Reto's Weblog

Back again?

Hefty! It's been quiet here for almost 2 years, which feels like 20 on the internet, but then Google still looks the same as on the 24th of April 2008, right?

Well, I've started using Google Code together with Mercurial repositories to manage some of the codings I did. Most of them are probably not very useful, but then again, they where useful for me at some point in time and could be a starting point for others. Furthermore, using a Google Code project is a great way of backing up stuff that needs no privacy ;).

My code dump has two repositories so far:

CMS Made Simple stuff (like plugins, tools etc.), my CMS of choice for small websites.
Shell Scripts I wrote. Some to integrate with Nautilus, some to be used on the command line

BTW: I'll post important updates regarding mycodedump on this blog.

Mixed Tape 20 Available for Download

The latest Mixed Tape is available for download. It's being downloaded to my iPod right now and you can get it here, if you like.

BTW: This is my last post on the Mixed Tapes. I don't intend to become news relay #1 for them. So, appologies to those that added me to their feed reader just to get updates on the Tapes :)

Getting Naked Again

Dustin Diaz is hosting the third CSS Naked Day on the 9th of April (yes, that's really soon!). It's the third CSS Naked Day and I've updated the LifeType plugin to default to the new date and fixed some bugs as well. So if you think your LifeType blog looks good without CSS you should go ahead, download the latest release and strip!

BTW: I've added the plugin to the official LifeType plugins page.

Mixed Tape 19 Available for Download

The Mixed Tapes from Mercedes are back again. They redesigned their flashy website and changed it to the worse - their script thinks the linux flash binaries are not good enough...
Well, at least the download URLs are now more predictable and direct downloads work, too. So you may try to get your copy as long as it's hot.

Optimizing PNG Compression

While creating some screenshots and saving them with the GIMP, I felt the PNG files were rather big and I was looking for a tool that would do better compression. PNG files usually are saved with lossless compression, not like JPEG files, where you always loose some image information with every percent of higher compression.

As usual googling helped and I quickly found the two very handy command line tools pngcrush and pngnq. pngcrush is an optimizer for PNG files and tries to create optimized PNG files without compromising their quality (e.g. as small as possible but lossless). pngnq on the other hand creates quantized PNG images, which means that the compression is not lossless anymore.

Both tools are available for various platforms such as Linux, Windows and Mac. As usual the ~~ubuntu-way~~ debian-way is straight forward and as easy as:

$ apt-get install pngnq pngcrush

The screenshots below illustrate the different qualities and file sizes to expect with default settings on all three tools. In some occasions individual tweaking may result in even better results, but the default settings work for me just fine in this case.

Summary on a 957x957 pixel screenshot:
Original (The GIMP, level 9): ~287 kb
Processed by pngcrush: ~284kb
Processed by pngnq: ~82kb

Screenshot saved with GIMP 2.4.2, compression level 9 (default/maximum) ~287kb:

Screenshot saved with GIMP and optimized with pngcrush ~284kb:

Screenshot saved with GIMP and quantized with pngnq ~82kb:

Conclusion: The GIMP has a rather effizient compression on level 9 as pngcrush could not achieve much better results (only about 1% reduced filesize). But you are limited to use lossless compression with the GIMP. So using pngnq may be usefull in some situations. The filesize reduction is usually significant (up to 70% as compared to the output of the GIMP).

Innovating the Online Job Market

We've currently a job vacancy for a PR Pro at unic and our HR is experimenting with new ways of acquisition by starting a blog at leitermarketingundkommunikation.ch. Well, I'm curious on what we can expect from that blog, not only content wise. Rumor goes that theres more to come than just the blog. In the meantime we're all sending some link love. At least Johann and Pascal already did so and Philippe has updated his blogroll. Let's see if Kevin is posting something, too. ;-)

Maybe we should register applicationarchitect.ch and xhtmlandcssguru.ch as long as they are available (webdesigner.ch is already taken)...

Mercede Benz Mixed Tape Collection

Due to the many requests for the Mercedes Benz Mixed Tapes, I've packed all the 18 albums in a zip file. Additionally you may download them via eMule (Windows) or aMule (Linux/Mac/Windows) or any other client compliant with eDonkey network. Downloading the albums via eDonkey is slower, but it helps spreading the music and as I won't guarantee any availability for the direct download, I'd suggest you use the eDonkey network and help spreading the albums.

~~Download Link: Mercedes Benz Mixed Tape Collection (zip/1.5GB)~~

eDonkey Network Link: Mercedes Benz Mixed Tape Collection

MD5 Checksum: fd37b77e42cdb62e7c9c3135be1abfa1

UPDATE 2008-06-19: My provider removed the direct download due to excessive traffic usage. Guess that link just got a little too popular. Sorry for those that didn't get a copy yet. Please use the eMule link.

Back in Shape

Long time no post on this blog and terribly bad performance for almost a year. But that's all history now. I finally found the time to move the site to a new server with enough speed to serve all visitors to their satisfaction. Hostpoint did quite a good job for a long time. But the performance on their shared hosting servers got bader and bader every year.

Especially the database performance became really awful. That alone may have been acceptable for some more time, but the downtime increased almost weekly, which of course is very annoying to users looking for PXE Install Tutorials or Firefox Tweaks.

Check out the list below to get an impression. The monitoring was done by requesting a file from the webserver every 15min, which is a really simple monitoring setup. Additionally I logged the load averages and uptime every 5 seconds and I can confirm that they match exactly with the external monitoring. Actually my server had a reboot about every 2-4 days after the load averages increased up to around 15-20 (where they usually should be around 2-5 for this server). Hostpoint is really doing a bad job on monitoring their older servers. I know they have other shared hosting servers that perform way better. Too bad...

Excerpt from the log of the last couple of days

2007-10-13 17:50:29 : back_up
2007-10-12 04:31:08 : down
2007-10-08 05:38:23 : back_up
2007-10-08 05:16:25 : down
2007-10-07 10:18:56 : back_up
2007-10-07 09:55:46 : down
2007-10-06 11:03:08 : back_up
2007-10-06 10:41:49 : down
2007-10-06 09:21:07 : back_up
2007-10-06 09:01:27 : down
2007-10-03 09:21:42 : back_up
2007-10-03 09:01:03 : down
2007-10-02 17:08:45 : back_up
2007-10-02 15:56:46 : down
2007-10-02 13:28:51 : back_up
2007-10-02 13:03:37 : down
2007-10-02 06:24:13 : back_up
2007-10-02 06:02:22 : down
2007-10-02 05:37:57 : back_up
2007-10-02 04:25:49 : down

... and so on.

Introducing Related Posts

Paul wrote a related articles plugin for LifeType. It works like a charm and gives useful results when the Minimum Keyword Length is at least set to 4. You can see the plugin in action on the right in the panel by clicking any article title.
Thanks Paul!

It's not about the new Mixed Tape

This post is not about the new Mixed Tape release, but the cool new addition to the upcoming LifeType 1.2.2. Oscar included the very nice Flash MP3 Player by Jeroen Wijering.
I was surprised to see that The Brand New Heavies are powering the compilation with the starting track - the mixed tape get's better with every release and /me likes it.

Getting Naked on the 5th of April

On the 5th of April (yes, that's really soon!) is the second CSS Naked Day. If you think your blog looks good without CSS you should go ahead and strip! Else you should think about revisiting your markup and make it semantic, standards compliant and accessible.

There are plugins for the most popular weblog tools available, to let you easily get rid of your cloths. Most of them are probably listed on the CSS Naked Day website. And if you're a LifeType user you can download the CSS Naked plugin I wrote. (note: this plugin is written for LifeType 1.2 the included readme.txt explains the installation in 4 easy steps).

Download the CSS Naked Plugin here!

It's All New

Guess you've noticed it (ok, maybe not if you're reading this with a feed reader): I've updated my weblog to LifeType 1.2 and am now using a modified version of the subtle template I ported to LifeType 1.2. Hope you like it. :-)

Fancy Pants?

... I don't think so. But what happened to the OSX guy? He should have been booted with:
$ Kernel --more-verbosity

Mercedes-Benz Mixed Tape 16

Mercedes-Benz released Mixed Tape #16 today. I tried downloading the album for about thirty minutes until I finally got a free slot. If you keep getting timeouts when trying to download the album, leave a message. I'll consider providing an alternative download link here. But maybe I should check back with the distribution policy of Mercedes-Benz first ;-)

LifeType 1.1.6 - Important Security Update

Yesterday Matt found a rather severe file disclosure vulnerability affecting all LifeType versions up to 1.1.5 (including 1.2 beta1). Thanks to oscar the fix was available within minutes and published today.

Heise Security Germany thankfully picked up our notification e-mail and released an news article as well. (thanks)

Oh well, of course all the blogs I maintain are up-to-date by now. :)

Update: Heise Security UK released an announcement, too.