Isles Tech

This is how I installed PhpMyLibrary for our school.

Note: The computer I wanted to run PML on was already running MediaWiki and was up to date with the latest Ubuntu patches (it is running Dapper), so I assumed that MySQL, PHP, and Apache2 are working properly.

1. Created database (librarydb). Then create an admin@localhost user for database with grant access (done using PhpMyAdmin; SQL query is “grant all privileges on librarydb.* to admin@localhost with grant option”
2. Download PhpMyLibrary.
3. Extract the files to /var/www/library.
4. Enable writing to /var/www/library/polerio/config (chmod a+w).
5. Go to http://localhost/library and check if all requirements are satisfied. (The red note about configuration.php is okay; at the end of the installer, you will be given the correct configuration info, and you will just put it into a file /var/www/library/polerio/config/conf.php)
6. Click on Next, read the license, click on Next.
7. Step 1: hostname is usually localhost. MySQL User Name: someone with create database privilege (usually root).
8. Step 2: select a good site name.
9. Step 3: take note of the admin password (you’ll need that for later).
10. Step 4: copy the config information from the text book and paste it into conf.php (see above).
11. Remove the installation directory.
12. Go to http://localhost/library and login as admin. You can then customize the site.

I was tired of trying to find certain files in my collection of installers which is distributed over dozens of CDs when I realized that I actually use a very small subset of all those files for a considerable amount of time.

So I made up a list of all those files which I think are often used, and collected them into one CD. The programs are listed below.

All of these programs are free for personal use.

• OpenOffice.org - good and free (as in free beer) replacement for Microsoft Office
• Java Runtime Environment - many programs require this, including Base, the database management component of OpenOffice.org
• Firefox - fast replacement for Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Foxit Reader - fast and small replacement for Adobe Acrobat Reader (for PDF files)
• TugZip - readers for archives, such as zip files. Free, unlike WinZip, which is shareware and nags you after 30 days.
• VideoLan Player (VLC) - fast replacement for Windows Media Player
• AVG Free, with latest update file (update files are almost always newer than the installer)
• Ad-Aware Personal - for spyware; catches spyware and adware which are not normally caught by AVG Free
• FLVPlayer for playing those .FLV files downloaded from YouTube

If the computer has an Internet connection, the following programs are also good to install:

• uTorrent - for BitTorrent
• Download Accelerator Plus (DAP)
• BackStreet Browser - for downloading whole websites
• LimeWire - although I do not use this program myself (I don’t advocate piracy, and files found in LimeWire networks are almost always pirated)

I also include the Python installer because I have some Python scripts to download files from sites which cannot be directly downloaded by BackStreet Browser.
Other files which I include in my tools collection are the following:

• Ghostscript interpreter - so that I can read/print those .ps files
• MD5SUMS program - to check the integrity of downloaded files
• File Splitter - HJSplitter is also good

If you are into PC and network troubleshooting, you might also consider the following programs:

• TCPOptimizer - to optimize network connections using the TCP/IP protocol
• Advanced Process Termination - esp. useful for virus control
• Aida32 - to know the internals of the PC without opening the case

If you have licenses to these programs, you might also include them:

• JV16 PC Optimizer
• DeepFreeze
• Diskeeper Pro

Alternatively, all of these three programs have trial versions, but remember that beyond the trial period or functionality it is illegal to use the software.

In another post I detailed how to install PhpMyLibrary. Unfortunately, I realized only the morning after that that I could not create new records in PhpMyLibrary. And I’ve demonstrated the thing to our librarian!

So I searched for another software solution. I’ve already came across PMB, but I could not understand the French that was presented to me. Fortunately after a little googling I discovered an explanation in English on downloading and installing PMB. Although the information is somewhat dated, it can still be adapted. I learnt a little French along the way: Telecharger means download. So that explains all those pages where I am supposed to download something and all that I could see was “Telecharger”

I will not repeat the instructions here in downloading and installing PMB. Just read the reference above. There are only two things which are not the same in the latest version:

1. when you come to the page to create the database tables, there’s actually an option to switch to an English interface;
2. instead of editing config.inc, you have to edit config.inc.php (in my system, at /var/www/lib/includes/)

Other notes:

1. If you receive permission errors in installing, make sure that the files are owned by www-data. In Linux, you would do a chown www-data foldername -R.
2. If you want to change the OPAC URL (which is by default at http://yourhost/yourlib/opac_css/) you can login as administrator and go to Administration > tools > parameters > OPAC and change opac_url). opac_css is also built to be standalone so that it can be moved around, so you can actually put it on the same level as libfolder and have opac_url as ./../opac

Say you have a file which contains some text like this:

I have now been in this country for over six
years, and consider myself in
most respects well-assimilated. However, there is
one key step on the road
to full assimilation which I have yet to take, and
that’s to eat BALUT. The

And what you would like it to appear is this:

I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider myself in most respects well-assimilated. However, there is one key step on the road to full assimilation which I have yet to take, and that’s to eat BALUT. The

That is, with those hard line breaks removed. This is how to do it in MS Word:

1. Ctrl+A to select all text.
2. Ctrl+H to open the Find & Replace dialog box. In “Find what”, type “^p^p”. The ‘^p’ means a line break. In “Replace with”, type “===”. (This is to make sure that only single line breaks will be replaced.)
3. Click on Replace All.
4. Do another search and replace. For “Find what”, use “^p”. For the replacement, use ” ” (space).
5. Finally, we will replace the replacement above for two consecutive hard line breaks. Search for “===” and replace it with “^p”.

Issue: Some web sites require that your Firefox version is at least 2.0. Also, some (most?) of the Firefox add-ons assume that you have the latest version. Unfortunately, Ubuntu Dapper comes with 1.5 by default.

I use Ubuntuzilla to do the update automatically. You can read the instructions at their web site on how to install the latest Firefox version.

Situation: The school’s OPAC computer must lock to the web address http://192.168.0.xxx/opac/ so that students will not use it to visit other web sites.

Note: Please take note of the address of this page since you may have to restart Firefox.

1. Make sure that you have the latest Firefox version.
2. Get ProCon Latte. You will be prompted to restart Firefox at the end of the installation.
3. Once Firefox has restarted, go to Tools > ProCon.
4. In the General tab, check “Hide from Tools menu”, uncheck “Show in status bar”, check “Lock the add-ons list”, and check the “Lock about:config”. Change the shortcut for showing ProCon (default is Ctrl + Alt + P; change this to something else so that would be another level of security against intruders).
5. Set a password. (Click on Set Password… in the General tab.)
6. On the main filter, check “Block all traffic”. Optionally, check “Add reason of blockage to warning”, using “Custom warning message” as message. You can also type the OPAC address in the “Redirect blocked page” address.
7. Click on the Whitelist tab, check “Enable whitelist” and delete all entries except the target URL (in our case, http://192.168.0.xxx/opac/). (The whitelist list can be edited just like in a text editor.)
8. You may need to restart Firefox for changes to take effect.

One of my other activities is that of language advocacy. I’ve been planning to translate some of the interface of the Ubuntu system to Cebuano for some time but I never moved my lazy butt to do that. Well, at least now, the school year is almost over, I could spend some time to at least start in that direction. (I really don’t know what is better: to start a project and leave it unfinished, or not to start at all.) Anyway, Lakein said that for complex and/or unpleasant tasks, it’s better to start them and just work on one bit at a time than not start at all, so I just took the plunge and dived in.

First of all, go to Launchpad Translations and create an account. Then you can select on the Ubuntu version you want to work on. (I choose Dapper 6.06) You next choose the language you want to work on (say Cebuano), and finally the program.

Hinay-hinay lang, my grandfather would have remarked.

WINE is a Windows emulator for Ubuntu. There are instructions on how to install it in Dapper 6.06, but I get the message “gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.” To work around this, open your web browser and go to http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg (you can right-click this link) and save the file as wine.gpg. Then open a terminal window, and type “sudo apt-key add wine.gpg”. The system should respond with “OK”. After this, you can just follow the instructions in the link given above.

Some other notes:

• If you have errors regarding your proxy settings, try System –> Preferences –> Network proxy and select “Direct internet connection.”
• You might need to restart the Synaptic Package Manager.

Since Yahoo Mail disabled its POP3 access to free accounts, you can’t do a mass download of the messages from Yahoo. YPOPs fixes this by acting like a Yahoo server, and getting the messages from Yahoo.

There is a supposed-to-be YPOP version for Linux, but I found out that you can just install the Windows version using WINE, and it runs fine.

Some blogger would just lift something from another website, put it as a post in their blog, and that’s it. They don’t even bother to cite the source. Okay, sometimes the original author of the article or page is given credit, but you would think that the piece was first published in the blog where you’re reading it.

A related sin is that of copying copious amount of text from a web site, so much text that the reader of the blog would not need to go to the original source. Some bloggers just don’t understand that the web site from where they got the article are most often supported by advertising, which is based on how many visitors have gone to the web site. Now, it just so happens that blogs (esp. those found here at blogspot.com) seem to have better integration with Google.com and other search engines, and the blog entry is almost always above that of the static web site when you look at the search results.

I resolve never to do these things in the blogs that I write.

I have a lot of blogs here at Wordpress.com that my drop-down menu for my blogs fill up the screen of my little monitor.

I decided to reduce my blogs to those which I really need. But since Wordpress.com doesn’t allow reuse of domain names, I thought that it is not a good idea for me to delete the blog names which I am not going to use at the moment but which I might reuse in the future.

My solution was to register another user. Whether that is okay or not with Wordpress.com I do not know; I don’t see it listed as “evil” in their Terms of Service.

Then from my old account I invited my new account to the blogs I want to rest for the moment. I made the new account an administrator. I then logged in using my new account and deleted my old account as a user in the blogs I want to disappear from the dashboard of my main account.

Situation: You have an old account at furl.net which you want to delete, but you want the bookmarks at that account transferred to a new account which you will keep.

1. Decide which account you will keep.
2. Login using the account that you are planning to delete.
3. Go to My Tools > Export > Furl XML format. Normally your browser will just open another page (exportXML.jsp) where the export data is saved. Save that page to a file on your disk.
4. Logout and login again using the account you want to keep.
5. Go to My Tools > Import. In the “Import from:” field, choose “Furl XML Export”. Then click on “Browse…” and browse for the XML file. Once you click on “Import It…” there is a warning: please pay attention to that warning!
6. If you did not receive any error messages, verify that all your furl bookmarks are working (might be difficult if you have thousands).

TinyURL is a service which will let you enter very long URLs and convert it into short ones. I’ve heard of the service long time ago, but I just became curious about it yesterday, when I had to report to someone some weird online activity through email and I wanted to keep the URLs intact.

I wondered where tinyurl.com/x where x is the numbers 0 to 9 will lead to. Here are my findings:

• http://tinyurl.com/0 - obviously tinyurl.com itself (EDIT: After a while, tinyurl.com says “Error: Unable to find site’s URL to redirect to. Please check that the URL entered is correct.”)
• http://tinyurl.com/1 - Gilby’s Website (a unicyclist community) - was he the first one to hear about the service? (actually, the tinyurls seem to be assigned using a random algorithm)
• http://tinyurl.com/2 - Unicyclist Community - there seems to be a pattern here… What the heck is a unicycle?
• http://tinyurl.com/3 - Unicycle.com :: Unicycle.com Home Page - what the?
• http://tinyurl.com/4 - Unicycle.com duh.
• http://tinyurl.com/5 - hey, at least, it’s an error message this time!
• http://tinyurl.com/6 - at least the first real long URL which got tiny
• http://tinyurl.com/7 - not taken
• http://tinyurl.com/8 - not taken
• http://tinyurl.com/9 - not taken

Conclusion: There is something wrong with my title. It’s not so fun after all.

Author's Note: This was originally posted on Nov. 6, 2007, in my now-defunct Wordpress.com blog.

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In another post I wrote about installing PMB, a free library cataloging software (available from sigb.net).

The problem with PMB is that it does not have a module to show the availability of room locations. In our school, we have 3 libraries, 1 AVR and 2 science laboratories under the Learning and Resource Center. In the past we used a local MediaWiki installation to show to the teachers the schedules of reservations for the different venues. However, it was a hassle since our Library Assistant had to create a snapshot of the schedule and upload it to the wiki.

I just discovered Google Calendar the other night, and I am discovering some things on sharing a given calendar. The Library Assistant will just be in charge of managing the schedule, and everyone will just be invited to view the calendar. To do this, he has to click on the little button beside the calendar and select “Share this calendar”. In the new screen which will show up, the GMail addresses of the teachers will be input under the “Add new person” field. The invited teacher will receive a note from Google that there is an invitation for him to use Google Calendar. Then if he has already activated his Google Calendar account, he can access the calendar but not edit it.