Author Archive for cnu

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Setup WordPress on Nearly Free Speech

Published on May 11, 2008 in FSlog, Sites and Tutorial. 13 Comments

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?

Acer Aspire 5050 Atheros AR5006EG wireless in Ubuntu 8.04

Published on May 3, 2008 in Hardware and Tutorial. 6 Comments

Atlast I got wireless working in my Acer Aspire 5050′s Atheros 5006 under the newly released Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron with the madwifi drivers. (BTW the upgrade to 8.04 from 7.10 screwed up my X server and I reinstalled from scratch). Previously I was using the ndiswrapper drivers and they would only work the first 5 minutes. Anyway here is a tutorial on how to get WiFi working if you have one of the Atheros cards.

First get the patched madwifi drivers from the site and extract them to some place (maybe your desktop)
You need to compile these drivers, so you must sudo apt-get install build-essential.
Then cd into that directory which you extracted recently and do a make, sudo make install
Then add the following two lines to this file /etc/modules
```
ath_pci
wlan_scan_sta
```
Then make sure that you disabled Atheros from System > Administration > Hardware Drivers (also called Restricted drivers management). If you don’t disable this, the modules which you added in the previous lines wont be loaded.
Then restart your system to find a new device named ath0 (when you ifconfig)

PS: I know it has been almost 5 months since I posted here. I am giving the (s/l)ame reason here that I was busy. I haven’t been giving much attention to this blog. If you can give some ideas or suggestions on better managing my time it would really help.

Setting up a local DNS Cache

Published on December 15, 2007 in Software and Tutorial. 4 Comments

Whenever you type in a website, the domain name is converted to the IP address and sends the request to the machine. You can have a DNS cache which will speed up the domain name resolving time. I get a boost up of almost 250ms.

You just have to install a package called dnsmasq.

First install it by running (you need to enable the Universe repository)

$sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

Then, open this file /etc/dnsmasq.conf and uncomment(remove the #) the line listen-address=127.0.0.1

After that edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and search for a line prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; and uncomment it. What this does is, whenever you get a new dhcp lease, the dhcp3 client tool on your computer gets the new lease and updates the /etc/resolv.conf file with the right values for the DNS server.

Using the prepend option, we make sure that 127.0.0.1 appears before the other DNS servers. So, if the details of a domain are already in the cache, it retrieves it fast – else it looks for the other DNS servers.

Now open /etc/resolv.conf and you can see that it doesn’t have 127.0.0.1 now.

search yourisp.com nameserver 127.0.0.1 nameserver 192.168.1.1

The last line may be different for you. I have a router which is configured to use OpenDNS, so my entry points to it.

To check whether the cache really works, execute the following command.

$dig google.com

You will get something like ;; Query time: 252 msec

Executing the command again will get you ;; Query time: 1 msec.

Congrats, you have saved about 250msec by caching the DNS.

twit.el – Tweet from emacs

Published on November 27, 2007 in FSlog, Others and Sites. 1 Comment

Now I can post to my twitter account from emacs (my favorite editor). Just install twit.el and you are ready to post to twitter, check recent tweets, etc. Download the twit.el file to some directory in your home dir (I have it in my .emacs.d directory) and then add the following line to your .emacs file present in your home directory.

(load-file "/path/to/twit.el")

After doing it and restart your emacs, just press M-x and twit-post and type in whatever you want to and press enter. It will then ask your twitter id and password – which gets saved for the entire emacs session. It is a very basic authentication and is not secure.

By the way, FSLog too has a twitter feed. You can follow this feed to get updates when I post here. Thanks to Srid for this tip.

Turbogears Catwalk UserStyle

Published on November 12, 2007 in Programming and Tips and Tricks. 1 Comment

For people who have been using Turbogears, Catwalk is an excellent tool to manage the database models and for populating the data into the database. But the footer which displays “Turbogears under the hood” is irritating as I couldn’t select items in which lie directly below the div. So I thought of writing down a quick userstyle where the display property of that div is set to none.

Find the Turbogears Catwalk – Remove footer userscript here. You may need to install the Stylish firefox extension for it to work.

Arichuvadi – Tamil Tutorial

Published on September 18, 2007 in Sites. 7 Comments

NRCFOSS has released a online tamil language learning tutorial called Arichuvadi. It is nicely thought out which has the english version of a sentence with its equivalent in written tamil and spoken tamil. All the voices are in ogg format. They now have partial alphabets in 3 languages. People can also come forward and add lessons.

Blogrush – New traffic exchange program

Published on September 16, 2007 in Sites. 2 Comments

Blogrush is a new traffic exchange program which promises to bring in targetted reader to your blogs. All you have to do is register for the program and you get a widget that can be pasted on your blog. Everytime a visitor visits your blog a credit is added to your account – which means that your blog will be showed on other blogs. The interesting thing about this is there is a great affiliate program which goes down to 10 tiers deep. Early adopters of this program are sure of benefiting from the exponential growth.

BarCamp Bangalore – Day 2

Published on September 16, 2007 in Events. 0 Comments

On day 2 of BarCamp Bangalore, it was a bit too boring and I attended only a few sessions which were interesting.

The first session was Rules to break in a startup by Mr.Ashwin which was quite interesting. I also met Sagaro during that session. Then we headed off to a session by Preethan about Branding on the internet. Then I sat down in the bloggers’ collective again where someone was supposed to speak about corporate blogging – which he greatly misunderstood and talked about how bloggers blogged about corporates. Then someone else made a impromptu session on corporate blogging.

After lunch and TShirts, two people were talking about bringing metro bloggers into print media. They were thinking of a startup where bloggers can get their content published on a paper which is distributed across a city.

When the afternoon sessions started, I sat down for a interesting session about Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) which was cool. Then in the startups collective, there was a hot discussion started off by Vaidhy which was about the lack of good developers in India and why starting a startup in India is difficult.

We started by 5 and didn’t wait till the end. However I have uploaded the pics to my flickr.

Jottit – Aaron’s new startup

Published on September 16, 2007 in Sites and Startups. 1 Comment

After Infogami and Reddit, Aaron Swartz has a new startup called Jottit along with Simon Carstensen under bitbots.net. It is similar to Infogami and is a plain vanilla wiki. You can easily create a page for yourself by visiting the site and typing out some content. You will be given a random page which you can claim later and also change to a sub-domain. It is written using web.py – and excellent python web framework. I wonder what will be business model for this and whether it will be able to stand up against spammers who brought down Infogami.

BarCamp Bangalore 4 – Day 1

Published on September 15, 2007 in Events. 0 Comments

I typed out this post long time back and was lazy in posting it. So here is the post about BarCamp 4 day 1. I will post about day 2 tomorrow.

This is an account of my first BarCamp at Bangalore IIM. I thought of
live blogging the event, but I couldn’t get WiFi get working on my
Acer. If anyone has made wifi working with an Acer Aspire 5050, please
do leave a comment. Anyway, this can be thought of as a pseudo-live blog of the event.

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