Category: technology

Now this looks fun: Lumalive, light emitting textile technology by Philips Research:

http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/archive/2006/060901-lumalive.html

They have had some interesting ambient media projects before, but this time this really looks like something that could transform the way urban nightlife and streets look like, if this tech gets a hold. Great!

Measuring traffic in such a low-traffic site as this one is probably vanity taken to an extreme, but I have tried it anyways – at least partly to understand how the various web measurements systems work. Google Analytics is a free, very comprehensive system that offers much more information than all those log analyser programs I have been trying out before. But since when I switched this blog to WordPress some time ago, I noticed a significant drop in the site visitor statistics that Google Analytics was reporting. It was only then when I realised that the Google system relies on a javascript embedded in all monitored pages, and WordPress is all database and PHP. It was not showing on the radar. Luckily, it appears that several people have figured out how to make Google Analytics work through a plugin in WordPress. I have now downloaded and activated this one from Johann Richard – lets see how it works out (and if there are actually anyone reading these notes, anyways).

Links: http://www.google.com/analytics/

http://mycvs.org/archives/2005/11/14/google-analytics-wordpress-plugin/

Edit: I don’t think that the first plugin was working (even me cannot have zero visitors, in these days of crowded information superhighways) — I am now trying another Google Analytics plugin, this time from Boakes.org; see: http://boakes.org/analytics

Edit2: The Boakes version was working, but I ended also upgrading to the WordPress Reports plugin by Joe Tan, which generates admin reports based on Google Analytics and Feedburner data. In any case, the number of visitors in this blog is down -92% according to these reports, as compared to the Blogger days. 😦 Link: http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/

Since I do these software and hardware tests to learn about them (and they are interesting and sometimes fun, too), I will shortly document here the technology used for this new blog site:

• HP Proliant ML 110 server
• Powerware UPS 5115-750i/6 uninterruptible power source
• Fujitsu-Siemens Storagebird XL external 250 GB disk for backups
• Linux Ubuntu Drapper Drake (6.06) operating system
• Apache 2.0.55 web server software, with several extensions, including mod_php5, mod_rewrite, and mod_ssl (for several different features, including more secure system access)
• PHP scripting language version 5.1.2
• cURL, with libcurl version 7.15.1 (for enhanced URL manipulation)
• phpMyAdmin, a set of MySQL administration scripts for web-based access
• mySQL database server and client, versions 5.0.22, with various extensions for PHP, Python and other uses
• Postfix mail transport agent (v. 2.2.10) with various antispam tools and safeguard implementations, necessary for the WordPress notifications such as registration password mails to go out

And on top of those, the actual blog:

• WordPress, version 2.0.2-2, with numerous plug-ins for comment spam management, Flickr and email integration, Cron-jobs, and so on.

This is not the most recent version of WordPress, but I let Ubuntu to maintain my software packages through its Synaptic Package Management, to maintain compatibility and automated system upgrading. But in this case the latest stable release of WordPress (2.0.4) had implemented an important change by removing ‘Check Admin Referer’ security measure, which was exactly that feature which created most troubles in this installation. Admin Referer is a logic where WordPress tries to make sure that only the rightful admin has access to all admin pages by checking that the previous page accessed was also part of the admin console. In my case there was an error in the way the blog address (URI) was registered into the database, leading to a situation where every attempt to fix the error was stopped by the Admin Referer check, which did not think I was coming from correct admin pages (due to the previous faulty registration of the WPress install directory). A complete Catch-22 situation. In the end, I had to learn to edit the mySQL database manually in order to fix the wrong entry, and installing, comparing and learning all the tools needed for this took also more time. The more current WordPress versions use something called Nonce to pass a unique code from page to page during the administration processes. Good luck so that you never have to get stuck into this particular hole.

Read more:

http://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2006-April/005666.html

http://asymptomatic.net/2006/06/01/2370/what-is-all-this-nonce-sense/

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_6.06