking for one because I didn't want the complexity of joomla,drupal or wordpress. I tried several of them and I especially liked zimplit andpico. But above them all I preferred getsimple.

If you are looking for a simple and easy to use but however complete CMS do not look any further. Give getsimple a try. I hope you like it as much as I do. In fact all this site is built with it. And I also hope that these screenshots are useful. 

First, the login screen:

Second, the Pages tab:

Third, the uploaded files management:

Fourth, choosing the themes and adding the code to the components:

Fifth, the Plugins tab. You can activate or de-activate them with just one click:

Sixth, the Blog management (which is a plugin):

And last but not least, the calendar (which is another plugin) I think the calendar is cool. I added it to the footer:

Valentine's day is alright for publishing

As I already hinted in my "Testing blog" post, which was indeed the first post I published here, today is as good a day for publishing a new website as any other. It happens to be Valentine's day, which makes it a special day.

This site is so far nothing but a clone of my previous version of chalsattack.com but who knows, maybe I will revamp it to a certain extent. Since 2006 I have revised my website/hosting conditions every two years. Now I have decided to make sdf-eu my home. I already spend most of my computing time at sdf-eu so it is not a weird thing to do. I guess this decission was an easy one to make.

I have been the entire week looking for simple cms systems. I discovered GetSimple CMS and I must say that I really love it. I'm truly impressed. I was only familiar with joomla and drupal and I thought that complexity was a must but I realized that rather on the contrary it is not. Thank God.

TODO (before actually publishing it):

• 1. Create the CNAME
• 2. Write the backup script (I will use my own 'gophersync' script but adapted to work with html. My  'gophersync' script makes a backup of my gopher hole using cron and rsync once a month).

DONE (which took a long while):

• 1. Creating the html tables

I hope you like my new site and new blog. It even has a calendar, and everybody knows that having a calendar is as important as having a towel for a hitchhiker ;)

weechat's relay plugin

Most irc people I know use either one of these combinations:

screen + irssi

or

tmux + weechat

I'm not an expert at all in any of them, but I have used both of them for several years now. And after configuring screen + irssi to get my perfect setup (combination of scripts, utf-8 support and so on and so forth). I decided it was time to make the switch to tmux + weechat.

I'm not going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of them because everyone has their own preferences and that is fine by me.

One feature that I'm really interested in is the proxy/relay feature of both irssi and weechat. I already wrote about irssi proxy a while ago. So I decided to explore both weechat relay plugins named irc and weechat. I wrote a complete tutorial on how to configure them, but specifically for sdf-eu users. Here is the link:

Weechat tutorial

I hope you find it useful.

weechat2

It has been a really, really long time since I used weechat for the last time but now I'm back and I don't anticipate to look back again.

My first irc attempt was with a web-based client (possibly mibbit) Then, when I started irc'ing seriously I started using irssi (inside screen). After that, a friend of mine recommended me weechat (inside tmux). I liked both combinations, but I soon went back to the good old duo irssi and screen. Why? Well, I really made an intensive use of the irssi proxy plugin. With it I could connect to the same core from different clients and different locations. It was very handy for me. (I know that weechat also has a relay plugin but I never bothered configuring it)

Now I really do not use the proxy. I only use one computer at a time so connecting via sshto the machine running my irc client 24/7 is more than enough for me at the moment. But then, the bad news, the machine running my irc client (odin at sdfeu.org) crashed and we were left without the service for an unspecified amount of time.

So I put plan B into practice. Bounce using my raspi, which already hosts my gopher server. In my raspi I only had tmux and weechat already configured, so I didn't spend any time installing and configuring other programs. I directly launched the already existing ones. And wow! what a difference. Now that I'm a bit more into the irc world. I can take advantage of the plugins and scripts that allow you to achieve what you want/need.

One big difference between weechat and irssi is that weechat's scripts and plugins seem to be more integrated (ie. work better) than in irssi. Apart from the fact that weechat has a lot of default options that you can only achieve in irssi installing plugins.

The best plugin, so far, is the aspell one. Once activated, it highlights in red your misspelt words. This way you avoid posting a lot of typos.

The best scripts, so far, are: the buffers.pl, urlbar.py, urlgrab.py, cmus.py, weeget.py, iset.pl and isgd.pl (a url shortening service utility) but there are also a lot of fun and interesting ones, like for example , the games weetris.pl or mastermind.pl. Some other scripts that allow you to manipulate text are, among many others, leet.py, upside_down.py or prism.py

I have played with some others and I will spend the rest of the weekend trying new ones, like for example the beep.pl or launcher.pl ones.

Screenshot of the week 3

A beautiful screenshot of mrxvt with transparency over X11 forwarding through ssh with two open tabs: mc and tmux

A fantastic shell account at sdf-eu

I have not really written very much about sdf-eu yet. As far as I can remember there is just one post named sdf-eu and a couple of posts named sdf.

Well, probably the reason why I have not written much about it is that I spend a lot of time at it.

It is true. I log into my shell account at sdf-eu every single day. The reasons for doing that are countless and if you want to know more about it you will definitely have to visit sdfeu.org, make an account and see for yourself.

All I can say is that having a shell account at sdf-eu is a fantastic thing to have.

What I do there everyday:

• Learn from practice and experience about *nix operating systems.
• Use tmux to have several processes running at the same time.
• Use irssi proxy to get in touch with computer savvy people.
• Electronic mail.
• Use gopher and keep a phlog.
• ssh into other servers.
• Bridge connections from my house to my flat.
• Read and write on the bboard.
• Create and edit files.
• Have a mirror of my website.
• Browse the web, use ftp...
• And so on and so forth...

The list of things that you can do is not limited to the few examples I have just included here. There are many more things that you can do but it is very difficult to explain it to someone who can not even imagine what this is all about.

I sometimes like to think of sdf-eu as an interactive shared server, but again if you can read my enthusiasm from between the lines you will realize that, even again, it is much more than that. It is like a family :-)

<3 u all guys :-p

pharc v 2.0 released.

Today I released pharc 2.0. pharc is a script that organizes your phlog posts on a yearly basis.

pharc is based on mkphlog written by octotep. The reason for releasing v 2.0 is that mkphlog has been updated to v.0.2 so I needed to adapt my script to the changes.

You can read my phlog post on the release of mkphlog v.0.2 in my phlog here (gopher link)

You can read my phlog post on the release of pharc v.2.0 in my phlog here (gopher link)

pharc is version controlled using git. You can find the script v.2.0 here

If you're interested in the .deb package it is available in two places:

a. In my gopher hole (gopher link)
b. here: pharc 2.0-1 all.deb


The changelog is:

• Updating for mkphlog v.0.2
• Adding version number 2.0
• Adding license (2012)

Enjoy!!!

SDF-EU

Some weeks ago I posted about SDF and my intention to become MetaArpa as soon as possible. I was interested in many of the services offered there, the most immediate ones were using gopher, screen + irc client. But after some connection issues I decided to ping sdf and sdf-eu, which is closer to my location.

PING sdf.org (192.94.73.15) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from SDF.ORG (192.94.73.15): icmp_req=1 ttl=241 time=237 ms

64 bytes from SDF.ORG (192.94.73.15): icmp_req=2 ttl=238 time=226 ms

64 bytes from SDF.ORG (192.94.73.15): icmp_req=3 ttl=240 time=228 ms

&&

PING sdf-eu.org (178.63.35.193) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from odin.sdf-eu.org (178.63.35.193): icmp_req=1 ttl=243 time=86.3 ms

64 bytes from odin.sdf-eu.org (178.63.35.193): icmp_req=2 ttl=243 time=86.0 ms

64 bytes from odin.sdf-eu.org (178.63.35.193): icmp_req=3 ttl=243 time=80.6 ms

So I decided to ask where to settle my home. The advice was, naturally SDF-EU. So here I am. I decided to take a screenshot of my everyday life at sdfeu. In the picture (which will also be the "Screenshot of the week") you can see me reading the bboard (Bulletin board) . Using mc (The midnight commander, file manager) and irc-ing with Weechat.

Note: Using blackbox as window manager (Debian Squeeze default)