Mini Rant: Blogbox.com

December 3rd, 2004 • 1 comment Rants

I don’t get it, if Laszlo becomes open source, why does all hell has to break loose? A search on Google or Technorati tells you how much fuzz these tiny little useless boxes have created.

What in the world happen to MT Plugins, they have tons of these so-called boxes. Why do I want a photoblox if I have Flickr, a linkblox if I have del.icio.us, a weatherblox or a clockblox when everyone is reading my blog using some news reader?!

This can’t be what Laszlo was made for, now can it? Is it all they could come up with? Bloggers don’t care about proof-of-concepts using X platform, or Y language, give them something that works and that’s it. You want to market for geeks? Give something to be proud of.

SCO WTF?!

November 30th, 2004 • 2 comments Rants

This might sound a bit rough, so excuse the language, but seriously, WTF is this?!!

Wiki may become a disaster

November 30th, 2004 • 4 comments General

Reading Wiki: A disaster waiting to happen?, I got an idea to add to my Perfect Wiki list. Why don’t wikis have a transaction like system? If someone wants to attack a wiki, why not make it more difficult for him to do that, and easier for the administrator to undo it, maybe with a few clicks?

I think a wiki should record everything a user does in a single session as a single transaction, in extreme cases add an approval system for each one, the administrator can then undo everything a certain user has done with just on click, “Undo” and the wiki rolls back to a state before vandalism.

Cool, huh? My list keeps growing more and more.

Loving DokuWiki

November 28th, 2004 • 3 comments General

During my search for the perfect wiki, Aaron told me about DokuWiki and that I should give it a try; so I did. Right now, it’s my choice for running Codeflakes Wiki, and here’s why:

• Plain file backend:

  DokuWiki uses simple text files as its storage, no complicated SQL queries, grep, sed and awk all work like a charm, and even if the server is turned off, I can still get all my data.

  I know that other solutions are good as well. XML and SQL databases are great, but they have their place, and I really don’t think that a wiki belongs there, wikis are either hierarchies (in case of namespace support) or a flat list of links. There are no complex relations between various components.

• Simple revisioning

  DokuWiki appends timestamps to filenames and moves them from data directory to attic, and that’s about it. There’s a nice diff engine, and better yet, GNU diff works two on any two files, you can even create patches, it just doesn’t get simpler. Maybe future versions should consider using Subversion, since it already solves most of a wiki’s problems.

• Namespace support

  I’m not a neat freak, but I like my stuff organized, maybe not into namespaces, but that’s still good. Faceted categorization would’ve been a better idea, but I understand it’s more difficult to implement.

• Simple syntax

  No fancy stuff, the syntax is easy, obvious, and just works. Yes, it doesn’t have it all, you don’t have plugins like coWiki, you don’t have advanced formatting tools, but you have almost everything you need, headings, paragraphs, lists, links, tables, Interwiki, and most of all syntax highlighting (admit it, geeks like that stuff).

• ACL

  Finally, a wiki with ACLs that aren’t a pain in the neck. You only have one file to edit and it’s where you store permissions for users and groups, you can let or restrict people from editing, creating pages, etc. PAM integration isn’t a necessity, but it’s a big plus. DokuWiki however has LDAP support for authentication.

• Bells & Whistles

  The rest is mostly bells and whistles to me, but they’re still nice features like RSS, Recent Changes, Changelog, an editing toolbar, XHTML compliant code, a nice design. mod_rewrite support is however essential.

• Neat Stuff

  If you’re using Mozilla’s Site Navigation Bar you’ll probably like this, in More -> Other Versions, you’ll see 4 pages to view, Recent Changes, Current namespace, Plain HTML and Wiki Markup of the current page. You don’t have to click Edit This Page just to figure out how something is written in this wiki.

  There are 2 CSS files that control the formatting, one is the display version of the page, the one you see in your browser, the other is the printable version, which you’ll get once you click print. Nice going DokuWiki.

I happen to be a minimalist, I like things that work out of the box, don’t fill my head with tons of greatness crap and market buzzwords, give me exactly (or nearly exactly) what I want, nothing more nothing less, and let me be able to add and extend myself without causing too much hassle. Thankfully, DokuWiki does just that.

Lawyers, Get a Life

November 27th, 2004 • Rants

The Court simply wants to scream to these lawyers, “Get a life” or “Do you have any other cases?” or “When is the last time you registered for anger management classes?”

Can’t wait to hear that on software patents, I mean for God’s sake, IS NOT Operator?!! Don’t these people feel ashamed of themselves by calling it an “Invention”?! Get a Life!