Bert's blog

For those of you who don’t know what gdata is, gdata is the api/communication protocol for accessing google services inside your applications. I’m using it to do some awesome stuff for the computerclub I’m part of their website (google calendar mostly).

Now, there are libs for all the prominent programming languages, including PHP. It’s even part of zendframework (you can find it in synaptic of course). For those of you having issues with it, try making a symlink from /usr/share/php/Zend  to /usr/share/php/libzend-framework-php/Zend that way you can copy over code without the need to change paths.

The library is really great if you want to do stuff just the way they’re found in the google or zend documentation. The documentation is, unluckily, based on examples and not on functions like the php.net website. Therefor it can be hard to find out stuff like how to get a client running on a public feed or how to post to the non-default calendar. I plan to commit some of my findings back to the zend wiki, or should I just opensource the computerclub’s calendar manager ?

On another note, for some mysterious reason all my different wordpress test installations that always wanted to auto-update perfectly, now decided to stop doing just that, so I’ll be upgrading to wordpress 3 manually (hurray). No offence wordpress, I probably broke something everywhere.

I know this post had very few things to do with ubuntu but I want to get back into my blogging habbit. Also, ubuntu weblogs is rather empty nowadays.

So, let me know if you liked this and questions on gdata are always welcome, if you notice that for some magical reason the spamcontrol is blocking comments again (don’t know for sure whether it is really working now or not), just email me (address on my homepage).

There’s another meme going around I thought that’d a good opportunity to start posting on my blog again.

So first of all, here is my score:

I wasn’t surprised at my score actually, my overall knowledge of computers is quite okey.

Now on wordpress, you probably don’t know I’m in a computer club. Well, actually I am. I’m responsible for all the linux stuff the C&T computerclub in Antwerp is doing (that’s in Belgium BTW). Now our website is quite old and no longer up-to-date, it’s a basic and old joomla site. You can find it on http://www.ct.be

The plans for a new website have been changing very actively in 2009 but no one seemed competent enough and had enough time to work on it. So I kind of decided I’d have my say on it. And currently I’m developing it on wordpress. As most of you know by now, wordpress can be extended with a few plugins and a nice theme and it easily becomes more of a website than a blog. That’s my plan for ct.be !

I have read through nearly all wordpress theme development documentation and I’m working on a new theme now, it seems quite easy if you take the “classic” theme as an example.

That’s all for now, I’ll post more often now on my encounters with wordpress theming.

Please comment if you found this interesting or not, so I can make sure I’m not posting uninteresting rubbish.

So first of all my server has been down for 2 days due to a power-outage in the nedzone datacenter. The outage lasted only a few minutes but for some reason the server didn’t like it and burned a piece of RAM and a network card.

My friend, who owns the server (I’m just on a VPS), has fixed it by now after some work last night on xen (I hate xen).

But though my blog had been down I found it very strange I didn’t get any replies on my latest blog post, so I checked my spam count and it had gone up A LOT. So I tried to post a comment as a guest myself and apparently my anti-spam plugin (wp-spamfree) was blocking EVERYTHING. So I just ditched it for a nice captcha plugin that seems to work just fine.

Sorry for the inconvenience to those who tried to reply on my post “on blogging”, please reply again if you still want to, it should work fine now (comments appear as soon as I approve them) ;)

I love the idea of blogging, I love reading news, blogs and mailinglists, I have an opinion concerning EVERY subject. But I never publish any blog posts.

I hear this a lot: I start a blog post but I never finish it, that’s why I’m posting right away now.

So tell me ubuntuweblogs.org readers, do you blog ?  Do you blog often ? Do you also never finish a post like me ? What tools do you use to blog ?

I just use the basic wordpress stuff, perhaps I should get an easy-to-use blog client. (Since I use a prism app for google calendar I started to watch it daily)

So enlighten me please :D

BTW:

This should be my first post to Ubuntu Weblogs Planet so hi everybody !!! :D

I guess most of you don’t know me so I’ll introduce myself.

I’m Bert Van de Poel (aka Bert_2 aka Bhack), I’m 17 years old and I’m in my 5th year Latin-Mathematics8 now.

I’ve been using ubuntu since 6.06 (dapper drake) and I’ve switched to it entirely around 7.04.

I’m a webdeveloper both as a hobby and as a way of getting money ( FOSDEM and all the hardware don’t pay themselves).

You guys probably noticed I’m not a native english speaker, I live in Belgium and I usually speak dutch, alhough I enjoy english a lot as it’s more functional language.

I don’t have anything more to say, if you guys really want to know something, post a comment ;)

I haven’t blogged in a long time, altough a lot has happened, this is perhaps because no one is reading this blog except search engines, and I’m not even linking to it at all.

But here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

I went to FOSDEM and it was great, I learned a whole lot and I talked to some very interesting persons.
I really enjoyed the talk about thunderbird3 I really like thunderbird and they’re changing exactly the things that I found disturbing in thunderbird2 so that’s awesome. Also I learned a lot about CalDAV and I got myself an FIC OpenMoko NEo Freerunner. Although it’s not the most beautiful device I’ve ever had, it surely is the coolest one. It has really awesome hardware and the FSOm5 distro even made it into a usable phone and with some fiddling I could play games on it :D

Also some roemenian guys broke in into this server through wordpress or roundcube (the 2 pieces of software that aren’t updated on a weekly/monthly basis) and they used 25GB of bandwidth during a period of a few days. They set up a lot of backup and restore systems + ssh server + webserver, and all that into every directory that www-data had write permissions too. Thank god I found them on time.

I have also been trying ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 4 on virtualbox and it rocks, the live CD seems so fast and also the new messaging system rocks.

There are probably a lot of things I’m forgetting but I think this is enough for now.

I’ll probably blog again in a few days ;)

I really need to update my website and start blogging activly (so I can get added to planets etc.)

But I just wanted to let you guys know the following (altough no-one is reading this blog yet)

Jeej FOSDEM :D:D:D:D

On ubuntu planet everybody seems to be posting the names of their computers, it’s odd how all those geeks gave cool names to their computers and I haven’t.

My computers just are berts-ubuntu-desktop berts-mac-mini berts-low-xubuntu berts-old-desktop etc.

Perhaps I should think of some cooler names for them, but for now I will be busy with other stuff (like fixing ********** windows, believe it or not but I use windows to play some games once in a while and of course it fucked up again and doesn’t want to do a thing anymore)

Also school brings up a lot of work, but that’s not that special or important.

Site’s are going well, bStats will soon be released I guess ;)

Okey, this is a quick blog post to let you all know that I’m downloading Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha5 right now and am going to test it the next 2 months until it’s released.

Also: I have started the school year, I’m the only one who’s studying Latin-Mathematics8 which is kind of funny though pretty most all people with which I have lessons with seem to dislike me but I try not to bother.

My old site, rpgfamilie.net is back up again and I hope it’ll stay up for some time now though migrating it to this VPS wouldn’t be a bad idea.

That’s it for now ;)

I haven’t blogged for a long time now, I really should make time to blog. It’s really important to look back on things and I also hope to meet some new persons in the blogo-sphere as soon as this blog goes fully public.

Well, lately I’ve been working on the isi-print site, it’s almost finished now I think.

Also I should start assembling the new Archiver issue but it has been far to hot here lately, it’s impossible to work when it’s like 34°C in my room.

Well, that’s kind of it, I should blog “on the spot”, meaning I should blog about things emediatly when I think “I should blog about this”, but post-poning things is typically me.

Well, this is it I think. For now ;) :P