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21 September 2007
Posted by Nad on 20 September 2007 at 12:05
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Problematic 1.11 Upgrade The OrganicDesign wiki has been upgraded from MediaWiki 1.10.0 to 1.11.0 tonight. Unfortunately the process didn't go very smoothly and the site was down for a few hours. The problem was eventually isolated and turned out to be due to some changes in the way 1.11 handles URL's. The problem still hasn't been solved but the site is able to operate in the mean time by removing the "friendliness" from some of the links. The issues should be resolved soon and some of our extensions will be upgraded with patches so that the other wikis 1.11 upgrades can work seamlessly.

15 June 2007
Posted by Nad on 15 June 2007 at 08:33
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format DPL Update The DynamicPageList extension (DPL) was updated from 1.1.8 to 1.2.0 today, see DPL:Version History for details.

5 October 2007
Posted by Nad on 4 October 2007 at 12:02
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format MooTools Independence Mootools is a compact, modular, object-oriented JavaScript web application framework, intended to make the process of writing extensible and cross-browser compatible code more efficient. It is lightweight, powerful and makes use of many new JavaScript coding functions. The extra functionality is easily applied to page elements by using class and id attributes in a similar way to using CSS. We were using the MooTools Ajax class for our Simple Forms and Livelets extensions, but both of them have now been updated to use MediaWiki's native ajax functions. Even though MooTools is an excellent framework, it's always best to reduce dependency where practical, and since our ajax requirements are so basic, the MediaWiki components can easily accommodate them. This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Countering the SmartBots The vandal bots are getting smarter, we've been using the ConfirmEdit extension in its default state which requires new users to answer a simple mathematical question upon registering. But tonight a number of them have managed to sign up successfully passing the basic CAPTCHA. So I've now upgraded the configuration to the next level of difficulty using the familiar form of image CAPTCHA which sometimes comes up with some very strange word combinations such as the one shown to the right.

14 October 2010
Posted by Nad on 13 October 2010 at 20:50
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format OD moving to a new server We're moving from eSecureData to Codero today! We were having to pay for about 750G of drive space that we didn't need because eSecureData only has specific hardware packages which meant that we couldn't upgrade to 4GB of RAM (which we really need) without also having a second 500G drive, but we only use about 200G. Codero are much more flexible in terms of hardware allowing us to have 4GB and only 250G of drive space saving us $60 per month. One draw-back with Codero is that they don't have a very good selection of OS's, we require a modern Debian or Ubuntu, but the closest option they offered was Ubuntu 8.04 which is about two years old now. If you want an OS installed which is not in the list they charge an extra $150 which I wasn't very keen on, so I thought I'd try starting with Ubuntu 8.04 and then doing a do-release-upgrade over ssh. I ran through the upgrade selecting the package maintainers versions for conflicting configurations, but then the machine didn't come back after reboot. I contacted support over Codero's live chat system and they were able to tell me that the networking hadn't been able to start, and that I could have one free re-imaging back to Ubuntu 8.04 and that subsequent re-images would cost $50 each. I decided to take the free re-imaging and try the upgrade again, then if I failed again I'd pay the $150 for them to install Debian 5.3. The second time round I was successful and we're now running Ubuntu 10.04! I ran through the upgrade procedure again selecting the package maintainers version of configuration, but this time I backed up the network/interfaces, dhclient.conf and grub/menu.lst which were the files involving the conflicting configuration. At the end of the release upgrade I opted to not reboot, and instead checked what had been done to the conflicting configuration files. The network interfaces file was pretty much the same, but the other two were changed a lot, so I reverted the dhclient.conf to the old state, and manually adjusted grub/menu.lst to the old state but replacing the kernel references with the new one installed for 10.04. I then rebooted, and was able to ssh back in within a minute or so. I was then able to begin going through our install a new server procedure, starting with the organicdesign-server package which had previously failed to install many packages under Ubuntu 8, but installed perfectly under Ubuntu 10 :-)

25 June 2012
Posted by Nad on 25 June 2012 at 20:58
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format US/NATO Beating the Drums of War: A Precursor to War in Syria Source: globalresearch.ca - by John Robles Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Kosovo; it is a formula US/NATO seem to have stuck to because so far they have gone unpunished for what in fact are crimes against humanity. Yes, waging a war of aggression is a crime against humanity. Even if it is a “preventive” war as the US loves to go around labelling its bloody criminal killing enterprises. There are always accusations of terrible crimes and violence that must not go unpunished by what in fact are the worst out-of-control killers, killing thousands and destroying countries to make them exploitable, in what must be called one the worst crimes against humanity that can be committed, and they do so based on lies and through media manipulation. They have grown so emboldened that they do so regularly and will say anything at all, now without even the need for proof or backing evidence. We must not sit idly by while they invade yet another sovereign nation on false evidence; any country that does so even once must be stripped of its weapons and of any right to wage war. See also: Israel Lobby Pushes for US Action Against Syrian Government UN Monitors in Syria are Spying for Washington CNN Syria Interviews Faked by Activist Danny Syrian Youth blog Uprooted Palestinians blog More links on Syria

9 May 2007
Posted by Nad on 9 May 2007 at 11:38
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format PeerCasting It looks like the nodal way of thought is really starting to manifest out there. I was doing some research on distributed hash tables and discovered that the P2P streams paradigm used by Skype etc has now reached the open-source world and is generally called peercasting. This concept is extremely significant to the project and a whole new level above the current DHT paradigm because it supports multicast streams. In terms of a distributed object environment the multicast aspect can be used to connect classes asyncronously with their many instances, and information with its viewers.

16 March 2009
Posted by Nad on 16 March 2009 at 10:38
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format RecentActivity extension The new RecentActivity extension has been created over the last couple of days. It was a quick and easy extension to create but provides very useful information about the last articles which have been edited or created in the wiki by anyone, or by a specific user. We've added the "Recent Activity" folder to our sidebar tree which you can see on the left showing the new extension in action. Logged in users can also see the articles they've personally recently edited or created. Below is a list of the last ten articles created in the wiki. N8n Arena-diagonal.jpg Agent-diagonal.jpg Vege patch 2024-11.jpg New root garden.jpg Saul/brewing Blue dragonfly in new pond close.jpg Blue dragonfly in new pond.jpg BRICS bill.jpg Owl with new baby.jpg

6 May 2007
Posted by Nad on 5 May 2007 at 21:38
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Categorisation parser-function Since we've upgraded from XmlWiki, we've had a bit of trouble categorising our program-code articles since they don't use the wiki-parser. In XmlWiki this was achieved by adding the category information to the articles XML properties. Today I've modified the CategoryHook extension to also offer an additional parser function which works exactly like a category link, for example: {{Category:Foo|Bar}} This categorises the article into Category:Foo using sort-key "Bar". It works because our script articles are still allowed to have their templates expanded before GeSHi parses them (see our GeSHi hack regarding this). See MW:Extension:CategoryHook for installation and usage details of the CategoryHook extension. The extension code is CategoryHook.php This method of categorisation is working correctly with DPL queries.

18 April 2007
Posted by Nad on 18 April 2007 at 12:47
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format 11:30pm ListCat replaced by DynamicPageList extension I've been checking out the DynamicPageList extension because we need a good method of making selections of articles and rendering them in certain ways, like lists, or tables to replace XmlWiki's List-Cat.php and Format-Workspace.php. DPL2 was designed for use on WikiNews so is scalable and it has excellent article selection capabilities, for more details. It's already been installed here on Organic Design and is being used to render this news ;-) Extension:DynamicPageList Syntax & Usage This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format 10:00pm CategoryHook extension Another bit of XmlWiki functionality has been ported to our new standard MediaWiki environment and has been added to the MediaWiki community here. XmlWiki used to auto-categorise articles based on various aspects of their content such as whether they contain any trees, maths or security or into a language category if they're code articles. The CategoryHook extension offers a function into which such auto-categorisation rules can be added. See local code and rules in CategoryHook.php This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format 3:30pm GeSHi back up and running again I'm slowly fixing all the new problems, today I've got GeSHi ready so that code can be highlighted properly without affecting the execution. It works with the usual geshi tags like <perl> or <php>, but also has a simple method of applying syntax to whole articles by including {{php}} or {{perl}} etc. These are best added to comments so normal raw requests still retrieve a workable script. Executable scripts can now be composed of templates or parser-functions, but must have templates=expand added to the query-string of a raw request. I'll get Bender to go through and add the templates to the current scripts soon. see GeSHi for more details

18 October 2006
Posted by Nad on 18 October 2006 at 21:36
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Math rendering up and running again Now that we're back on Debian I got the math rendering working again. This time I did a hack to get it outputting black on transparent instead of black on white so they can be put over any background colour. Also a slight improvement in quality has been achieved by rendering the postscript stage much larger and then reducing the final result down at the end. [math]e^x = \sum_{n = 0}^{\infty} {x^n \over n!} = 1 + x + {x^2 \over 2!} + {x^3 \over 3!} + {x^4 \over 4!} + \cdots[/math]

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