May 30, 2013
fvwm-mode now on GitHub
This is just a short update to announce that fvwm-mode has moved from my internal Subversion repository to GitHub after a request to update the headers to conform to Emacs standards for the Emacsmirror , the net result of this are two things:
- I was reminded of a bunch of stuff I still wanted to do/fix in fvwm-mode, so it might even get done (I’ve already fixed some deprecation warnings, properly supporting lexical binding is next on my list)
- fvwm-mode ended up on GitHub as that’s easier for the Emacsmirror to, well, mirror compared to some file on some webserver that I sometimes update.
I didn’t bother retaining the original version history as the interesting bits are in the NEWS file anyway.
The fvwm-mode repository resides here.
June 2, 2007
FVWM Forum upgrade to phpBB 3.0 RC1
After years of good service phpBB2 finally succumbed under the pressure of spambots, the amount of work required to keep a phpBB2 board spamfree was getting out of hand very quickly, phpBB3 was going to make keeping spam out of your board easier as well as getting rid of any spam that got through after all easier to track down and remove.
But phpBB3 remained something at the distant horizon for way too long, for a while it appeared to be obtaining some sort of Duke Nuke ’em For(n)ever like cult status: highly anticipated but always just out of reach. Competing packages came and went and all the time it became more apparent that phpBB2 no longer lived up to the today’s bulletain board standards. Lots of boards switched to competing forum software, others kept on waiting, because phpBB3 was right behind the door, nearly there. But now, the first Release Candidate of phpBB3 is among us with a huge load of improvements over phpBB2 and we (being the FVWM Forum admins) decided very quickly we wanted to switch to RC1 right away and not wait for the Final to come about.
So? Was it worth switching? In my opinion it was. Conversion from phpBB2 went smooth, to say the least and the new anti-spam and anti-bot measures like usage of blacklists look very promising, though only time will tell how effective they will be in the end when phpBB3 becomes more mainstream.
The Administration Control Panel (ACP) is pretty overwhelming at first and it’ll probably take some time before you know where to look for the options you need. But after a bit of searching it became apparent that all settings from the phpBB2 board were nicely imported into phpBB3, the only thing that annoyed me a bit is that a lot of the new features (like attachments) are turned on by default, I would have preferred them to have been turned off by default.
The new default style takes some getting used to and I haven’t decided whether I like it or not yet. But for the people that really can’t stand the new look an updated version of phpBB2’s SubSilver style is also available in the default install albeit disabled by default.
It’s now also easier to modify the styles in phpBB3, replacing most graphics can be done from the ACP using ImageSets. It’s similarly possible to edit the Styles’ CSS and Templates from the web interface, this makes small modifications possible without having to get out an FTP client and digg through the sourcecode of phpBB or the Style you wanted to change.
Another interesting feature is the Jabber integration, not only can you now add a Jabber address to your profile, you can also use this address to send messages to users (if the Administrator has enabled this, of course). There’s only one problem with this: Google Talk accounts won’t be able to receive messages sent via the forum (see this thread on the phpBB forums for more information) at least not in RC1. It looked to me as if Google blocked messages sent from people not on your roster by default, but I would be happy to be proven wrong on this.
Other interesting features are the ability to search for a user using different search criteria or request a list of inactive users on which you can batch perform an action like activating or deleting them.
New options have been added for moderators too. Moderators can now ‘officially’ warn a user for misbehaviour which has the advantage that other moderators can see these warnings and act accordingly to repeated misbehaviour.
Other actions like merging and splitting topics have been made easier to perform as have a number of other actions that deal with multiple posts or topics. Moderators now have access to a list of (unexpired) warnings issued to users as well as to lists of posts that are in the moderation queue, posts/users that have been reported for violations by other users and a log of the actions other moderators have performed which makes it easier for moderators to prevent stepping on eachother’s toes . They can now also ban users by username, ip or e-mail address something that previously had to be done by an administrator.
For forum users not a lot has changed on first sight, things that worked before still work in mostly the same way in phpBB3 although some actions have been streamlined more.
One of the first changes you’ll probably notice is the total redesign of the User Control Panel (UCP). The UCP has been broken up into that make keeping an overview a lot easier, something which is important as the amount of settings has been expanded quite a bit in comparison to phpBB2.
It’s now possible to only show topics or posts from the past x days by default, this can be done on a per forum basis but can also be set to a default board wide value in the UCP.
All in all I’m liking phpBB3 so far, many of the new features make life a lot easier for administrators and/or moderators (these were my main reasons for upgrading and my main gripe with phpBB2), but the new features for users are pretty nice as well and the ones that don’t seem useful (like the “Friends & Foes” list in my case) are easy to turn off.
September 19, 2006
Yes, I’m still here…
People who have played Baldur’s Gate 2 might recognize the quote, but anyway, I’m still around and I thought I had some interesting things to tell, and a little explanation for some weird/pathetic behaviour over the past months…
I’ve bought myself three new IT related books:
- Aspect-Oriented Software development by Ivar Jacobson and Pan-Wei NG (Addison Wesley)
- Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson (O’Reilly)
- The Art of SQL by Stephane Faroult with Peter Robson (O’Reilly)
So I’ve got quite some extra reading to do 😉
It’s been some time since I last really used Ruby and I must say that the language’s documentation has improved a lot over the last few years.
While we’re on the subject of Ruby, Thomas has announced that FvwmRuby is as good as finished, I’ve been looking forward to this ever since he announced he was working on it about a year ago, now I might finally get around to coding FvwmMpd as an FVWM module, yay 🙂
On a personal level I’m still struggling with what started nearly three months ago. I still can’t really grasp what happened and I’m still struggling with it on a daily basis. It’s really hard to understand how somebody you think actually cares about you, for which you think you mean something, can just replace you when the next best guy comes along. And then I haven’t even mentioned the amount of lies, half truths and whatsnot…
For some reason I always have to think about this song by The Crüxshadows (Even Angels Fall):
Sorrow sings her kisses in silence and adjusts the blinds to keep the light from mocking everything I feel She dances slowly a silhouette upon the curtains but her eyes seem to cry only empty tears I beg for comfort with inadequate verse it meant so much to me.... and so little to her and I am sinking into a mountain of self pity why can't I simply disregard all the things I feel? "where is my angel," "where is my angel," "where is my angel, when I need him most?" "where is my angel," "where is my angel," "where is my angel, tell me now where did he go?"
Oh well, it makes me think of a good number of other songs as well, but anyway… It makes you wonder who you can still trust if even the person you trust most on this planet treats you like … I dunno… like you’re disposable? Like you’re nothing or nobody?
Good thing I still have friends to support me and community work and projects to immerse myself in, keeps a man going through hard times. So thank you all, you know who you are!
August 1, 2006
FVWM & Last.fm
For some reason I couldn’t resist creating a last.fm FVWM group.
It’s kind of empty right now so all FVWM-using Last.fm-ers join me there! 😉
May 2, 2006
Doubleclick in FvwmScript
FvwmScript is a scripting language provided by FVWM that allows you to create windows that can integrate perfectly with your FVWM configuration. Unfortunately it is also very limited. It for example doesn't support some sort of DoubleClic[1] event, even though this name pops up in the sources it doesn't seem to ever have gotten implemented.
I came accross this about half a year ago when writing FvwmMpd, an FvwmScript frontend to mpd where I wanted to start playing a file when one doubleclicked a song in the library as having your song change whenever you singleclick an item is obviously annoying…
So I worked out this little workaround:
Widget 1
Property
Position 0 24
Size 450 450
Type List
Title { }
Main
Case message of
SingleClic :
Begin
Set $item = (GetValue 1)
Set $clicks = (Add $clicks 1)
If $olditem == $item Then
Begin
If $clicks==1 Then
Do {Exec mpc play } (GetValue 1) { >/dev/null}
End
Else
Begin
Set $olditem = $item
Set $clicks=0
End
End
End
It obviously is somewhat of an ugly hack but it's about as good as it gets and since I've been asked how to do something like this a couple of times already I thought I might as well publish it here, it might just help someone 🙂
[1]The single click event is called SingleClic, which is probably due to the fact that the original author was French speaking.
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