Ambition

Today I got one of the best rock albums in history. It is, at least, an all-time personal favourite. I had been looking for it for years but it was only resold second hand and at a very high price. Thank god I could get this remastered copy at a very affordable one.

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Tommy Shaw's Ambition

I would really like to explain how I feel, all the emotion that having this masterpiece produces in me (after so many years). I would really like to be able to express how happy I am, but I simply can't put it into words.

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 ;)

MiniDLNA on a raspi

One of the best things in life is that you never stop learning and/or discovering new and exciting things. Today was a great day in that sense. I discovered the set -u builtin which warns you if a variable is not set and also that it is good to talk to people to share ideas. (I've been talking to a cousin of mine for a long, long while this afternoon, interesting things).

But in respect to software, the discovery of the day/week/month and probably the whole year (hmm) was MiniDLNA. minidlna is a streaming server that can serve your files across the network to any device that supports the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) protocol.

I was looking for a way to stream media from my raspi. Since I had only tried to do it once and it was with vlc, I installed vlc in my raspi and tried to stream video with it but it was almost impossible. It turned out to be a too resource intensive method.

Then I used a clever way of streaming media from my raspi to my network. I copied the files that I wanted to stream to /var/www and accessed the contents of that directory over http, either using vlc or just a web browser. But no matter how clever this idea is, it is not very handy. You have to do a lot of manual work.

Today I asked on irc and a friend of mine said he used minidlna. I installed and configured it follwowing a tutorial I found on the web. Basically what I did was to edit/etc/minidlna.conf with several settings that apply to my device. It is pretty simple and straightforward, and in case you do not know what to put in there, you can always use the default settings.

Then from another computer I launched vlc and went to View --> Playlist --> Local Network --> Universal Plug n' Play and there I could see all the files that I wanted to share. Impressive, huh?

And the best thing yet to come, minidlna does not stress your raspi cpu at all. While working, it only used 0.3% of the cpu power.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2966 minidlna 20 0 37332 5824 552 S 0.3 1.3 0:00.22 minidlna

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.

pharc flowchart

This it the flowchart for pharc, my 'phlog archiver'. It is my first flowchart. I started drawing it with dia but I ended up using google docs. You can see an up-to-date version here