Andrea Olivato’s Blog

Yesterday night I couldn’t sleep so I started developing a new usplash theme. I realized just the main loading effect but I believe that with this background the theme can become really nice! If you want to know more, go to the project page ->

Note that this theme is a pre-release version, not even near to be stable… so please,please, use it just if you’re sure of what you’re doing.

If you want to see it in action I realized a screencast from virtualbox.

Links

• Project Homepage
• Gnome Look Page
• Screencast

Setting up a svn is not a big deal on any linux box. On Linux Feed server, which is running Debian Stable,it’s just a matter of

$ sudo apt-get install subversion
$ sudo mkdir /var/svn-repos/
$ sudo svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /var/svn-repos/dummy-project

and add the right permissions. However if you want to create more trunks, manage more users with different permission the whole process may result complex and laborious. This is why I looked for an easy-to-use web interface to administrate one ore more project, create users and groups, assign permissions to projects or sub folders.

I found Usvn a php5 + mysql (nobody likes postges out there uh???) powered admin interface, which is able to do all the operations I explained before. Obviously the whole process needs a complete control on apache and the server you’re going to run svn on, as you need to edit the apache2.conf (or httpd.conf) file, the mod_svn and mod_dav_svn activated, and obviously subversion installed.

During installation I lost 10 mins looking for the mod_dav_svn module, which I could not find with aptitude. I finally understand it was just part of the apache2-svn packagage.

So, after a bit of configuration, db setup, apache reload and  few actions more, Usvn is successfully installed, configured and ready to create users and trunks. It also support the importation of any existing repo on your panel… terribly useful if you want to start using this tool but got some existing repositories.

Here are some links:

Home Page: http://www.usvn.info
Downloads: http://www.usvn.info/download
Docs: https://trac.usvn.info/wiki/Documentation

Reading Fabrizio‘s blog article I came to know about Koders, an incredible resource of open source code. Using Koders search engine you can easily find the code you were looking for, or get informations about the classes you are already using.

In fact, their database does not only contains the code but also informations about the author, the licence and the source it was cut from.

Apart from the web interface I believe the most interesting part of Koders are the IDE plugins, developed to rapidly access code’s informations directly from a developing platform. In the download page you can find the Eclipse plugin, which searches in real time any documentation, information and code related to what you’re writing on eclipse.  As shown in their screencast as soon as you declare a class/function the plugin will start a research on background and will return all the posssible related class. If you find what fits your needing you can just double click to include open source functions and classes inside your project!

Just wanted to deny myself about my previous article about Who’s Amung stat service.

Since one month all the stats provided from who’s service have been perfect, without any downtimes. Congrats to the staff, for resolving stability problem and returned to offer a great stat service.

After some testing from me and some users I released the sh404 version of my Google news Sitemap Generator for Joomla using Sh404. Even if I prefer OpenSef plugin, lots of people use sh404 for managing url rewrite on Joomla, as it is currently on development.

You can find downloads and some instructions on the dedicated page.

The script is available for both 1.0.x and 1.5.x versions, however it was tested the most on the newer Joomla.

Reading Federico‘s article about the Remember the Milk AIR client get me more interested on RTM ( still Remember the Milk, not Read The Manual ) and curious about the possibilities offered by this Service.

Looking around the net I found that this guy created a nice integration beetween RTM and Gnome DE, using the Deskbar Applet. I’m not a Deskbar fan, I thinks it’s quite heavy on loading and I always preferred not adding it to my panel, however I decided to use it only for RTM tasking, disabling all others plugins.

In the screenshot above you can see the nice result I got with a 30secs installation. Just downloaded the plugin, extracted it (withouth the directory, just the two files) indide my :

~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/modules-2.20-compatible

In some enviroments the directory can also be

~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers

Then I just added the applet to my panel, disabled all plugins from it except the RTM one and configured Remember The Milk, confirming in the browser the possibility to access the APIs.

In the above picture it was shown what happens when you digit on the deskbar a name for a task that you have not inserted yet. Below you can see what happes when you digit something that is both contained in one ore more tasks but can also be a new one.

If you click on the Icon or on the text you will be browser redirected to website while if you click on the arrows you will be prompted for new interaction and/or more informations will be shown.

As example below you can see what happens when clicking on the arrow near the Add Task instruction: you can choose in which folder save your new task…

If you want to modify or view a task you can click on the arrow near the name of the old task and this is what you get:

Conclusions: useful instrument, nice interaction with Gnome DE. I like it!

I always liked who’s amoung service, and I personally congratulated their staff about their brand new web site style. However in the last week I noticed lots of ‘black holes’ in their tracking system.

As you can see from the above image, for each day of the week I got one ore more hours of 0 visitors while the other web analytics tools I do use, reveal a normal activity of the site. I checked some other websites and they seems to have problems located on the same (italian) hour so I believe this can be a generalized problem.

I really hope they are in troubles for having received so many new sign up requests after the new release, and that this is going to be solved soon!

Yes that’s what I mean by : ‘LinuxFeed is growing fast‘

Future Whish List :

• English Version
• Offering a blogging host ( WordPress Based )
• Owning an in-server built OpenId service

Yes, it’s ture. There are a lot of plugins for WordPress that let your users interact with Social Bookmarking sites, but as soon as I looked at Hey Silver, I started loving its new way of proposing content. Continue reading →