The Linux Action Show is back!

If you love Linux, good humour and the occasional technical rant then do I have just the medicine for you. Check out the latest Linux Action Show podcast!

I have been listening to this podcast since they released episode 4 in June of 2006 and I am addicted! So much so that I actually felt just a little sad when Bryan and Chris decided to first cut back to a bi-weekly episode format, and then later their decision to switch to a season format.

I’ve missed them, but now they are back with what they call the 8th season and it’s as good as ever. Episode 1 of series 8 has, among other things, a funny review of the new ASUS eeePC laptop.

You may be suspect, because some podcasts out there are just absolute rubbish with terrible audio and static content. This podcast, however, does not suffer the same fate. Nor is it just an oral reading of last weeks news items. This is a high quality audio recording of great entertainment value and comparable to a really good and funny radio show. You should really, really check it out. You won’t regret it.

The power of your own personal wiki

Introduction

It’s only human. Over time you are destined to forget information and recycle it with fresh knowledge. You do this unintentionally. It seems that even the latest neuron based harddrives, encapsulated inside the human brain, have a limited size capacity before information is either archived or sent to /dev/null. The logical strategy is, of course, to store the important information externally, outside the body, for future reference.

The problem domain

I try to keep up to date on a broad variety of mostly open source technology. The usual trend is to acquire an taste for something, learn enough about it to test it and form an opinion, and then forget all about it. That is, of course, unless I can use it for something immediately. In which case the information may stick if I’m lucky.

Some time back I was configuring a lot of Linux software, mostly for my own personal home use. On many occasions I would find myself in a situation where I would need to repeat a process that I knew I had performed earlier. Although Google is a good friend, I was getting frustrated with myself for wasting time acquiring knowledge only to use it once and then throw it away. I was more or less starting over, every time. My first solution was to persist the freshly gained knowledge to text files.

Prelude to the “battle”

I was quite happy with the solution for a while, but something was still wrong. The second part of the problem was becoming apparant. It wasn’t that things weren’t getting documented in some form or fashion as expected, but I was missing the necessary functionality to reclaim the information when I needed it. Plain text files only get you so far, and although easy to access from a wide variety of user interfaces, they allow for mostly simple read and write access, but not search (Yes, I am aware of grep).

On Linux, using text files is considered the normal thing to do. Most system and application configuration is stored in plain text files so at first this didn’t strike me as abnormal. However, when the number of text files started to reach double figures, together with poorly chosen file names, and grep wasn’t helping me, I concluded that the time had come to bring out the big guns.

Introducing the Wiki

I’m sure most of you know what a Wiki is, but in the event you do not, then let me introduce WikiPedia as the best evidence of a great wiki implementation. It is the largest multilingual encyclopedia available online, containing more than 2 million articles and growing. In general, a wiki is a browser-based collaborative writing environment, to which anyone may contribute without having web programming or publishing skills. It is software that is used to create and display collaborative content, usually without intervention from an administrator or editor.

I began using a personal wiki instead of text files and the success was immediate. Reading, writing, searching and categorizing the documentation was a piece of cake. I can also let others use my wiki should I choose without giving them access to my file system.

MediaWiki software – open source, of course

A lesser known fact is that WikiPedia runs on open source software, created by the WikiMedia Foundation for the WikiPedia project. It is freely available under an open source license for anyone to download and use. The software’s name is MediaWiki and is written in PHP. I will only be discussing the MediaWiki software in this blog entry.

Prerequisites and installation

The easiest way to run MediaWiki is using the Apache web server, PHP and MySQL. All are open source software and form three of the four components of the defacto LAMP software setup. You don’t need to use Linux as your operating system to run MediaWiki, but if you should choose to then your installation will be relatively easy to setup and configure. The aforementioned software packages are normally a part of most common Linux distributions or easily available from the distribution software repository, so you won’t need to download or update a thing – the OS will do it for you. I will avoid going into details on how to install Apache, PHP or MySQL for other systems since there already exists much well written documentation and tutorials for each of these packages online. Remember, Google is your friend.

Let me also add that you will need PHP version 5 or above and MySQL 4 or above. It is now also possible to use PostgreSQL as a replacement for MySQL, should you prefer. In which case you will need version 8.1 or above. You can also replace Apache and use Microsoft IIS as your web server, but surly only someone insane would want to do that…

Of course, you will also need to download the actual MediaWiki software which, as mentioned previously, is also open source. Unpack it to your Apache server document root (usually the htdocs directory) and rename the resulting directory to “wiki”. You should then be able to access the MediaWiki setup wizard from a URL of form “http://yourhost/wiki”. Follow the instructions carefully. If memory serves me correctly, you will need some basic MySQL knowledge, but the tables etc are created automatically on setup. The web server will need write access to the MediaWiki’s “config” directory to store the resulting configuration, but you will be informed should a problem present itself.

Here are two screen shots of how things should look when you start the web based installation wizard.

Has the jury reached a verdict?

Next it’s time to add some wiki content, but this blog entry is just getting too long, so let’s leave it at that for now. Make sure you call back some time later and I’ll introduce some of MediaWiki’s nifty formatting features. Adding web content has never been easier and the results look great.

Why here, why now, why not?

The short presentation

Ever since I read chapter 37 of the book “My job went to India (And all I got was this lousy book)” I have been thinking of creating my own blog. This particular chapter of the book is titled “Let your voice be heard” and contains information on how and why you should want to share your ideas with your peers online.

However, I read this particular book back in 2006. I have, since then, read many good books worth mentioning, so why now? No one good explanation comes to mind, but remembering some of the good advice given in the chapter, it states that you should get familiar with weblogs and weblog syndication before creating your own. At the time of reading the book I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the concept of blogs, but since then I decided to take the author seriously and my browser’s start page has been set to DZone ever since. I therefore consider myself an avid reader of other people’s blogs when time permits. I guess I needed the time until now to digest it all.

There is also a growing amount of quality content out there within the “blog sphere” and you have to ask yourself if there is anything you can contribute that may be of interest to others? I guess, in my case, only time will tell.

A bit on myself

So who am I? Generally I think I am considered a quiet person. That statement will probably cause a frown amongst my closer friends and family who, most likely, do not recognize me in that description at all. Professionally I have no problem giving my opinion when asked, but I never really push it publicly. I guess that part of me is about to change somewhat, and I am now taking the more pro-active approach. So what can a reader expect to find here?

Mission objective

I work as a software consultant in the Norwegian computer industry. I started my professional career back in 1998 so I am closing in on my 10 year anniversary this summer. During the past 10 years I have worked with a wide range of technology for different companies and customers. Three of my previous employers were also in the software consulting business.

I am interested in the open source community and hope to one day be in a position to work with open source code and solutions for a living. Unfortunately up to now I have yet to really succeed in combining open source software development with my day job. Today I use a lot of open source software at home and also in the workspace, although I am not associated with any particular open source project or technology. I am simply an end user of the many open source systems and components available.

In my neck of the woods, open source software products have still not managed to gain a substantial foothold in the market place, which is a shame for both developers and customers. Today I find myself behind enemy lines in primarily Microsoft occupied territory. Hopefully that will change sometime in the immediate future, and I am hoping to help lead a legion of troops in a brave outflanking maneuver to gain the upper hand over this evil empire [joke].

Technology dialysis

To cut a long story short, I started my career working with C++ and Lotus Domino servers. I didn’t really care much for Lotus Domino/Notes and could never really take part in, or understand, the unequivocal devotion for the product by it’s “fanatical” community. I guess I wasn’t convinced then and I’m still not today. I later moved on to Java in it’s many variations and forms, my focus being on both back-end integration and web/swing front-end development, sometimes running in parallel with the occasional odd Lotus Domino server or IBM WebSphere Portal server. There have been a few odd things in between, but currently I’m doing some Python development, something I have been longing to do for many years.

With this blog I am hoping to share a bit of the information, thoughts and advice I have consumed during my professional career for others to read and hopefully learn from. Maybe professionals or other interested parties with more experience than I can leave the occasional comment to supplement, support or correct my ramblings. I hope that by putting this information in writing online I can justify that the last 10 years have not been a total waste of my time.

Diagnosis in closing

You may be wondering why I started reading the aforementioned book in the first place. Well, you see, my job did in fact go to India and the advice in the book helped me through that process. At the time I was working for a large oil company, and against all the odds, they one day decided to outsource their IBM WebSphere Application Server environment to a foreign contractor. Anticipating the change I had read the book ahead of the process and felt prepared. I was at the time, working as one of the administrators for this particular environment, although I was starting to get a bit restless and needed a new challenge. I think it’s fair to say that the actual outsourcing decision did not bring me to tears. The market was booming and I knew there would be other, hopefully better, opportunities.

If you are in a similar situation today then maybe this book may serve to offer you some guidance on how to professionally deal with a tricky outsourcing situation or focus your attention on avoiding the scenario in the future. I still consider it a very good book.