In my experience customizing and deploying CMSs for clients, 99% of folks want a WYSIWYG editor, for good or ill. Usually good.

I’ve customized the FCKEditor for various projects, and I like:

• the way it uses “connectors” to allow for the integration of the WYSIWYG with in-site assets / resources and file uploads,
• that it generates clean HTML for the flexibility the WYSIWYG provides,
• and it’s good at not molesting any custom HTML you throw in.

So I’ve made a Radiant FCKEditor extension and put it on github.

See the readme for install instructions, requirements and other crap.

Features

• In-WYSIWYG file uploads and image placement,
• Spellchecking – provided aspell is installed,
• Radius-tag awareness – I did my best to tell FCKEditor to leave radius tags alone, even customizing the tags it should ignore at the PageType level,
• Works everywhere FCKEditor does,
• Implemented as a “filter”, allowing you to manage arbitrary numbers of page parts with it,
• You can dynamically add / remove it from page parts as you see fit.

The Future

• Create an admin tab to allow for editor toolbar customization,
• Integrate the link browser to allow for dirt-simple in-site linking,
• Offer optional integration with the page_attachments plugin for more logical file organization.

Get involved

Really! Drop me a line – dan @ endpoint dot com to discuss your ideas or make a fork, push your changes and send me a pull request. All reasonable offers accepted!

I have no idea if there’s a term to describe this kind of navigation, but I’ll use “flexmenu” as it’s what the excellent WebGUI CMS calls them, implemented via nested ul / li tags.

I like this method of site navigation as it gives a user the ability to see the entirety of the site along with the ability to zoom in / out easily and bounce between sub-sections.

As you drill down into the page hierarchy, the siblings of each page stay open. I’ll try to illustrate:

At the root, where “1” is the root.

1.1
1.2 <-- User clicks this
1.3
1.4

Next:

1.1
1.2
  1.2.1
  1.2.2
  1.2.3 <-- User clicks this
  1.2.4
  1.2.5
1.3
1.4

That opens up.

1.1
1.2
  1.2.1
  1.2.2
  1.2.3
    1.2.3.1 <-- leaf node
    1.2.3.2 <-- leaf node
    1.2.3.3 <-- leaf node
  1.2.4
  1.2.5
1.3
1.4

User clicks a completely separate part of the tree, and the 1.2 branch closes.

1.1
1.2
1.3 <-- User clicks here
  1.3.1
  1.3.2
  1.3.3
1.4

This is implemented via two snippets- a container and a recursive snippet for each node:

Container Snippet

 <r:if_parent>
 <div id="left-column-nav">
 <r:find url="/">
   <ul>
     <r:snippet name="menu-line" />
   </ul>
 </r:find>
 </div>
 </r:if_parent>

Recursive Snippet, named “menu-line”

 <r:children:each>
   <li<r:if_self> class="active"</r:if_self>><r:link />
       <r:if_ancestor_or_self>
         <r:if_children>
           <ul>
             <r:snippet name="menu-line" />
           </ul>
         </r:if_children>
       </r:if_ancestor_or_self>
   </li>  
 </r:children:each>

To use an example from a real site, when at the page ”/about/people/”, this navigation menu will yield HTML similar to:

<div id="left-column-nav">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="/about/">About</a>
      <ul>
        <li><a href="/about/goals/">Goals</a></li>  
        <li><a href="/about/history/">History</a></li>  
        <li><a href="/about/mission/">Mission</a></li>  
        <li class="active"><a href="/about/people/">People</a>
          <ul>
            <li><a href="/about/people/executive-committee-members/">Executive Committee Members</a></li>  
            <li><a href="/about/people/other-committees/">Other Committees</a></li>  
          </ul>
        </li>  
      </ul>
    </li>  
    <li><a href="/news/">News</a></li>  
    <li><a href="/programs/">Programs</a></li>  
    <li><a href="/publications/">Publications</a></li>  
    <li><a href="/resources/">Resources</a></li>  
    <li><a href="/morville-house/">Morville House</a></li>  
  </ul>
</div>

Nicely nested and easily styled via CSS.

No. Not with that processed “cheese food” crap. “Easy” as in “not difficult”.

Ingredients

• 1 cup flour. I prefer King Arthur White Whole Wheat
• 2 cups shredded firm cheese – sharp cheddar is a good choice
• 1 stick softened butter
• 2 tsp baking powder
• Dash salt
• 1/4 tsp cayenne
• 1/2 tsp mustard powder
• 1/4 tsp finely ground black pepper
• 1/2 tsp rosemary

Process

Preheat your oven to 375. Mix everything together in a mixing bowl. Knead together until dough is smooth. It’ll be similar to sugar cookie dough.

Form into bite-sized pieces and place on an ungreased cookie sheet – forming the dough by pressing an amount about the size of a cherry tomato between your palms works well. Optionally – make an X in the flattened balls with a pastry cutter.

Bake 12 to 15 minutes until just starting to brown at the edges. Transfer to a rack to cool. Makes 2 to 3 dozen.

Notes

If you get the timing right, these’ll be slightly chewy and crispy. Incredible.

Do whatever you want with the herbs – this is just a combo I happen to like. I think cayenne and mustard powder are an excellent complement to sharp cheeses. There’s no rule about the cheese, either. Any strong-flavored cheese that can be grated would work fine.

These crackers are an excellent way to use up the odds-and-ends that seem to collect in the cheese drawer.

TrendMicro is suing BarracudaNetworks over the incredibly novel idea of scanning email for viruses (via the excellent open-source ClamAV ) on an SMTP server. To me, this is akin to suing someone for locking their doors at night. I mean, who could’ve ever thunk to scan email before it hits mailboxes? Unpossible.

Sigh. Add me to the list of sysadmins that think TrendMicro sucks and doesn’t deserve your money.

• Case: Antec NSK2480, 380W PS
• Motherboard: ASUS M2NPV-VM AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 MicroATX
• Wireless Card: SMC SMCWPCIT-G PCI V2.2 (5V/3.3V) Wireless Adapter – Retail
• HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3400620A 400GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive – OEM
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 LE-1620 2.4GHz Socket AM2 45W Single-Core Processor Model
• Capture Card: Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350
• DVD: ASUS 18X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black PATA Model DRW-1814BL
• Memory: Crucial 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667

Synopsis

This hardware works excellently right out of the box with Knoppmyth – part of the reason is that I did my homework beforehand. Everything was purchased at NewEgg and arrived promptly and worked perfectly. I found this mix of hardware to be an excellent place to start if you’re looking to build a MythTV PVR. Total cost was a hair under $600, with shipping.

To go through each piece:

The Case – Antec NSK2480

It’s bigger than I thought – about the size of a component stereo tuner. NewEgg has the size wrong.

It’s quality stuff. Good fit and finish, easy to work with, quality fans and a quiet power supply.

The Motherboard – ASUS M2NPV-VM

More features than you can shake a stick at, including:

• Built-in nVidia graphics,
• Many video-out options,
• Paravirtualization support,
• Onboard LAN,
• SATA RAID.

Everything worked fine, and I’m using the proprietary nVidia drivers. The heavy emphasis on multimedia options (and the microATX form factor) makes this an excellent PVR chassis.

Wireless Card – SMC

The SMC has an Atheros chipset and is supported directly in recent linux kernels. I had to use wpa_supplicant to get WPA encrypted wireless connections working.

HDD – Seagate Barracuda 400GB Ultra ATA100

I screwed up and bought an IDE drive – woops. No big deal – it’s still plenty fast enough for recording live TV.

Processor – Athlon 64 LE-1620

This is a low power single core AMD 64-bit chip. I find myself doing more post-processing of video than I thought I would, so if I had it to do again I’d probably get a faster dual-core chip. BUT – this machine idles at 64 watts, so I should save some scratch on electricity in the long haul.

Capture Card – PVR-350

Excellent capture quality – but I had much trouble with the TV-out. It’d work fine for a few hours – then I’d lose red output and everyone would look like a smurf until I rebooted.

So I just started using the TV-out provided by the motherboard – and my problems disappeared. Were I to do it again, I’d either buy two of the cheaper PVR-150s or the PVR-500 to get dual tuners.

A plus – the remote is high quality and works perfectly via lirc. Load is very low during video capture because of the PVR-350’s hardware MPEG decoder.

DVD – ASUS 18x DVD±R Burner

Not much to say – works fine and is darned quiet.

Memory – Crucial 1GB DDR2 667

This is plenty of RAM – after a month it essentially never hits the swap file.

Things I’d do differently

I alluded to some of this above, but:

• I’d get two cheaper PVR-150s or the more expensive PVR-500. TV-out on the PVR-350 was buggy for me, has a low maximum resolution and is handled admirably by the motherboard. More than once I’ve wanted to watch live TV while recording – but I’ve found as my library has increased this happens less often.
• I MIGHT get a faster dual-core AMD processor. It’s not a problem and I’m patient, but for an hour-long show the post-processing for commercial detection and transcoding takes about an hour. Slow, but tolerable.
• You can’t have enough HDD space. I’d get a larger hard drive.
• I would use a standard Debian Etch install instead of Knoppmyth. Now that the system is working the way I want, I’ve realized that Knoppmyth really didn’t do anything I couldn’t have, and I may have saved some time starting with Debian Etch proper. But – if you’re not a Debian zealot like myself, you really can’t go wrong with Knoppmyth.

Notes

I transcode video after recording, shrinking it to about 60% of its original size. I can store 14+ days of TV. ARMAGEDDON, HERE I COME!

I switched the default desktop from XFCE (or whatever it was) to my currently preferred KDE – I’ve got plenty of RAM, and I wanted to use Amarok to stream my music collection from my OpenBSD firewall/router/home server. Sound is piped out through my (somewhat old) component stereo and is excellent.

I do not know what I did before commercial auto-skip. I cannot stand watching TV now without it. Were MythTV made of the blood of innocents, I’d still use it because of commercial auto-skip.

This system would serve as an excellent chassis for pretty much any MythTV system – it’s got tons of room, it’s very quiet and the motherboard gives you a ton of connection options – with excellent linux support (proprietary drivers aside).

When I record, transcode and watch TV at the same time, load averages around 1. Very impressive.

Currently I have standard cable. My next upgrades will be a HD Tuner and HD cable – along with a much bigger HDD and a filesystem managed via LVM.

I am ridiculously happy with this system – it’s changed how I watch TV, listen to music and is worth every penny. I cannot say enough good things about it – and because of prudent hardware choices it was quite easy to set up.

If you’re looking to create a MythTV system, this’d be a great place to start.

Nice phone. I’ve had it a few weeks since my Treo 600 gave up the ghost. There’s no way in hell I was going to spring for the derivative rip-off that is the IPhone (more on that), and another Treo would just be overkill for me.

So this $99, feature-packed number caught my eye.

The highlights:

• FM transmitter,
• MicroSD, up to 4GB according to the docs,
• Plays WMA, mp3 and a couple other formats,
• Includes a stereo headphone adapter,
• Built-in camera / camcorder,
• Java,
• GPS,
• External ipod-like controls,
• Speakerphone

And a slew of other crap that you can find out about at the end of a google search.

The good

• The FM transmitter is quite nice,
• Music sounds great. I’ve got a bunch of MP3/ogg players and this sounds as good as any of them on quality headphones,
• The phone feels solid and looks great,
• The external controls are quite handy,
• The included mini-stereo headphone adapters are a nice touch,
• Flexibility for transferring music and photos – you can pop the microSD card into your computer with an adapter or use the supplied USB cable. With the cable, the phone was recognized on my Debian Etch system with a vfat filesystem and transfers worked perfectly.
• Cheap.

The bad

• It comes with an insultingly small 64 meg microSD card – money grubbing bastards. What is this, 1998?
• No ogg support.

It’s probably hard to beat this phone as far as the features/value ratio and, most importantly, it’s a damn good phone.

So we provide really, really good MX-proxy based spamfiltering services at work via exim , clamav , spamassassin and a slew of other open-source tools and DNSRBLs.

Our system:

• Requires no training,
• Has no black holes for messages to fall into,
• Notifies the rare false positive when we don’t accept a message,
• Sends no “backscatter”,
• and is stupidly accurate.

One of the most basic tests is to confirm whether or not a recipient is valid before filtering email for them – after all, why scan email that’ll never get delivered? This test involves a mini-SMTP transaction from our spamfilters to the target server, asking “does this email address exist?”

Here’s where Exchange’s lameness comes in – it accepts email for all recipients, valid or not by default, bouncing them later on if they don’t exist. That makes it impossible to reject emails to invalid recipients at SMTP time from the spamfilters. And it means your stupid Exchange server is left vulnerable to backscatter should a spammer chooses to spoof sending from your domain.

No wonder Exchange message stores get piggishly large so quickly.

Fortunately, you can disable this by turning on “recipient filtering” in Exchange 2003. Please do. Why accept email you’re never going to deliver?

Feeling like your basement isn’t creepy enough? Looking for a place to stash your victims? Build a catacombs under your basement.

The best part about this article are the questions it leaves unanswered… such as “Where do I find the minions to populate my catacombs?” and “Should I coat the punji sticks with feces or not?”

This is an easy, quick and spicy entree I devised when the fridge was looking sparse.

• 1 can undrained black beans,
• 1 medium onion diced,
• 4 cloves garlic,
• 1 tsp oregano,
• 1/2 tsp basil,
• 1 bay leaf,
• 1/2 tsp cumin,
• 1/4 to 1/3 of a 7 oz. can chipotle peppers in adobo sauce,
• 1 bullion cube – I prefer chicken,
• Smidge of tomato paste,
• Olive Oil,
• Pepper to taste.

Saute the onion in the olive oil until translucent. Throw in the garlic for a couple minutes, then follow with the undrained beans and everything else.

Simmer over medium heat for around 30 minutes or to desired consistency, stirring frequently. Serve over rice.

Notes

This is relatively spicy – increase or decrease the chipotle peppers to taste. It doesn’t really matter how large of a can of beans you use (not a #10 can, obviously) – the other stuff will stretch out pretty well.

An oldie but goodie. . .

If you’ve ever watched Norton SpeedDisk while it’s defragmenting a drive: this is for you. Imagine satisfying “blocks go by and change color in patterns” animations combined with one of the world’s best classical pieces- and you’ve got this.

On September 29th, I got some time away during a wedding weekend in Denver to do a tour of the Wynkoop Brewery, “Denver’s first brewpub.”

Craig and Waldo (two junior brewers) were kind enough to give my daughter Arden and myself a look around the inner workings of the brewery. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera with me. . . so no pictures.

First impressions – the food is excellent – as is the beer. I had an IPA, a pilsner and and amber, I believe. All of them impressed me greatly. Unfortunately I had these libations right before the tour – so perhaps I didn’t pick up all the details I could’ve. Hey – sometimes you have a choice between documenting or enjoying an experience.

They have a 30 barrel system – with very little automation. As Craig said “we’re basically homebrewing on a 30 barrel scale.” A system tipped towards manual management didn’t hurt the quality of their beers a bit.

They use old milk tanks for their mash tuns, boiling kettles and fermenters. Their boiling kettles are in the same room as their fermenters – so they have real problems with heat control. Apparently all the relevant tanks have glycol systems installed.

Craig and Waldo both started as homebrewers. The tour was more of a conversation than a one-way “this is how we do it” kinda thing. The quality and openness of the tour reflected very nicely on the laid-back atmosphere of the brewpub.

I don’t have much else to say except that the beer is excellent, the atmosphere inviting and the food a couple steps above typical brewpub fare. Absolutely worth a side trip when in the Denver area.

My first “you-tube-y” post. These are most of my favorites – except I couldn’t find a full-length “Robin Hood Daffy.” :-(

What’s Opera Doc?

Rabbit of Seville

Feed the Kitty

Bit sappier than the others.

To Itch His Own

One Froggy Evening

• 11 lbs. dry amber malt extract
• 1/2 lb. chocolate malt
• 1/2 lb. roasted barley
• 5 oz. Northern Brewer – boiling
• 2 oz. Cascade – finishing
• 1/4 tsp. Irish Moss
• 1 quart double-strength french press dark-roasted coffee in the secondary fermenter.

Bring two gallons of water up to 150 degrees. Steep grains a half hour. Remove. Add malt extract and boiling hops – boil vigorously for an hour. Be careful! This wort is very likely to boil over when you’re not looking.

Add finishing hops and Irish Moss, boil 15 more minutes. Sparge into 3 gallons of cold water, top up to 5 gallons if necessary. Primary ferment and rack to the secondary, adding the hot double-strength coffee. The temperature shouldn’t rise appreciably from the quart of coffee you add. Give it a few days in the secondary and bottle as usual. This beer can stand up to age – and I wouldn’t touch it until at least a month in the bottle.

If you don’t use hop bags, now is the time to start. Nobody wants to scoop and sparge 7 ounces of hops.

Notes

Coffee Imperial Stout. This beer was one of my entries (along with Maple Brown Ale) in the Sam Adams “LongShot” contest. I didn’t win. Sob. But both beers are well worth the effort, especially this one. Malty, smooth, a bit of a residual bitterness from the coffee and a bunch of interesting flavors. Nice. This one leaves a taste on your lips.

I used Ethiopian coffee from my client Dean’s Beans at a full city+ roast. You could probably get away with any darker-roast coffee, but do use the good stuff. You’re already spending $45+ on the malt and hops, don’t skimp on the finisher – good coffee.

I think it’s important to add the coffee to the secondary fermenter, as boiling coffee is a great way to lose a lot of the flavor notes it contains. The coffee oils probably interfere with head retention. . . but no worries. The head looked fine to me.

This is an excellent beer – I know I’ll be brewing it again.

He’s also:

• a fan of Jim Carrey,
• Being tracked by the CIA and FBI, and
• Suing David Copperfield because David’s tricks are real, and this dude holds the patent on “godly powers.” Ok – he doesn’t hold the patent yet – but he has applied for it. Pretty much the same thing, right?

Looks to me like another street theater believing paranoid. Here’s the site.

Here’s some YouTube stuff. He’s probably the least convincing god-complex paranoid I’ve seen – like he’s not even trying.

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp. butter
• 1 tbsp. olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 (28 oz.) can Italian plum tomatoes, drained, seeded, chopped
• 1 c. heavy cream
• 1/4 c. vodka
• 1/4 tsp. dried crushed red pepper
• Oregano to taste
• 1 or 2 lbs penne, bowtie, or other pasta
• Freshly grated Parmesan or Romano cheese
• Minced fresh chives
• 1/2 to 1 lb meat – or not. I suggest shrimp, lobster or scallops.

Process

Very easy, very good quick sauce that only requires two ingredients you might not always have on hand – vodka and heavy cream.

Melt butter and oil together in a heavy saucepan. Add onions, cover (to “sweat” them) and cook until translucent. Add garlic and cook 1 minute.

Add tomatoes and cook uncovered to reduce until little liquid remains – about a half hour. Fresh tomatoes are excellent – of course – just cook a little longer to reduce.

Add cream, vodka, red pepper and lightly steamed (pre-cooked) seafood. Cook only a minute or so to thicken. Salt and pepper to taste.

Put it over the pasta and garnish with chives and cheese. This makes a surprising amount of sauce. Serves 4 generously, 6 at normal portions.

Tips

• Don’t cook it longer than a minute or two after you add the cream – otherwise the cream with react with the tomatoes and “curdle.” It’ll taste fine, but it won’t look right.

• Steam your seafood so you’ve got it hot as you’re adding it to the sauce with the cream.