Crazy roof shutter things

We got motorised roller shutters installed today from… some company that does that thing. Basically our back area is a greenhouse (effectively), and gets stupidly hot… and we’re not quite in winter yet, but predictions run that it’ll also get stupidly cold at night with heat escaping through the glass.

So… it was an excuse for some pictures.

It also has a fun switch to play with…

Ubuntu, Sendmail and PHP

Surprisingly, I hadn’t noticed until just yesterday when I was testing out a contact form for a website under development that my PHP mail() wasn’t working properly. I really should have — WordPress sends out moderation emails for comments, and the absence of those in testing should have made me think twice, but it didn’t.

So, PHP and Sendmail weren’t playing nice. The default command is sendmail -t -i, if you don’t manually set sendmail_path in your php.ini configuration, but this wasn’t working.

Unfortunately, due to some degree of stupidity in the way things are run, you need to use an absolute path for PHP to find where it is (even if just the command “sendmail” works fine from a terminal… like I said, stupid), so if you want mail, you have to play by its rules. For no apparent reason.

This is all with stock Ubuntu versions of Apache2 and PHP, by the way — the stupidity may go away if you do-it-yourself, but I’m kind of doubting it.

Anyway, assuming you’ve got sendmail (or an MTA which provides sendmail hooks — I’m actually using postfix here) installed, you can simply set this in your php.ini, restart Apache (using apache2ctl restart from a root account), and all should be working:

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -i -t

Bingo!

The dog month continues: Tosca… errr… Indie!

So between the time I made the post this morning and now, I think her name has changed no fewer than three times… but now Tosca Indie is safely home, and photos have been taken (visible ones, too!)

No connection with grassroots publishing organisation Indymedia has been cited, although there remains the possibility that Indie is a closet media-activist-dog — only time shall tell!

The dog month continues: Tosca!

I’ve got no idea why there are so many dog pictures this month, but oh well… Tori’s picking up her new puppy, Tosca, today, and here’s one of the first lot of (slightly blurry) photos taken in the store — I’m promised more are coming as soon as Tosca gets home!

Posting from BloGTK 1.1

Just for kicks, to see if it’s any easier than using a plain old web browser to interface with the blog!

Anyway, BloGTK is a desktop client for WordPress which runs on Linux systems. Niggly features I’ve discovered in the last 30 seconds:

• Can’t select text, then click the “hyperlink” icon, and have the anchor tags wrap around selected text — they appear to the right of it.
• Compulsory “target” field in anchor generation — which I don’t think (if I recall correctly) is even valid in XHTML 1.1, possibly earlier.
• Lack of built-in quick tags that WordPress’ own posting interface has, namely for unordered lists, list items, and tagging of abbreviations, etc.
• Ironically, it’s possible to define your own tags, which can wrap around selected text just fine, whilst the “built-in” anchor button doesn’t do this… Hmm, okay.

It’s really little things, nothing major — the formatting tags (strong, em, etc.) work just fine on selections, which is great. It also has an inbuilt preview which (I’m 99% sure) functions using an internal rendering engine (or part of the GTK toolkit, same thing), rather than making HTTP calls. A change that’d be interesting to see (although one which doesn’t affect me directly) would be the implementation of either a WYSIWYG editor, or simply Textile or Markdown support with XMLHttpRequest being used (or something like it? I gather that’s a JavaScript thing, not having ever used it, so it mayn’t be usable like that.

Another thing that’d be nice is the implementation of keyboard shortcuts, just for text formatting stuff — so, Ctrl + B for strong and em tags, etc. And also the changing of the category display to a list of checkboxes in its own frame (or whatever the term is in desktop app interface design lingo) on the right of the posting area, instead of a dropdown — that’d allow posters to select multiple categories, more rapidly.

It’s a good simple app (sorry… I know it’s probably rather unsimple when you look at the code driving behind it, but I don’t understand any of that Python stuff, so I’m just judging on the interface), but a few niggly things mean I’d still prefer to use the native WordPress web interface.

Edit: In part to see if it does, but also because I had another thought — the absence of a “Posting…” status window is also something which could be improved, just so the user doesn’t think the application has crashed. It took a while here due to my ISP’s poor DNS performance, and had I not known why it was going slowly, I may have closed the application thinking it had crashed.