Monday, September 27, 2010

Swiki localhost for AniAniWeb as a personal home page.

AniAniWeb strikes me as a natural evolution of WikiWikiWeb.

But as a personal homepage, the Squeak Smalltalkers seem not to have tested on a mere netbook which is not itself running an SMTP mail server.

The reason that I note this is that setting up this Wiki as a home page requires that you simply login as 'admin' with a password  of 'password'.  Create your wiki.  But now try to use that swiki (read: edit those pages!)

The packagers did not realize that to edit, you must login, but to login you must be a user and that you can only become a user through responding to an e-mail with an e-mail.  But this is localhost on a netbook.  Ahem.

It would all be easy if they had admin:password as the values for a default user in a default XML file.  And that is in fact the solution that I offer here: place a file named 1.xml in the users folder of the default folder.

It is charming to  observe that for starters almost any garbage sufficed, because the swiki will attempt to re-write the file.  If sufficed to find which file placed where would cause the swiki to fail. And browsing the Smalltalk code helped. This is usually not a sign of secure software!  Without going through the amusing details, here is what will suffice:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<user name="admin">
<settings>
<s name="password" type="text">password</s>
<s name="address" type="text">yourname@yourmail.com</s>
<s name="sendAlerts" type="boolean">false</s>
<s name="showModified" type="boolean">true</s>
</settings>
</user>
Note that mail alerts are turned off, so the required email can be bogus.

N.B. do not save the file with a BOM (on Windows set the file's encoding using an editor such as Notepad++)

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Linux Curl

If you try the logiquewerks.com Curl pages from the aule-browser.com home page while on a linux desktop, here is a tip:
after you start, if a Curl Control Panel widget is cluttering your pane of active desktop applications, then right-click that Curl Control Panel 'button' and select an option to move it to some other workspace.  That will leave the Curl Control Panel over on the comparable pane of that alternate workspace.  
The Curl Runtime Engine (RTE) will still be running, but the widget will not be cluttering your pane of active window buttons on the parent window of your preferred or current workspace.

This sort of annoyance may be gone in Curl 8.0 (I hope.)  Even in Microsoft Windows, it should have been an option, not an imposed feature.  In some ways it makes telephone support of users easier, as in: "Do you see your Curl icon on your ..."

Friday, September 17, 2010

desktop clutter

One of the best features of a recent Firefox browser is the Prism plugin.

Prism can be used stand-alone to create icons on your desktop which are just a favourite web page.  That page opens almost as if it were an application.

The Firefox plugin for Prism adds a menu item to Firefox so that any useful page can be saved to your desktop as a Prism quasi-application.

But this has limitations.  Take Qtask.com for instance.

Back when I was doing UI's for Win32, I learned to set my Windows application default for backgrounds to non-white: I use a mossy-kind of olive drab.  This color shows up in the background of any application which neglects to offer a default background or a background choice.  The qtask.com web site is like that, so I use a user script in my Opera browser and a GreaseMonkey script in Firefox to flip that background to a pleasant "linen" color with
document.body.style.backgroundColor = "linen";
Easy.

When the web page is "sent" to the desktop, the user script option is lost: Prism's virtue is in being a minimalist browser - more a vassel or varlet than a butler or person-Friday.

But even if you could still run your own script to set a desktop web page to your own liking, the end result is not a home but a midden: desktop clutter and a hades of folders within folders.

This is what brings me to evolving Aule: the changes are to what is to count as my entry point, my aule, or your portal or her mashup.

Services purporting to offer home web pages seem to always fall short here: Yahoo's My Yahoo is one of the worst.

A bit of client-side persistent data is likely as not also not the answer: I want my "home page" to be available from my travelling netbook, my mobile and my sedentary PC.

So what would a browser of prospective entry points - aules - be like?

It would know how to preserve my preferred entry points and my privacy - as any private entry to a home should do.

My first set starts with the coming release from beta of Tcl 8.6 and TclOO for Tcl/Tk.  I have started by revising the link to a Tcl aule at logiquewerks.com.

Over the coming days and weeks the aules for Tcl, Ruby, remote astronomy, Fredericton, poets and such will offer a default HTML entry, a scripted entry and three Curl options - one being a browser widget on Windows IE, one a desktop app and one as a Curl applet in most any browser on most any platform.

There are a few Curl open-source projects that will facilitate building a web page that will help a user arrive at an entry point other than a browser "home page".  Some will want a 3-D aule with video and audio and some will want bread-crumbs that persist and some will want side-bars and gadgets.

In some ways this is also where IE 9 on Vista and Win7 is headed - but that is no help when I head out the door with my linux netbook or just my iTouch.

And in time it should lead to the demise of this blog as it, too, is in the wrong place and in the wrong format and does not show me what I need to know (a comment has arrived or a link has gone stale.)

My "home page" should be my entry point - simple, clear, visible and on my path.  And maybe more cluttered on a Saturday morning but elegant before midnight.  This is do-able.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Here You Have

The news reports that the "here you have" virus brought down servers at both NASA and Comcast should have IT managers looking at why employees have open access to web mail in their workplace web browser.

The aule-browser page on restricted email access begins at a logiquewerks.com page because open access to web mail is often also an open exit for confidential corporate content.

Given that Comcast's own customers run a variety of web browsers, there is no good reason for Comcast to use anything other than their own custom employees-only browser in-house.

Employees tasked with validating customer issues with generic web browsers on the open internet never need to perform those tasks while on the corporate intranet or to run on hardware or an OS which accepts user USB memory sticks as valid storage devices.  The helpdesk practice of using one PC for both internal tasks and external web validation involves a failure to invest in security.  In the early days of PC computing this was not the case in large corporations where 3270 terminals were still in use.  Having participated in the introduction of 3270 emulation with early departmental networking, I remember this situation very clearly.

Today an astute employee running Firefox or Opera as their corporate browser can use "user scripts" very effectively to mask his or her activity from the sight of any cubicle visitor so a casual management approach of "keeping an eye" on your staff will not suffice.

The shibboleth of "web-enabled" should never have meant the expensive choice of allowing free entry across "free" web browsers and "free" web mail.  That cost has been far too high for too long.