Back in August I upgraded my IPCop hardware, and tonight I finally installed the latest Zerina OpenVPN addon. The next/last thing I wanted to do was to hook up the parallel LCD and permanently mount it in the front of the case.

I had the LCD working on IPCop before using Mario Minati’s LCDProc addon. But when I checked tonight, his site hasn’t been updated since the 1.3.x series of IPCop releases (the current version is 1.4.11).

And this ipcop-users post doesn’t sound too good:

Does anyone know if there is an LCDProc addon for IPCop v1.4.x. I used to use the addon on v1.3 but unfortunatley it did not work on v1.4.x series so it would be nice if anyone managed to get it going on a current release. If not, then I’ll probably try to recompile it and get it going, but don’t want to reinvent the wheel if there is something out there already.

…and there were no responses.

Hopefully someone will compile a version and release it. I can use the LCD on a different box, but I was hoping to put it in the IPCop box.

After fighting with MediaWiki for a while, I finally figured out how to disable all forms of page caching so that it actually hands over the latest version of a given page when I ask for it.

To disable caching (including memcached) add the following lines to your LocalSettings.php file:

## Disable all forms of MediaWiki caching $wgMainCacheType = CACHE_NONE; $wgMessageCacheType = CACHE_NONE; $wgParserCacheType = CACHE_NONE; $wgCachePages = false;

You probably already have the $wgMainCacheType line, so just add the other three lines if you need those.

As a side note, you should make these changes in LocalSettings.php rather than in DefaultSettings.php (as some have recommended). DefaultSettings.php should not be edited, and is there just to give you a list of all of the available settings and their default values.

Just today I was discussing the latest version of Gnome with Matt, saying that it has come a long way from the 1.x days. And that, most importantly, it is no longer horribly ugly out of the box. As of 2.16, I actually really like the default look. With a little help from gnome-look, it can be a rather attractive desktop indeed.

But then tonight I come across this post (Why is Gnome So Ugly?):

Ok, so Gnome 2.16 came out a while ago. There are lots of new features. Yay for the foot.

Now I bet Apple fanboys are screaming right now. I don’t blame them. For the rest of you who don’t know why people would be screaming, its fairly simple. Default Gnome is ass-ugly. Thank God the Ubuntu folks made their own theme, otherwise no one would be using Gnome at all. I’ll swear by that.

Heh. Oh well… de gustibus non est disputandum.

Tonight’s CPLUG meeting was a little different that the usual format. A few reps from Acronis came down from Massachusetts to give a talk on their backup and data recovery solutions.

The presentation was good, and I was glad I attended. Their software seems to be well polished and looks like it would be easy to use, especially in an enterprise environment with a mix Windows workstations and Linux servers. It also appeared to handle virtual machine (e.g. VMWare) backups without a problem. All in all, looked pretty decent. And, all things considered, the price was very reasonable.

That said, being a LUG meeting and not just a sales meeting, I had hoped for something a little different…

(more…)

Quoth Kevin Dangoor:

I am pleased to announce TurboGears 1.0b1, which now supersedes the 0.8.9 release as the preferred TurboGears release. Many people have been using the TurboGears 0.9x releases for several months now and have been very happy with the results. The 1.0 APIs are stable and we’re focused on bugs and docs for the final 1.0 release. This is a bugfix release over 0.9a9.

I guess he didn’t give up just yet. ;)

I just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.0.4 tonight. Seems to have gone well. The WP devs certainly do a nice job keeping everything simple.

The Django team has decided to use SQLAlchemy as their database library of choice in future versions of the web framework.

Quoth Adrian:

The Django database API would not change, and the SQLAlchemy backend would be *optional*. The point of the SQLAlchemy backend would be to expose the underlying SQLAlchemy API if you need to do something truly complicated, rather than having to fall into raw SQL.

Additionally…

…this would be an *optional* add-on — the existing model machinery would stay put. I.e., people could still use Django without SQLAlchemy, and that would be the default. I wouldn’t rule out a full migration to SQLAlchemy (i.e., making it default) in the future, but we’d rather not add a dependency at this point.

The SVN branch will be called sqlalchemy if you want to look for it.

Via: SQLAlchemy News

By the way, PyWeek 3 is currently underway with the theme of The Disappearing Act. The dates of the challenge are 00:00 UTC 2006-09-03 to 00:00 UTC 2006-09-10.

In case you missed it, new version of Pylons was released in July.

Quoth Ben:

This version had some big internal changes, no longer using custom Myghty resolvers. We now use a very straight-forward WSGI interface to setup the application and the middleware. It’s easier to customize as a result, and the call-cycle is very understandable.

And it sounds like the strict adherence to WSGI minimizing compatibility issues.

Joel Spolsky writes about the language wars. I’m sure his comments about Ruby on Rails (about halfway down the column) will earn him some flames.

Update: DHH responds here and here. Winning quote:

I swear I couldn’t make this stuff up even if I tried. Joel, you’re my new hero of irony. And as soon as you start selling those t-shirts with “Serious Business Stuff”, I got green ready to flow. Short of that, I’d take a red teddy bear with the embroidering “Someone is Going to Get Fired”.

Heh!