Jonathan's blog

Today I signed up for Twitter – not for personal reasons but because I needed it for work. Of course I’ve heard about it in the past as the leading micro-blogging service, but it hadn’t interested me in the slightest.

I have used Facebook since its early days (when you could only get in if you had an academic email address!), primarily to keep in touch with friends. When they brought out the status updates feature, I couldn’t see the point. Even less so having something like Twitter that’s purely status updates.

There are so many ways these days to get content out there and onto the web. But I can’t see the point in many of the newer sites.

Facebook

Like I said, I use Facebook as a way to keep up with friends whom I don’t see very often. While I was at school, MSN Messenger was all the rage, but now we’re a bit more grown up we don’t all have time to sit on MSN all night. So Facebook is a convenient way to keep in touch from time to time – given that email is only really used for work these days.

But my only friends on Facebook are friends in real life. I don’t meet people through Facebook. For me, it’s just a direct replacement for emailing friends or chatting on MSN. I don’t broadcast my life to the world. I can’t see why they’d care.

Twitter

Which brings me onto Twitter. I can’t imagine that anyone would be interested in snippets of my daily life. If they’re that interested, they can text me and ask. As I mentioned, I now have a Twitter feed and you can follow me if you want – but I don’t recommend it. I’m not intending to write anything interesting – only to use it for following boring feeds like these from the University of Bristol.

Blogs and websites

I’m more interested in personal websites, often in blog format. Maybe it’s because I used the web for years before these social, collaborative sites popped up, and the only resources available were traditional websites.

I’ve had my own website for over a decade now, in one form or another. When I was a kid, I didn’t have much of interest to say and there was nothing on the site. Nowadays I have two blogs: this one, mainly for technical articles, guides, reviews and so on; and my photo blog where I publish photos that I have taken.

Flickr

I’m a geek, and so I have my own server and I run these blogs from scratch using Wordpress. Obviously such an approach isn’t going to work for everyone, which is why I like sites like Flickr. It’s a really easy way to get your work online. I set up my own Flickr page some time ago, before I decided where I was primarily going to host my photos.

As you can see, there’s hardly anything on it and only two comments. I’ve worked a bit harder to promote my official photo blog, which also gives me the freedom to customise it exactly as I want, and here I have had thousands of views of my photos.

In summary

I’m not saying that “Web 2.0” is a bad thing – I’m just saying it only works for me in limited ways.

I want to publish my articles and photos in a more traditional format, and I only use Facebook because most of my mates don’t use MSN any more.

As much as I hate Facebook for its annoying apps, there are one or two good ones.

Cities I’ve Visited is one such app that I like. You can add new cities either by scrolling, zooming & clicking, or by typing in a name. I like maps so I find it pretty interesting to see where I’ve been.

The application itself uses the Google Maps API so it’s interactive. Unfortunately the embedded version of this app for blogs is just a static image. You can’t change the zoom level or centre point, which is annoying, since you can see I’ve never been to America or Asia.

One day I might have a go at building my own app for fun. It shouldn’t be horrifically difficult to build a simple, single-user app for having an interactive map with points on it. The difficult parts are making it multi-user, and having a system for adding cities by name (rather than by grid reference).

I could even steal the work of my colleague, who built a map of wireless hotspots at Bristol University.

For some time, I’ve been taking part in Stu’s Tuesday Challenge.

Recently, Stu has had great success with his East Midlands wedding photography business and so doesn’t have time for the Challenge any more.

So I’ve taken over the Challenge and rebranded it the Photo Challenge (so I’m not tied to a Tuesday). I hope the regular contributors on Stu’s blog will continue to take photos for the Challenges. It’s also an ideal opportunity for new photographers to try their hand at some of the challenges and get some feedback.

Why not give it a go?

In the past, I’ve enjoyed reading Photoshop Disasters. Today I was delighted to spot my own Photoshop Disaster in Dorothy Perkins.

Looks to me as though they’ve just chopped her fingers off to resemble pockets.

I’ve been using awstats to collect statistics on visitors to my blog since July 2009. I’m a sucker for pretty graphs, so I’ve made a few

Operating systems

First and foremost, which operating systems are visitors running?

Operating systems

Good to see a disproportionately large number of Linux users! It’s probably a self-selecting audience to a certain extent though, as many of the posts on this blog are Linux guides or musings.

Linux distributions

So what distributions are the visitors running?

Linux distributions

Overwhelmingly Fedora, it would seem. Again, perhaps no surprise as most of the articles here are about Fedora or CentOS.

Windows versions

Should I be worried that some of my visitors are still running Windows 98, Me and NT? Should I be concerned that there are also many hits from Windows 2003 and 2008, the server editions?

Windows versions

Browsers

And, of course, a chart of the browsers.

Browsers

Unsurprisingly, Firefox blows everything else out of the water. “Others” included Netscape, Konqueror and FeedDemon.

Interestingly, the proportion of Mac users is far greater than the proportion or Safari users – which implies that Mac users are probably running Firefox instead.

I decided that I need to sort out the way I do my personal calendaring.

Currently I only use my phone’s built-in calendar. I nearly always have my phone with me, but it’s a bit of a pain to enter stuff on when I’m sat at a computer anyway, and carrying all that information solely on my phone presents a huge risk of loss, theft or breakage.

I need some kind of centralised store of information that is able to sync with all the devices and programs I want to use, namely:

• Some sort of cross-platform calendar client – mainly for use on Linux but also nice to be able to use similar software if I’m on Windows or OS X.
• Sony-Ericsson P1i (Symbian) built-in calendar
• iPhone, for when I get one
• Web interface, for those times when I’m borrowing a computer and can’t install a client.

Google Calendar seems to be a good choice. It’s flexible and can sync with lots of things.

Linux

So I installed Lightning on all my Fedora and Ubuntu machines. It’s a calendar extension for Thunderbird, which I already use. To install it yourself:

On Fedora:
yum install thunderbird-lightning
On Ubuntu:
apt-get thunderbird-lightning

It’s easy to set up, too. Suppose your Google account is joebloggs@gmail.com, then you would…

• Add a new calendar to Lightning by right-clicking in the Calendar area
• Choose On the Network
• Select CalDAV
• Enter your location as https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/joebloggs@gmail.com/events
• Give the calendar a name

OS X and Windows

It’s a little more work to install Lightning on OS X. You have to download the add-on from Mozilla, and install it in Thunderbird. Same story for Windows.

It’s quite straightforward and there are instructions on the website.

When you’re done, follow the same instructions as for Linux to subscribe to your Google calendar in Lightning.

Sony Ericsson UIQ

Setting up Google Calendar on my Sony Ericsson P1i was a bit of a pain, too. The P1i can’t interact with Google natively, I had to set up an account with Goosync to enable this. Goosync talks to Google, and your phone talks to Goosync using SyncML.

But once you have a Goosync account, you can synchronise a lot of handsets with Google calendar.

So first, you will need to set up an account with Goosync. It’s free and very easy. Goosync will ask you to tie your Goosync account to your Google account.

There’s also an option to have the settings for your phone sent automatically to your handset. However this didn’t work for me so I had to enter the settings manually.

Assuming the sync task on your phone has been set up properly, do a  test run to make sure it all works.

• If possible, connect to a wireless network first. If not, 3G will have to do.
• Go to the Main Menu
• Go to Tools
• Go to Remote Sync
• Find the profile that syncs with Goosync
• Find the sync task called Calendar. Make sure it is ticked, and then tap Sync to start off the first synchronisation.

If that worked, you can now run the sync task whenever you like from within the calendar itself.

• Open your phone calendar
• Tap More
• Tap Calendar manager
• Tap Synchronise

That’s all there is to it! Unfortunately there’s no way of making your calendar synchronise automatically at set intervals, but that’s probably a good thing, because you can’t get stung for 3G charges!

iPhone and iPod touch

Coming soon…

Is it just me, or is this not the kind of error message you want from a company that handles your bank and debit card details?

Error 500 from PayPal

This evening I stumbled across my first web site. I put this together using Publisher 97, probably in the year 1997. It looks rather, uh, dated these days.

While browsing the tree of that site, I also found my brother Oliver’s website, and a site I set up in 1999 about my year 9 class at school.

Frankly I’m amazed it’s still there – I set this site up in webspace provided with a dialup ISP and I terminated my account once we had ADSL – probably in 1999 or so.

This guide is particularly aimed at novice owners of Linux servers at home, such as the one described in a guide on this blog.

A transparent web proxy caches web content without having to make any changes on the clients on the network. For a proxy to run transparently, it must be running on a Linux server that’s acting as your network gateway/firewall/router. If you have a standalone server on your LAN, you can still set up a non-transparent proxy, but this guide isn’t for you.

To get started, install squid:

[root@zeus ~]# yum install squid

Backup and edit the original squid config:

[root@zeus ~]# cp /etc/squid/squid.conf /etc/squid/squid.conf.old
[root@zeus ~]# vim /etc/squid/squid.conf

Erase all of the original contents and replace them with the blurb below.

The important lines are in bold, and in my case:

• I’ve asked squid to use 50MB of RAM for the cache…
• …and 4096MB (4GB) of disk space. You can change the path if you want to use a different disk or even a memory card for low seek time.
• I also increased the maximum object size from its default small size to a larger size of 40MB. (This is so it can cache updates from the Fedora repository – after the first PC on my LAN has updated, the rest can then fetch the same updates from the local cache at high speed.)

http_port 3128 transparent
acl manager proto cache_object
acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/32
acl to_localhost dst 127.0.0.0/8
acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/24 # RFC1918 possible internal network
acl SSL_ports port 443
acl Safe_ports port 80 # http
acl Safe_ports port 21 # ftp
acl Safe_ports port 443 # https
acl Safe_ports port 70 # gopher
acl Safe_ports port 210 # wais
acl Safe_ports port 1025-65535 # unregistered ports
acl Safe_ports port 280 # http-mgmt
acl Safe_ports port 488 # gss-http
acl Safe_ports port 591 # filemaker
acl Safe_ports port 777 # multiling http
acl CONNECT method CONNECT
http_access allow manager localhost
http_access deny manager
http_access deny !Safe_ports
http_access deny CONNECT !SSL_ports
http_access deny to_localhost
http_access allow localhost
http_access allow localnet
http_access deny all
icp_access allow localnet
icp_access deny all
htcp_access allow localnet
htcp_access deny all
http_port 3128
hierarchy_stoplist cgi-bin ?
cache_mem 50 MB
maximum_object_size_in_memory 50 KB
cache_dir ufs /var/cache/squid 4096 256 256
maximum_object_size 40000 KB
access_log /var/log/squid/access.log squid
refresh_pattern ^ftp: 1440 20% 10080
refresh_pattern ^gopher: 1440 0% 1440
refresh_pattern (cgi-bin|\?) 0 0% 0
refresh_pattern . 0 20% 4320
icp_port 3130
coredump_dir /var/spool/squid


With the squid config in place, let’s start the service and set it to run on boot:

[root@zeus ~]# service squid start
[root@zeus ~]# chkconfig --level 2345 squid on

This is only half the problem though. Squid is running now, but no requests are being sent to it. So we need to tweak the firewall config to send passing web traffic through the squid server. Open /etc/sysconfig/iptables for editing and just before the line

-A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE

add this line:

-A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3128

Restart your firewall…

[root@zeus ~]# service iptables restart

…and now all web traffic from your clients should be being sent through the transparent proxy.