Planet Exclaim

Thats it for Crappotop!

2008-06-07T20:14:20+00:00

I have finally put Crappotop to rest, its DBANning as I speak.

Now I need a new one

Leopard MySQL Guide Update

2008-05-28T10:10:36+00:00

I updated the Leopard MySQL guide as a new version of MySQL is out which fixes this (in the 5.0 branch).

I suspect this will be fixed in MySQL 5.1 too.

Pinboard

2008-05-28T09:51:54+00:00

A while ago a friend of mine asked me to make a web-based note taking application for his iPod Touch. And here it is, Pinboard 1.01!

Pinboard has very light system requirements, you just need a web server and PHP with SQLite support (I wrote it with SQLite 2.8).

If your interested it’s available under the BSD license and can be got here on my blog.

The new Exclaim site is launching!

2008-05-26T15:30:11+00:00

The time has finally come to launch the new Exclaim website!

Tomorrow I am going to roll in the new wiki and bugtracker, which will live on the wiki. and bugs. subdomains. The current wiki and bugtracker have already been disabled.

On Wednesday I am hoping to theme WebSVN with the new Exclaim theme, so as to fit in with the rest of the site.

Thursday will be the big one, when I roll in the new SwishCMS installation, which will include the Pastebin for the developer site.

And finally on Friday I am going to theme the Forum and Planet with the new Exclaim theme, but this might roll onto Saturday too depending on how long it takes.

Also on the new Exclaim site will be advertisments, so you can help support the running costs of the Exclaim project. They will be non-intrusive Google ones however, so no flashing stupid “You are the 1,000,000th Visitor to this site!”.

Once I visited a site, got that advertisment, came back the next day and got the same. But I digress.

Now to update this copy of Wordpress…

Fail.

2008-05-24T18:24:01+00:00

All I can say about today is FAIL. All I can say about Seagate is FAIL. My Seagate hard disk, which isn’t even 6 months old, dropped dead without warning today. Seems to be a mechanical failure as it died with a rather loud crunch and when i move the disk about or tap it it rattles quite a bit, as if something is completely loose in it and moving about.

FAIL!

What’s going on with Exclaim

2008-05-08T17:14:36+00:00

We sadly had to restart Exclaim on Monday due to a host of reasons, see the Exclaim Website for details.

However doing this gave me some motivation to do some work on the behind the scenes work at Exclaim. I have recently been working on (when not doing SwishCMS) the Exclaim Test site.

The greatest feature is how all my work is now done in SVN (using a WebSVN installation that was set up this week), so it is available for all. However, the best bit is that if I make a change to the theme, I can just svn up in the theme directory, which is pretty neat and saves a lot of time.

The Exclaim Test site is almost done, just need to sort out the Search tool and import all the old news articles, both of which depend on SwishCMS features which will be written right after this blog post.

Alex is working on the new build system which might land in svn today. This new one based on rant is looking great and is much easier to work. No more kconfig sadly but we will have a replacement.

Finally I am hoping to start sorting out the bug tracker and wiki that will be on the new site, and Alex will start on the great new kernel, which hopefully will not be rewritten for a LONG time

Exclaim Test

2008-04-27T17:24:14+00:00

Being a web designer is hard work, but seeing the end result and hearing what your friends think of it does bring a smile do your face.

I have finished work on designing the theme for the SwishCMS 2.0 install (which will be coming out soon) on Exclaim Test. Feel free to give it a spin.

kexec-loader 1.2

2008-04-27T17:22:21+00:00

I appear to have got myself into a new open source project. This one is written by a friend of mine called solemnwarning. kexec-loader is a boot loader that boots a linux kernel, then uses kexec to load a new one. Useful if you want to boot a linux distro off USB and your BIOS doesn’t support it.

I wrote the README and did some testing, but im hoping to write more

solemnwarning’s website.

Updated WordPress

2008-04-19T10:44:37+00:00

WordPress is now at 2.5. Go me!

IE beats Firefox?

2008-03-29T09:20:15+00:00

When I was designing the new Exclaim site, I was doing it on Safari. I then tried it in Firefox 3, and much to my surprise, there was a problem rendering!

Realising that a hack would be needed to fix this, I moved on and tested in IE. I almost fell over when IE7 rendered the page perfectly (bar lack of AA on the text). Could it really be possible for IE to beat FF?

Ill add links to screenshots as I go:

Coming soon

Getting GD into Mac OS X Leopard’s PHP

2008-03-20T11:38:32+00:00

In my work with SwishCMS, I needed GD. The best guide I found for that is http://www.veola.net/macintosh/adding-gd-library-for-mac-os-x-leopard.

Please note to follow the guide after the introduction, and not the link given.One hiccup I ran into when doing this was what configure line to use.

I use Leopard on a Core 2 Mac, so I need to use the 64bit configure line. I am unsure what you need for a PowerPC Mac, so good luck

MySQL and PHP in Mac OS X Leopard

2008-03-20T11:29:10+00:00

There have been hundreds of these blog posts over the internet about how to get MySQL and PHP to work well together in Leopard. Here is my method, collated from over the internet. This works for me, and its probably the first place I’ll come if I get stuck

Getting the Startup Item and prefPane to work

These two have been fixed as of MySQL Community Server 5.0.51b

MySQL Sock problems

There are two fixes for this. The first is to do a symlink:

/var/mysql/mysql.sock -> /tmp/mysql.sock

The second is to modify the php.ini. If you haven’t already done so, move /etc/php.ini.dist to /etc/php.ini. Then change the following two lines:

mysql.default_socket = mysqli.default_socket =
Change them to read:

mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock mysqli.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
Then restart Web Sharing and it will work!

lskernel

2008-02-26T07:14:10+00:00

I have started work on a small OS kernel just for my education. If anyone is interested, you can view the code at http://lsproc.exclaim-project.org/websvn. Users wanting to checkout the source should do: svn co http://lsproc.exclaim-project.org/lskernel.

It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by exclamation marks

2008-01-29T21:36:52+00:00

It is dark… Oh no, you have walked into the slavering fangs of a Grue!

Exclaim running GCC!

2008-01-27T09:39:08+00:00

Exclaim can now run GCC and Binutils!

Plus, I hacked together a PNG viewer using libpng/zlib and the VBE driver:

RIP Crappotop

2008-01-26T13:49:32+00:00

Crappotop has kicked the bucket again, hard disk once again will not start. Ill have a word with the tecchie to see if he might want to fix it, but until then, a moment silence please

The Best Error’d

2008-01-24T20:15:52+00:00

I have never seen a WTF better than thisThanks to http://www.thedailywtf.com!

No more TuxTalk, new domain!

2008-01-20T22:06:46+00:00

TuxTalk never really took off, nobody has been on it in months, so I decided to kill it off. The domain will expire in August. This means I needed a place to put Exclaim, so I registered a new domain for it, exclaim-project.org. If you have any bookmarks pointing to the old URLs, please update them! Plus, if you have any TuxTalk bookmarks, delete them

New URL

2008-01-20T22:00:36+00:00

My new URL is http://lsproc.exclaim-project.org. The old one will work for a while, and will redirect here.

Volume up to level BSOD

2008-01-19T22:06:00+00:00

I was playing with my keyboard today. Normally if I press volume up, the volume goes up (as expected). However, today, Vista decided to BSOD on me when holding down Volume Up.

I have no idea whether it’s because of an Apple keyboard, but I think this blows Alex’s previous find of killing certain processes in Vista and ReactOS causing an instant BSOD into the water.

Its Back

2008-01-19T22:04:02+00:00

Maintenance took a lot longer than expected due to slow upload speeds and the sort. Some stuff still isn’t up.

Thanks for hanging on with us.

Site Maintenance

2008-01-18T20:23:46+00:00

The Exclaim Project is performing maintenance on the server this site runs on. This site will be unavailable during the following time and duration:

When: Saturday 19th January at 10:00 AM (GMT+)

ETA: 5 Hours.

All times are estimates.

Becoming an Exclaim Developer

2008-01-08T20:31:14+00:00

Following our recent post on OSNews, we have had a few people asking how to become an Exclaim developer. Since this is mostly my job in the Administrative section, I now present The Official Exclaim How To for Becoming a Developer!

Get familiar with C, Assembly and OS Development. Particularly programming protected mode kernels for Intel x86 systems.
Get familiar with the Exclaim code, check out a copy with Bazaar and learn how it works. Feel free to play around.
If you changed the tree, bzr revert it to the original state, and make some useful patches. Currently we want 10 useful and well build patches. Make sure you follow our Syntax Guidelines and TODO list, as patches not following these can not be accepted.
When you have made your patches, dump them on the Exclaim Pastebin or any other service, and let ME (lsproc) know on IRC. Then wait

What I do when I have got the patches is:

Check they build and work as intended, without affecting any other part of the system.
Ensure that the patches can be included in current bzr, e.g. don’t conflict with anything else going on, and do fit with the TODO schedule.
Ensure the patch follows the syntax guidelines
If all of these have passed, then the patches go to Alex, who then tests them for the highest of quality standards (which are very picky). He has the last word, regardless of what I say.

If you get this far, then Alex will consider giving you write access to the bazaar branch. You will find out if you get accepted, and if not, why not.

You are probably wondering why its so complex and strict. The answer to that is that we act heavily on our targets of a stable and lightweight OS. We make sure at every point that the code is of the quality that is already in the branch, and that it doesn’t affect those two targets. While this may seem harsh, it keeps the quality of the code, and an excellent end product. Don’t let this put you off though, we are always looking for more people to help us out.

Exclaim 0.2.0 released!

2008-01-02T14:20:52+00:00

Wow, completely forgot to post this here! Yesterday we released Exclaim 0.2.0, the first usable release of Exclaim. It has many more features than 0.1 (see previous posts for some details). I uploaded a screenshot that shows the difference between 0.1 and 0.2, it’s quite funny

The Motivation to Code

2007-12-31T20:38:29+00:00

Irrelevant but important notice: This blog will be moving sometime in January.

If you have been reading the SwishCMS Roadmap you will notice that I will have missed the roadmap target for SwishNEWS 1.5 Alpha 1. This is because of a problem that hits many people - the lack of motivation to code.

If you find any other app not turning up in time - keep this in mind!

New machine again!

2007-12-30T08:17:37+00:00

Just ordered a new machine again Exactly 1 year since I ordered my last one. The specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz
Asus P5KC (Intel P35) motherboard
2GB DDR2 PC2-6400 (800Mhz) RAM
Asus 8600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E graphics
Seagate 250GB SATA-II hard disk
HP Lightscribe DVD burner

Pretty cool, huh?

I’m still here!

2007-12-28T17:56:00+00:00

No, I haven’t vanished yet. Just been very busy with Christmas, SwishCMS work, and Exclaim.

Happy New Year everyone!

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-24T21:57:19+00:00

This is just a quick post to wish anyone reading my blog Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or whatever you want to call it!

If only…

2007-12-04T21:09:01+00:00

… you could modify somebody’s memory (I almost said RAM there ><).

Wouldn’t stuff just be a lot nicer

It lives!

2007-11-30T20:40:05+00:00

In the end I put Windows 95 and Office 95 on, only because I had issues with DSL and the PCMCIA networking card. Here are some photos. Click a photo to see full size..