Thanks to this post on Tech recipes I can easily replace DOS/Windows line endings in files:

To remove the ^M characters at the end of all lines in vi, use:

:%s/^V^M//g

The ^v is a CONTROL-V character and ^m is a CONTROL-M. When you type this, it will look like this:

:%s/^M//g

In UNIX, you can escape a control character by preceeding it with a CONTROL-V. The :%s is a basic search and replace command in vi. It tells vi to replace the regular expression between the first and second slashes (^M) with the text between the second and third slashes (nothing in this case). The g at the end directs vi to search and replace globally (all occurrences).

Just saw this video by Douglas Rushkoff on what I would call ‘programming literacy’ and it made me curious about his new book Life Inc. I really like this quote from the last part of this video:

“If we don’t create a society, that at least knows there is a thing called programming, then we will end being not the programmers, but the users and worse: the used”

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“If RepRap is succesfull a number of changes may well happen in society. The principal one of them will be that we have the distribution of the
manufacture of goods. At the moment economics scale it means that it is sensible for goods to be manufactured in factories and then to be shipped to the individual people who wish to have these goods using a complicated transport system. If RepRap takes off and increases its abilities by evolution to manufacture more and more products, then people having these machines in their homes will be no longer a need, or no longer such a big need for factories to make the goods they want. When they want something it will simply be a question of downloading it from the web, in the way they currently do with music, a film or anything else. That downloaded file would then allow them to manufacture whatever object is was they wanted in their own home.[...]”

Check the embedded movie below by RepRap.org from which I took this quote (starts around 5:14) by Adrian Bowyer from. The RepRap raises a lot of interesting questions, such as is personal fabrication another nail in the coffin of intellectual property? Looking forward to this publication: “The Intellectual Property Implications Of Low-Cost 3D Printing by Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer and Patrick Haufe.” which as far as I can see will be available online here, the 15th of April.

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Ik heb voor de Wordpress plugin Limit Login Attempts – ontwikkeld door Johan Eenfeldt – een Nederlandse vertaling gemaakt. Het is gebaseerd op versie 1.4.1 van de plugin. Schroom niet om contact op te nemen voor wijzigingen of op- en/of aanmerkingen op de Nederlandse vertaling.

De vertaling is hier te downloaden.

Installatie:

1. Gedownload zip bestand uitpakken.
2. Bestanden in Limit Login Attempts directory plaatsen
3. Wordpress op Nederlands als taal instellen

ps: Ik heb Johan inmiddels ook op de hoogte gesteld van de Nederlandse vertaling en ik hoop dat de vertaling zo spoedig mogelijk toegevoegd wordt aan de plugin zelf zodat je deze vertaling niet meer extra hoeft te downloaden.

I’ve just released another Wordpress plugin. This one is called bbRedirector:

bbRedirector makes it easy to redirect a page to another location using absolute urls from within Wordpress. No mod_rewrite nor .htaccess is needed. You just create a page, add a specific customfield and choose the redirect template included with this plugin. It even allows you to set the required http status code (302 or 301). You can also set a default sitewide redirection or setup your own custom redirection.

The included templates should give you an easy start using this plugin.

Download the plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbredirector/

Today, I finally added my first commit of the Creative Commons Netherlands(CC NL) wordpress theme (see also ‘New Creative Commons Netherlands site launched’) to the Creative Commons.org git repository. This means that other local CC chapters only need to install Wordpress and install this theme to have their own Creative Commons website. For example, Creative Commons France could now easily update their website and have a look and feel similar to Creative Commons Netherlands (and thus Creative Commons.org), without having to develop a theme on their own. By using this template, local Creative Commons organizations show more cohesion between the different CC chapters and allow them to be identifiable as part of the global Creative Commons movement.

I’m very interested in the response on this theme, although it’s still kinda rough around the edges. I still need to find some time to replace the Dutch names for English, write something down on how to use the theme  and there’s probably tons of stuff that might need some tweaking, but at least it’s in the repository.

If you’re interested in using it yet something is keeping you from doing this feel free to contact me and I’ll see what I can do to help you.

Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank:

- Paul Keller (Creative Commons Netherlands) for recognizing the potential use of this theme for other local CC chapters around the world.
- Mike Linksvayer and Nathan Yergler from Creative Commons.org for their enthusiasm, help and infrastructure.

When using WordPress Mu (WP MU) 2.8.4 or 2.8.5.2 (not tested on older versions) with sub directories it seems one can override the main blog’s pages by creating a blog with the exactly the same name without any warning. Causing visitors to be redirected to the newly created blog instead of the page with the same name. I presume most people would not expect this and in fact it can become quite nasty. So I filled a bug report.

Assume this situation:
You have a WPMU site set using sub directories available at http://mywebsite.dev/. You’re using the primary blog as your website with mostly pages. One of those pages is called “Donation”. You allow other people to register and create a blog. Someone creates a blog called “Donation” and without warning the previous existing page “Donation” has been redirected to the blog “Donation”.

Obliviously, this should not happen.

As I understood from Donncha (lead-developer of WP MU), in earlier version there was a check to prevent this from happening. I haven’t tested older versions so I cannot confirm nor deny this. However in the current and previous stable version of Wordpress Mu this unexpected behavior does happen. There are some solutions in order to prevent this from happening:

• Use sub-domains instead of sub-directories. Since each blog will become a sub-domain instead of a sub-directory it will not clash with any pages created in the
  main blog.
• Prevent any blogs from being created with the same slug (path) as a page in the primary blog. This fixes the issue with WP MU and sub-directories

I created a plugin called “bbMuAutoBanPage” for the latter, which uses the “Banned Names” option in the site admin. Basically it keeps track of the pages created in the primary blog and adds the slugs to the illegal_names options which is used for the “Banned Names” functionality. This is a temporarily fix until this issue is properly fixed in the core WP MU code. Until then you can use my plugin, which I highly recommend if you allow people to register their own blog on your WP MU install. DOWNLOAD IT HERE

In my humble opinion this would be a great moment to have a closer look at the way Wordpress Mu deals with routing, since I would like to see it allow for more fine-grained control.

Recently I needed an easy way for a client to create a link in a Wordpress powered website that would automagically redirect a visitor to a certain location upon visiting. Part of the requirement was that this link could be easily remembered and used in printed material such as leaflets and magazines. As an extra option it should be easy to change the location towards the redirection would point. I couldn’t find anything like this so I created a very simple little page template.

How it works:
Copy the template page Page Redirect code below to a file and save it as page-redirect.php in your own template’s directory. Create a Page in Wordpress and set the Page’s template to Page Redirect. Add a custom field to this page with the name redirect_url and the full url of the url you want to redirect to.
For instance: http://www.redirected-location.com. Now save the page and you should now test it by visiting the page you created.

For example (I assume you are using nice urls):

http://www.your-website.com/the-page-title-of-the-page-with-the-redirect-template

If all went well you should be instantaneously be redirected (using a standard php redirect with a 302 HTTP redirect) ) to the url you entered in the custom field. You can easily change the redirect location by changing the value of the custom field.

Code:

< ?php
/*
 * Template Name: Page Redirect
 *
 * Makes it easy to redirect a page to another url, using the parameter redirect_url
 */
$redirect_url = get_post_meta($post->ID, "redirect_url", true); 

// Defaults if no options we're given
if( ! empty($redirect_url) ) {  header("Location: $redirect_url"); } else { echo ""; }
/* Make sure that code below does not get executed when we redirect. */

exit;
?>

As I said it uses the standard PHP redirect, but you could easily change or extend it with more specific http headers if needs arise. Feel free to use the above snippet as you see fit, as far as I’m concerned it’s in the public domain. I hope this might be useful to you. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

If you want the above clock in your linux terminal then run this command:

watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet"

Source: http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2009/07/23/s02e09-the-dimensions-of-time/

I wrote this summary of the first Creative Commons tech summit in 2008 at the Googleplex, however somehow it ended up in being a draft in Wordpress for more than a year. I decided to add links and publish it although in the meantime two follow up conferences have already been held. Maybe it still holds some value. Enjoy my rather lengthy ’summary’.

Thanks to Creative Commons.org and The institute of Sound and Images I was able to join the first Creative Commons Tech Summit in San Francisco. Since the amount of participants was limited to 100 people I decided to write a summary for those not able to attend on this blog. There have been more people writing about the summit and the whole thing is made available on Youtube as well. I hope this summary will be of use to you. Feel free to comment. More after the jump.. (more…)