Category: Hosting

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Roundcube in cPanel

For about a year, Birdhouse has offered users an experimental installation of the Ajax-based Roundcube webmail client. In addition to its super-clean appearance, Roundcube takes the unusual approach of applying desktop application UI conventions to a web application.

On the web, a single click activates links (e.g. opens email messages), while on the desktop, it usually takes a double-click. Roundcube also requires a double-click to open email messages. Pain in the neck? Kind of, but the pay-off is that you can select a group of messages just like you would on the desktop, by Shift-clicking a range of messages, and drag them into a folder, batch-delete, etc. A trade-off. Other than the UI differences, Roundcube is still a bit short on the more advanced features, though it definitely feels less like 1995 than ye olde Squirrel (though I confess to a huge soft spot for the Squirrel).

As more and more apps move online, this single-click vs. double-click question is going to get stickier. Ironically, Microsoft tried making the single-click-to-open-anything convention a desktop standard a very long time ago (was it Windows 98?) — a move that failed miserably. Windows ME/2000/XP all returned to double-click launching by default.

Anyway, we’ve been running Roundcube outside of cPanel, but recently found a tutorial on integrating Roundcube directly into the cPanel webmail screen, alongside the already offered Squirrel and Horde options. Now if the folks at cPanel would get off their keisters and make it part of the official distribution, so I wouldn’t have to maintain it manually…

Music: Nels Cline And Gregg Bendian :: Mars
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katovichlaw.com

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes katovichlaw.com:

Katovich Law Group assists clients in integrating sustainable, socially and environmentally responsible practices into their businesses at every level.

Katovich Law came to Birdhouse as a Plone site. The Plone CMS embeds its own server, and is therefore incompatible with Apache (without doing fancy port re-routing). Rather than go down that road (and because circumstances were going to make it very difficult to get a raw data dump or even a Plone backup from the old host), I offered to port the site to a more common/compatible CMS (Katovich had no particular attraction to any particular CMS – they were on Plone by circumstance).

Since the site had a pretty straightforward structure, decided to see if I could pull it off in WordPress (it’s what’s for breakfast). There were a few rough edges where WordPress’ blog orientation made things a bit tricky, but overall, the experience underscored my confidence in WP’s flexibility. Had never had cause to dig into the parent/child relationship of WordPress pages, but found them an incredibly easy way to organize hierarchical material and get logically nested URLs and nav sub-menus with zero effort.

Actually wanting to start mastering messing with Drupal, but this was a useful experiment.

Music: Spaceways Incorporated :: Future
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Deleting the Impossible

It finally happened – a customer managed to give a pair of files some impossible names:


\*\*somefile_&name.mov
\*another_file.mov

(how they accomplished this is anyone’s guess) and then complained that they couldn’t delete or rename them. Which is true — the mv, rm, stat, and file commands all complained that they couldn’t stat the files, no matter how I quoted their names. Remembered reading once that you could nuke such files via inode, but had never had cause to try it. Sure enough: “ls -il” gives you the inode number in the filesystem. You can then use:

find . -inum [inode_number] -exec rm -i {} \;

There’s always a side door.

Music: Otis Redding :: Security
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thornography.net

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes thornography.net:

Mr. M. Thorn’s private path, petal-littered, meandersome and pungent, in the World Wide Wonder. Words (with occasional illustration), so many words, mostly pertaining to things shiny, absurd, and new: ideas, events of currentness, technology, culture. Occasional saber-rattling involving Finland.

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dangillmor.com

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes dangillmor.com, a portal page for author and citizen media advocate Dan Gillmor.

Dan Gillmor is director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project affiliated with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Gillmor is also the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.

Gillmor also runs kralums.com, “A blog for the soon-to-be thousands of former Knight Ridder employees.”

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Live Logging

Nifty WordPress plugin lets you view activity on a WP blog in real time: Live. Watch RSS access, comments, misc visitor activity in a little Ajax window as it’s happening.

In a similar vein, discovered Apache Log Tail the other day — integrates with cPanel’s WHM and lets you view tail activity for each domain on a cPanel server in real time – really useful during comment spam attacks, etc. (and way easier / more compact / more visual) than running tail from a shell). Also a big fan of the same developer’s vpsinfo and loadavg scripts.

Music: The Ramones :: Loudmouth
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Rice Cracker

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes hunxue-er.com.

Li Zhaohua is an American journalist based in Oakland, California. He also spends time in Beijing. He finds “I’m genetically predisposed to the crossing of cultural barriers” a useful phrase in fellowship and job applications, but would rather jam an ice-pick repeatedly into his own leg than say something like that in real life.

WordPress blog.

Music: Hawkwind :: Spirit Of The Age
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Lieberman’s Server Dinks Out

After Lieberman’s campaign web site went down yesterday, there was some suggestion that it might have been hacked by the opposition. Not so fast… turns out Lieberman’s $12 million campaign was running its site off a common $15/month hosting plan at a generic provider. I can just see how it all unfolded: Campaign director asks a friend who knows “a web guy I like” to build a site for the campaign. Web dude sets it up where he sets up all of his clients, never thinks to ask Day 1 questions like “So how much traffic do we expect here?” And neither does a single soul in the entire campaign staff.

Not saying Birdhouse could handle that kind of traffic, but I would certainly have the sense to make sure a site reaching out to a population this large had a dedicated server. Or two. Twist: The Lamont campaign offered midway through the day to take over hosting for their opponent — a gracious gesture — but never heard back.

Also interesting is that the gross underestimation wasn’t discovered until election day — evidence of how many people wait until the very last minute to start scrabbling together a bit of voting information.

Music: Palace Brothers :: O Paul
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timothydocumentary.com

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes timothydocumentary.com, a site representing the documentary work of J-School graduate Tim Wheeler.

Timothy Documentary clients are production companies, organizations, and publications interested in documenting pressing social issues and underrepresented communities around the world. The work is inspired by the strength and wisdom that people gain from their unique upbringings.

Nice use of Slideshow Pro, which I also use for an “Image of the Week” feature on the J-School intranet.

Music: The Fall :: Dog Is Life/Jerusalem