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FSLog (10 unread)

Upgraded to WordPress 3.0

Posted: June 18th, 2010, 12:42am CDT by cnu

It has been a very long time since I blogged and the only thing I was doing with the blogs was paying the hosting bills. So, I decided to do something useful and decided to upgrade to WordPress 3.0 finally. The manual upgrade process was smooth and was over in less than 5 mins.
Running the new version of the software might close the numerous bugs and holes which might have been exposed on this blog for long. I recommend other wordpress self hosted users to upgrade to 3.0 – it is neat.
MontyLingua3 - GPLed fork of MontyLingua

Posted: September 20th, 2008, 3:52am CDT by cnu

MontyLingua is a popular Natural Language processing tool which can understand english language and also correct it based on common sense – used by many people around the world for research. It did have a small problem – licensing. The author released it under two licenses which states that:

If it is your intent to use this software for non-commercial,
non-prioprietary purposes, such as for academic research purposes,
this software is free and is covered under the GNU GPL License,
given here: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt> and in the
APPENDIX of this document.

If you are interested in this software for commercial purposes,
commercial licensing information is available. Please email
(hugo@media.mit.edu) for more information.

In my company, we have been trying to get to the author for the commercial license but he hasn’t replied to any emails. So we decided to make use of another NLP tool and move on. But a few days back there was a discussion at Reddit where it was noted that someone can get the software for non-commercial use under GPL – which gives him the full right offered by GPL. So he can copy, modify and share the software to anyone and the person who gets the software from him (not Hugo) can get it under GPL. This essentially avoids the commercial license path of MontyLingua Version 2.0 license.

I thought since I was already working on improving the code, why don’t I fork it, do the bug fixes and release it under GPL. This will allow anyone else to come up and fix the code and improve the project. Since the author isn’t actively working on this project, I think using this fork will benefit everyone to get a better version.

I have created a public repository in bitbucket called MontyLingua3 (the old one is in version 2.1). Right now I am going to clean up the code and since I am not a NLP expert there won’t be any new additional features. If someone can contribute with new features/functions then I would be very happy to include their patches.

To get the source code, install mercurial and clone the repository as

$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/cnu/montylingua3/

So, please contribute to the project.
Distro Comparison for Organisations

Posted: July 28th, 2008, 4:56am CDT by cnu
Anish (at oz.blogial) is writing a 3 part series of comparisons of Linux distros in the eyes of corporate organisations. In that he is comparing Ubuntu, Gentoo and Fedora. Head over there to know which distro is suitable for your organisation.
1. Ubuntu
2. Gentoo
3. Fedora
Wordpress MU vs MovableType

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:23pm CDT by cnu
For almost one week I have been setting up Blogial Networks and have played around with WordPress mu. I decided to use WPMU after trying out MovableType. I created a MT blog for FSLog and imported all the contents into it. With just about 350 posts, it created so many files for various views – single post, monthly archive, yearly archive, category view, etc. In total it took about 25 MB for all these files for just one blog.

Here are some of the basic reasons for not choosing MT and using WPMU:
- MT is huge. The zip file costs about 5MB and extracting it gets a 21MB monster out. Whereas WPMU is only 1.5MB – 6MB when extracted.
- Ease of use – during installation and for creating post.
- MovableType needs rebuilding so many files for every update to a single post. Missed out a word there, save it and republish the entire blog. This is unacceptable for a blog network which wants even technologically challenged people to blog. Not many would understand the republishing process (unless they are the old blogger type). I agree that plain html files are blazingly faster than executing more than 30 SQL queries for every request, but wp-cache does a great job in caching the rendered HTML pages in wordpress.
- Lot of plugins written in PHP. I can get my hands dirty with the plugins if I want to as I have seen and understood the WordPress architecture more than MT’s.
Regarding the last point, I would be running a series of posts about the various plugins that we use here are Blogial and the problems and incompatibilities we faced while installing it in WPMU.
FSLog now a part of Blogial networks

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 2:35pm CDT by cnu
I am happy to announce that FSLog is now part of Blogial networks – a small blog network started by me and Sudarsan. We decided to start this blog network so that we can have a platform where people can cross post across various blogs thus creating good quality content.

If someone comes up and suggests a new idea for a blog – we will be happy to create a blog and make them the owner of it. He should then build the blog and most important of all, build a community around it. Any reader who wishes to contribute to a blog, can register and ask for becoming an author in it. This is all about trying to get more people to post in a single blog and to build the blog more social.

This blog network isn’t about making huge money or to compete with the big players. We are just simple minded people who want to blog about things passionate to us. Of course we would think about monetising and would also love to get donations(paypal:srinivasanr@gmail.com) so that we can sustain running this network.

I have this network running on a WordPress-mu installation which is very easy to get a blog network up and running in minutes. I have it hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech and tried to bring fslog.com also into that. I know that wpmu supports multiple domain names and I tried using this Multi-Site Manager plugin – but couldn’t get fslog.com work in NFShost. Also for creating a blog in blogial, I should manually create an alias in NFS. This needs to be changed asap and we are looking at moving onto a better host (maybe a VPS). If someone can give us some good offer for a VPS, we are listening to you. Till we can fix this, FSLog is going to be on a seperate WordPress installation.

I am in the process of setting up the blog, installing plugins and creating blogs. Right now we have 3 blogs under blogial.
- FSLog – This one
- Codelog – about programming owned by Sudarsan (previously ProgrammersLog)
- OZ – about living in Australia owned by Anish
I am open to any other blogs that you may want to be here.

I am also looking at creating some good themes for the blog and also a logo for blogial. If someone can help us in it, we would be very happy.

Since we now have more people to post in this blog, you can be sure to get good, quality content here on the network.
Opensolaris and Ubuntu Dual boot

Posted: July 13th, 2008, 2:50am CDT by cnu
Yesterday I decided to try out the live cd of Opensolaris 2008.05 and decided to install it on my laptop after playing around with it for some time. The install process was painfully slow, but was very easy. If you already had Ubuntu (or any other OS for that matter), then OpenSolaris’s Grub menu would not have autodetected the other OS like Ubuntu does. There would be only one single entry for Open Solaris.

I wanted my Ubuntu back and so searched the web for info regarding this and found one. He has given steps to first install Solaris and then Ubuntu, but this holds true the other way round too.

You would need the desktop live CD of Ubuntu for this, so that you can recover Ubuntu’s grub.
1. After booting to Ubuntu Live system, open up the terminal and type sudo grub.
2. You will get a grub prompt – here type
```
find /boot/grub/stage1
```
3. Use this information to set the root device (this may be different for you)
```
root (hd0,0)
```
4. Then install grub
```
setup (hd0)
```
5. And quit
This would get back the Ubuntu’s old grub, but now you have to make an entry for OpenSolaris.

Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add this new entry at the bottom
```
title	Open Solaris
root	(hd0,1)
chainloader	+1
makeactive
boot
```
This would enable you to boot to Open Solaris too now. There were problems with my Atheros drivers as usual and I have to find a way to install the madwifi drivers as I did on my Ubuntu. If anyone got wifi working on Acer Aspire 5050 with OpenSolaris, please do leave a comment here.
Clean Windows virus from Linux

Posted: July 12th, 2008, 4:03am CDT by cnu
Yesterday we noticed in our windows samba share machine that it was infected with virus. This is the kind of virus which became common 2 years back which created an executable file with the name same as the current directory name. In a windows machine, the icon was set in such a way that it looked exactly like a windows directory. If you double click that file (thinking it is a folder), you are sure be infected.

So, I had to delete the files and the shared directory was having numerous folders. I then wrote a bash one liner (not exactly 1 line) to delete the files.

First I used find to get the list of all the exe files in all folders and stored it in a file (exe_files).

This was the command I then used to delete all the files.
```
cat exe_files | while read line;do l=`ls -lh "${line}"`;size=`echo $l| cut -d' ' -f5`;if [ $size = "604K" ]; then rm "`echo $l| cut -c"47-"`" ;fi; done
```
What it does is reads each line in the file and finds the size of each file and if the size is ‘604K‘ then remove the file.

Deleting based on the filesize was not that good, as we might have lost some original file which was correctly 604K. If you wanted a better solution, you would have to write one more if clause to check if the filename is the same as the folder name – better to create a shell script instead of trying a one liner.

Thanks to linux, we could delete all the ~6000 virus files in a simple command without the fear of infection.
Feedly - social, magazine like start page for firefox

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 1:48pm CDT by cnu

Today I found this excellent firefox addon called feedly – which calls itself as a more social and magazine-like start page for firefox. I see this as a great RSS feed reader which is integrated with Google reader, twitter and other social thingies.

This is very well integrated with Google reader that any feeds you subscribe here automatically is reflected in Google reader. Reading a post here marks the post as read in Google reader.

You can recommend, tweet and annotate articles which enables your friends to know what you are doing with your feeds. One important feature is allowing the user to view the post from the site directly in an IFrame. So, I can comment on a post without leaving my feed reader.

They also have a feedly API which lets website owners to write custom views for their content. They also have a plan to allow the owners to better design ads for displaying in their feedly UI.

Overall this is a nice way to read my feeds and I think I am going to try this one for some days. It is available as a free Firefox extension and you can install it by going to the feedly website.

Update: They even have got it integrated with del.icio.us.
Skribit: Suggest topics to write about

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 3:01am CDT by cnu

Skribit is a product I found out today in news.YC. I think this is one tool which is essential for bloggers like me who can’t find interesting topics to blog about. This product will help solve the problem of writer’s block by engaging the community into the blog’s content.

People can suggest new topics which they would like to be covered or they can vote on topics already added by other members in the community. It is non-intrusive and takes just a simple sign-on (they have openid too) and adding a widget to your blog. A very simple idea.

So, if you want me to write about any particular topic, just use the widget in the side bar and suggest new topics.
Setup Wordpress on Nearly Free Speech

Posted: May 11th, 2008, 1:22am CDT by cnu

Yesterday I moved this blog over to NearlyFreeSpeech.net hosting, which I think has a great hosting plan for almost everyone. You only pay for what you use. The disk space is a bit costly than others ($0.01 per MB), but that cost is due to the numerous backups they take. The bandwidth cost is great, just $1 per GB. And there is no fixed cost for each month. I wanted to move FSLog to NFS, and finally did it. This is a small tutorial on getting wordpress installed and the various plugins I have used.

After you have setup an account with NFS and setup a site, you will be given the site details – like FTP, SSH, etc. I prefer using SSH if available, as it is faster to download and install directly than to get it on my machine and uploading it again.

Just ssh to the site and download the latest wordpress tarball and untar it

$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz $ tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz

If you want to setup the blog at a subdirectory, just rename the ‘wordpress’ folder to something like ‘blog’. If you want it to be at the root of the site, just move all the contents of the wordpress folder to the parent directory.

Then visit your site http://your-site.nfshost.com or the domain if you have registered one.

It will guide you through the install process which is very easy. You just have to give the MySQL database details. You may need to temporarily give write permissions to the public folder, so that the installer can write a config file.

After this, login to your admin page and remember to change the password from Users menu.

Plugins

After you have your blog setup, its time to get some basic plugins installed. You can get more functionality by installing these plugins.

All you have to do is just download the zip files to the wp-content/plugins/ directory and unzip them. The plugins I have installed are:
WP-SuperCache This caches your blog’s contents as plain old HTML, so that your server doesn’t have to process and fetch all the data from the database. Previously the install process was a bit difficult, but now it has become very easy. Just unzip and activate. reCAPTCHA Prevent comment spam by using CAPTCHA for your comments form, also help in converting books to electronic format. WordPress.com Stats Track your popular posts and other statistics by using the wordpress.com’s stats. Google Analyticator Google Analytics is an excellent user metrics analysis tool with bright colorful charts and best of all, it is free. This plugin asks just for your Google Analytics’ UID. Feedburner Feedsmith Feedburner is a great service for your RSS feeds and I have been using that for this blog for a long time. This plugin is now the official plugin and it automatically redirectly your feeds to the FeedBurner link.
These are my list of plugins. So, what are the plugins that your have?