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Found 10 entries.
I'm giving away free wine...
After Nate posted this - New Thing #98: Free Stuff, I decided to give away 5 bottles of wine.
I won them the other week but I'm not a wine drinker. It's really nice stuff, Grove Mill, Sauvignon Blanc 2006 and retails about $20 a bottle.
Here's the details. You must do ALL of these things:
All entries subject to my decision. Judges decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into.
Finally, well done Nate, I was thinking of doing something like this anyway but you just forced my hand :-)
Update - 2007-10-23 20:02: requirement to be in Wellington removed
Update - 2007-10-24 08:56: Nate has update him entry with an email I sent to him. Just some ideas about how we can keep it going forward rather than backwards! :-)
Inserted: 2007-10-23 18:58 (4 years, 3 months ago)
After almost all of October being spent on polishing and shining Zaapt, I'm now making the move to Etch and Apache 2 from Sarge and Apache Perl.
After telling you about my refactoring on Zaapt I'm now migrating my sites over to Etch with Apache 2.
This site, kapiti.geek.nz, is the first to move. I did it last night and generally it went quite well. I got most of the bugs out last night before I switched DNS so that was good. I did find one this morning however regarding my RSS feeds, so I apologise if you had to wade through a list of broken links to my site from your feed reader this morning (one silly '/' is all that caused it).
Since then, I have found a few other back-end things which needed fixing, mainly caused by the migration from the old roles and privileges to the new RBAC. Overall though, I'm really happy. I may find some more problems when I migrate Zaapt and Zaapt Simple but hopefully all those things will be ironed out by the time I migrate KiwiWriters.
Labels: zaapt, planet-geek, kapiti-geek-nz
Inserted: 2007-10-22 13:00 (4 years, 4 months ago)
For a while I've wanted to refactor a lot of stuff in Zaapt and I finally got my chance to do it and much more.
I've been meaning to tidy up a few things in Zaapt for a while and over the past two weeks I've hacked on it lots and lots.
In short point form, the changes I have made are:
As always, a small list doesn't do justice to the amount of work I have actually put in. Add to this that fact that I've been hacking on it constantly since the end of June and you can see where Zaapt has gone in the meantime.
In fact, Zaapt is still only 10 months old so it really has come a long way from being nothing beforehand.
Here, I'm just going to touch on a few different things related to recent happenings in the Zaapt world.
There is more interest from other people around Zaapt these days but still no hard-and-fast site to say "hey looky over there, there's a Zaapt site and you know what and I didn't make it". I can't wait for that day to come and I promise you, it'll come before Zaapt is 1 year old.
Or at least, I hope it will.
This is something I had to do which just made sense. Apache Perl is looking a bit long in the tooth and of course, it's going to be removed from Debian in Lenny so I had to move away sometime.
As it turns out, porting Zaapt over to Apache 2 wasn't that hard, just a little picky. I had to change a few little things here and there once I'd Googled for the information I needed but mostly it was harmless.
Most of my sites are still running on this Debian Sarge box but I now have one running on Debian Etch. In the next week or so, I'm going to start porting all the sites over to the new box from the smallest to the largest. Firstly, Zaapt itself and Zaapt Simple, then kapiti.geek.nz and finally KiwiWriters. As they say, "it's quicker to build a 5" telescope and a 9" telescope than it is to build a 9" telescope".
After I showed Donovan how my old privileges worked, I knew it was confusing by the look on his face. The good news is however that Zaapt now has a good implementation of Role-Based Access Control and it's much the better for it. Currently it does the simplest level but it's easy to add some of the more advanced levels later even though I think that will be unnecessary.
Adding RBAC has been the hardest change I've had to do to Zaapt so far. Not because it was tough, just because RBAC is implicit in a CMS like Zaapt and used in a lot of places. I had to change a lot of the Mason processing components as well as the database schema.
This addition to Zaapt had to happen now because otherwise it would become even harder later on when more sites, more users and more content models are using it.
Finally, because I'm changing servers, it gives me a prime opportunity to test it all works when I migrate the databases across but before I switch the DNS.
Zaapt is still young but it is almost ready for the first official release. I know about the adage "release early, release often" but I just never felt that Zaapt was in that release position yet. Still you'll note that I'm only going to release as v0.1 but that's just because I know there are many more things to do before I get to a v1.0 state.
I will however now adhere to that phrase, moreso in the "release often" thing. That way, to upgrade from one version to the next would be relatively easy and certainly less of a headstrain.
I wanted to get a simple-ish site going on Debian Etch, Apache 2 and all the new refactored stuff so I created Amazing Structures just as a hobby site. So far it just maps a few structures within a few categories but this is going to be expanded over time with many more features planned along the way.
As it turns out, its use of in-built Zaapt content models is straightfoward, but the site also has a very complex custom content model of it's own.
This is another great example of a custom content model which extends Zaapt without any trouble whatsoever. An even better example of a custom content model is the Challenge model (using SoCNoC as an example) over on KiwiWriters.
That's it for now, but remember to lookout for a v0.1 of Zaapt in the next few weeks (and as a bonus, with a new Event content model too).
Labels: apache, zaapt, debian, planet-geek
Inserted: 2007-10-20 02:03 (4 years, 4 months ago)
I wasn't going to do NaNo this year but it just wouldn't feel right if I didn't. So I am.
Already things are getting exciting. The new NaNo site is up (still some teething problems but I'm sure they'll get it sorted). And for the geeks, it's now using Drupal.
Loads of names I know from last year are already on the forums, but even better I know more of them since many from KiwiWriters are also over there too. Added to this, we're getting crossover from NaNo and our KiwiWriters membership has gone up a lot over the past two weeks and hopefully some more during November.
The Manawatu Standard is being the best local paper which supports writing events like this one with this article - Have you got the write stuff?. Hopefully more of them will promote it too since it's a very enjoyable month - of course I have a view that they might support us with SoCNoC next year too.
It's all very exciting.
Labels: nanowrimo, kiwiwriters, planet-catalyst, novel
Inserted: 2007-10-17 21:50 (4 years, 4 months ago)
It seems that no matter what you do and how hard you try, you can always be greener.
Sometimes I feel I don't do enough to be green. Mostly I think I'm okay but in reality there are many many more things I can do to help out.
Here is some of the things I do, I've started doing recently or I want to do more of in the future. I'm going to centre on Reduce, Re-use, Recycle and public transport.
This is the area I can probably do most in. Not that I'm bad but I feel I can do a lot more mainly by buying less! It's that simple. My main problem is food since I eat out a lot. I really should buy in more and eat at home more (but that's no fun).
Recently I got reusable shopping bags. Erm, can't think of anything else. Oh, I re-use water bottles instead of buying a new one all the time. I really should use my proper bottle.
I recycle paper, glass and metals every week (thanks to the council picking them up). I took my old computers to Wellington's eDay recently and I usually give old clothes to various charities for re-use or re-sell.
I walked to school everyday from the age of 9 to 18. At university I always took public transport. I have always used public transport to work (except on the odd occassion I take the car).
I love trains, have a love-hate relationship with buses and wish Wellington would get proper trams (those silly old trolly-buses don't count).
My car doesn't guzzle gas, I despise the people around town who have 4x4's for no good reason and I really should get peddle cycle.
I will be moving closer to work at some stage in the future, for both the environment and so I get more hours in the day. Then, I'll feel like cooking at home in the evening and I might even be able to go home at lunchtime - which I did do for a while and it certainly means I eat healthier, cheaper and create less waste.
So, that's about it for me. But finally... this article was written because today is Blog Action Day.
Labels: green, wellington, blog-action-day
Inserted: 2007-10-15 22:50 (4 years, 4 months ago)
...and having a fun time too!
I said to Brenda the other week that I'd come along to her Drupal Hackfest, but said I'd probably be hacking on Zaapt - which I am.
So far, I have refactored the Account model so it's a lot nicer and uses a lot of the newer functionality contained within Zaapt.
Now, and this is the big one, I'm going to hack in a better Accounts/Roles/Permissions. My original implementation wasn't far from wrong but I've decided it's time to make it right.
Once that's done, plus a few other fixes here and there and I will decide if it's time to finally release v0.1 of Zaapt.
Ah, happy days.
Labels: zaapt, drupal, planet-geek
Inserted: 2007-10-13 16:21 (4 years, 4 months ago)
On 15th October, I have pledged to blog about the environment.
As it says:
What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?
One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.
That issue is: the environment.
Head over to Blog Action Day and pledge your support.
Labels: green, environment
Inserted: 2007-10-09 12:04 (4 years, 4 months ago)
Warning: advert for geeks to unite.
As has been always this year, I'm going to the Wellington PerlMongers meeting tomorrow night, so if anyone is interested, please come along. There are four speakers lined up so it's going to be a busy one.
Also, there is a new User Group starting next month. A few others in Catalyst (I think Finlay, Brenda and Penny) have been organising getting the New Zaland PostgreSQL Users Group up and going so put the first Tuesday of each month in your calendar for that one.
Labels: perl, planet-geek, postgres
Inserted: 2007-10-08 23:39 (4 years, 4 months ago)
Yet again, things are well in the land of Wellington.
So I meant to blog last week about going to see The Phoenix smash 4 goals past Perth Glory. That was one entertaining and hugely enjoyable match. As each match comes around, watching the Phoenix just gets better and better even if we are having fairly random results. You always bump into someone you know at the match, singing along with Yellow Fever is always funny and the crowd entertainment value is excellent.
This week, I managed to walk the Carbon Crusade and planted 5 trees for it too. All good fun.
In other news, both good and bad. I managed to win a crate of wine at the Carbon Crusade from More FM. It's the first time I've ever entered a competition on the radio but I only did it 'coz I figured I actually had good odds of winning - and I did :-)
But the bad news is, I've gone and made my injury worse. After not playing footy for 3 weeks, I then proceeded to jump across the stream eager to plant my trees - and promptly pulled my groin again. So it looks like I'll be out of action for even longer, which I'm very miffed about.
Finally, I went to the NZSO last night and can honestly say was my favourite night there in a while. Plus, I have tickets to see Turandot in a couple of weeks.
As always, Wellington is keeping me busy.
I love this place.
Labels: nzso, phoenix, opera, football
Inserted: 2007-10-07 20:06 (4 years, 4 months ago)
Ma.gnolia.com is also getting in on the act.
From a webpost on the Ma.gnolia.com blog, they are releasing a new specification called Open Authentication specification (OAuth).
The thing is though, they are calling it Open Authentication but really, it's not just authentication, it's actually also (maybe sneakily) authorisation too. Authorisation to your data, that's what.
Using Open Authentication certainly does allow one site (the web app) to confirm with another (the identity server) that you are who you say you are. But there is more to it than that...
It also allows the web app to gain access - on your say-so of course - to your private data on the identity server.
(As an aside, I think that Open Authentication, or OAuth, is actually a misnomer and really should be named something else.)
This can be most easily thought of as an example where a photograph printing site wants access to a user's images at their favourite image sharing site.
This OAuth specification is along the same lines as quite a number of different specifications which allow for authentication and authorisation of data access which are vying for adoption throughout the rest of the web. Much like what I said last week about the possibility of Google opening out their authentication/authorisation, it'll be interesting from here on in and the good thing is, if there is enough people looking at the problem and creating solutions, the best one will probably win - or maybe the biggest one.
One thing I forgot to mention in last week's post is about the type of data that can be shared. For example, having Ma.gnolia as your identify server and your data manager will give you access to your bookmarks from other web apps if given authorisation, but from this provider, that's all you can get at - since that's all they keep.
Opposed to this is some new abilities within Google Mashups which allow you to store any type of data against each user. When it was first released, you could only access the \c{${app}} variable (I need to confirm this) but now there is a \c{${user}} variable too.
So again, this is another step along the road where you'll actually be able to create and store anything with anyone and access it from anywhere, on the assumption that Google's new API allows this.
That's a lot of options and very much inline with the true spirit of the web.
Life is good.
Labels: google, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, magnolia, social-graph
Inserted: 2007-10-05 16:05 (4 years, 4 months ago)
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