Eine Besonderheit fällt auf: Wenn für den Nutzer im Open-Directory über den Arbeitsgruppenmanager verschiedene Kurznamen (Reiter »Allgemein«) für einen Nutzer vergeben wurden, werden diese im Attribut uid gespeichert. Dies führt dazu, dass der LDAP-Nutzer auf der Synology unter dem letzten Kurznamen in der Liste auftaucht. Ist der normale Nutzer-Account z.B. user1 und dessen letzte Kurzname Vorname.Nachname so taucht dieser User als Vorname.Nachname@ldap.domain.tld auf.

Wir haben die Rich Snippets ursprünglich in zwei Formaten eingeführt: Bewertungen (reviews) und Personen (people). Danach haben wir erweiterte Möglichkeiten eingeführt, um Video-Informationen auszuzeichnen und damit die Video-Suche zu verbessern. Heute freuen wir uns, mit einer weiteren Neuerung ins neue Jahr zu starten: Events (Veranstaltungen).

Das neue Format zeigt Links zu bestimmten Veranstaltungen auf der Seite, zusammen mit Datums- und Ortsangaben. Es bietet somit eine schnelle und komfortable Art, um festzustellen, ob eine Seite bestimmte Veranstaltungen enthält, an denen man möglicherweise interessiert ist.

Der ganze Blog-Eintrag: http://googlewebmastercentral-de.blogspot.com/

This guide is straight forward and shows just the required changes, a working MacPorts installation with Apache 2 is mandatory. You simply have to edit the Portfile that contains the details for mod_security.

Step-by-step explanation

1. Update your MacPorts installation by sudo port selfupdate and sudo port upgrade outdated (read this guide for more details on MacPorts selfupdate)
2. Open the portfile for mod_security and replace the content of the file with the provided code. The portfile in my installation resides in/opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/ release/ports/www/mod_security/Portfile


   
   Download the Portfile as text file
   

3. Now you may install mod_security via MacPorts using this terminal command:sudo port install mod_security

4. Open the Apache configuration file (/opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf) in a text editor and add mod_security to the list.Open a new Terminal (the Termin.app resides in /Applications/Utilities on your harddrive) window and then type the following command to open and edit the file (the sudo command is required to get write-access to this file since it is normally not writable for you user account).sudo nano /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.confNow enter your password (the same you use to log in to your Mac). Use the cursor keys to scroll down to the section for the Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) Support and copy the following line below the last LoadModule… statement (see screenshot).LoadModule security2_module modules/mod_security2.so
   

   To save and leave the Nano editor press CTRL+X and confirm with Y (for Yes) to save.

5. Reload the Apache server. The security module should now be loaded by Apache (start or restart Apache to commit changes).sudo /opt/local/etc/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.apache2/apache2.wrapper restart

(Via Golem.de.)

(Via Slashdot.)

Der Zusammenhang zwischen manuellem(!) Synchronisieren und der Notwenigkeit zum Löschen aller Titel, Filme und Fernsehsendungen erschließt sich mir nicht.

Because so many people still use the older version of Internet Explorer, many web sites have made the choice to continue supporting it (including SitePoint — where about 12% of our visitors still come to us using IE6). But is it perhaps time to ditch IE6 support and start forcing people to upgrade?

Web application developer 37signals made the decision to drop IE6 support in July (actual support for Microsoft’s last generation browser ceased on August 15). ‘IE 6 can’t provide the same web experience that modern browsers can,’ wrote 37signals of the decision. ‘Continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress.’

According to 37signals, supporting IE6 was holding them back. And 37signals isn’t alone in their dislike of IE6. In 2006, a few months before Microsoft released their last major browser, PC World magazine ranked Internet Explorer 6 as the 8th worst tech product of all time, citing its terrible track record when it comes to security.

Security is such a big issue for IE6, that one blogger recently reported that 95% of all bots accessing his site use Internet Explorer 6 as their user-agent. ‘Most blog spam comes from bots that either fake or, as a trojan, use Internet Explorer 6 of infected systems,’ he wrote, ultimately deciding to block IE6 completely to alleviate the blog spam problem.

Of course, security isn’t the only reason web developers are sour on IE6. Internet Explorer 6 is also dismal when it comes to standards compliance. So why do people continue to use it? As Nick La wrote a year ago, the reason people still use IE6 is that developers go out of their way to make web sites work in it. So most people don’t realize that IE6 isn’t a good browser.

‘We all know that IE6 is outdated and has horrible CSS rendering engine. However, most average Internet users haven’t realized that yet. Why? Because we put our hard work on it and patch the bugs by various IE hacks,’ La wrote, urging people to drop support for IE6.

A third of the Internet is a lot of people to just leave behind, though. So support for IE6 continues at most web sites, especially large ones. What we need to move us forward, however, is a bold move, not too much unlike the one Apple made in 2001 when it decided to forgo backwards compatibility when it released OS X. In order to save the Internet from IE6, perhaps we need to stop supporting it.

What do you think? Should web developers stop supporting Internet Explorer 6? Vote in our poll and then leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

(Via SitePoint Blogs.)

If we are to go forward, we must repair the standards. This is something that must be done with great care. A revision to a standard is an act of violence, just like any surgical procedure. It should only be undertaken when the likely benefit far exceeds the cost and the pain and the risk. The web is particularly troublesome because it did not anticipate the management of software updates, which is why IE5, an ancient browser, still has more users than Safari and Opera combined. Changes to the standard can put developers in a very difficult position because the benefits to users of some browsers become the seeds of failure for the users of others. Developers must manage this gulf, and it is not easy. Developers are not well served by new standards that make their jobs even harder.

I think it is instructive to look at two approaches to managing innovation within a standards based system, one that I view as a success, and the other not so much. JavaScript was a promising but half-baked language that was irresponsibly rushed to market and then irresponsibly cast into a standard. That standard is called ECMAScript to avoid a trademark dispute. That standard was last revised in 1999.

It is clear that the language needs to be updated, but TC39 (the committee that is responsible for drafting a new standard) could not reach consensus on how to do it, so it split into two groups, each producing its own proposal. This was a good thing in that competition is a healthy thing, and I believe that competition inspired improvements to both proposals. This was also a bad thing because no standards organization can adopt two proposal for the same standard. Without consensus, both proposals must fail.

On one side there was the proposal called ES4. It was unfortunate that it adopted that name because it strongly suggested that it was destined to be the Fourth Edition of ECMAScript, a fate that was not certain. The project was very open to new ideas and features, adopting a porkbarrel attitude that was almost Congressional in its expansiveness. Lots of good ideas were included without an adequate analysis of the language as a whole system. As a result, many overlapping features were adopted which would have significantly increased to complexity of the language.

ES4 was so large and so innovative that there were doubts about whether it could be successfully specified and implemented. More worrisome, there was no experience with the language itself. Would the interaction of features cause unintended problems as we saw in ES1 and ES3? The schedule for ES4 required that the standard be put in place and adopted by the browser makers before that question could be answered. This is a problem because once a bug is inserted into a standard, it can be extremely difficult to remove it. All of the features, considered individually, were attractive. But taken as a whole, the language was a mess.

On the other side was a proposal called ES3.1. Its name indicated a less ambitious proposal, being a smaller increment over the current Third Edition. This project was intended to repair as many of the problems with the language as possible while minimizing the pain of disruption. New syntax was considered only when it was already implemented and proven in at least three of the four major browsers. Feature selection tended to favor necessary improvements over desirable improvements.

ES3.1 was more minimal in approach. The set of feature interactions was much smaller and much easier to reason about. ES3.1 is likely to complete its specification and will be the candidate for the Fourth Edition.

ES4 had a large head start (by as much as seven years by some estimates), but was unable to meet its deadlines. Ultimately, the project fell apart when some of the key members left.

Some of the features that were in ES4 were reasonable, so a new project, called Harmony, is starting which will look at adapting the best of ES4 on top of ES3.1. The success of this project will depend on the ability of TC39 to do a better job of managing the tradeoffs between innovation and stability, and adopting a discipline for managing complexity. Simplicity should be highly valued in a standard. Simplicity cannot be added. Instead, complexity must be removed.

It turns out that standard bodies are not good places to innovate. That’s what laboratories and startups are for. Standards must be drafted by consensus Standards must be free of controversy. If a feature is too murky to produce a consensus, then it should not be a candidate for standardization. It is for a good reason that ‘design by committee’ is a pejorative. Standards bodies should not be in the business of design. They should stick to careful specification, which is important and difficult work.

I see similar stories in HTML5. The early work of WHATWG in documenting the undocumented behavior of HTML was brilliant. It went off the rails when people started to just make new stuff up. There is way too much controversy in HTML5. I would like to see a complete reset with a stronger set of design rules. Things can be much worse than the way things currently are. Having smart people with good intentions is necessary but not sufficient for making good standards.

(Via Yahoo! User Interface Blog.)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today released the 1.0 version of their Mobile Web Best Practices document. The guidelines offer mobile web developers a consistent set of best practices to apply when creating content for consumption on mobile devices. ‘The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from [mobile web] devices,’ according to the W3C.

In Japan, there are already more mobile web users than PC users, and the rest of the world is catching up. Jupiter Research expects that mobile Web 2.0 revenues will hit $22.4 billion by 2014, with the biggest growth areas in mobile social networking and user generated content.

Developing content across such a wide array of mobile devices and creating a consistent and enjoyable user experience is not an easy task. The W3C hopes that its new mobile best practices guidelines will make it easier for developers to create content and applications for cell phones and other mobile devices.

‘Mobile Web content developers now have stable guidelines and maturing tools to help them create a better mobile Web experience,’ said Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, W3C Mobile Web Activity Lead in a press release. ‘In support of the W3C mission of building One Web, we want to support the developer community by providing tools to enable a great mobile Web user experience.’

The W3C also announced the release of the XHTML Basic 1.1 Recommendation today as the preferred markup language for the best practices document. ‘Until today, content developers faced an additional challenge: a variety of mobile markup languages to choose from,’ said the W3C. ‘With the publication of the XHTML Basic 1.1 Recommendation today, the preferred format specification of the Best Practices, there is now a full convergence in mobile markup languages, including those developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).’”

(Via SitePoint Blogs.)

Viele Features, die in den letzten Jahren auf Druck von MySQL-Nutzern aus Unternehmen hinzukamen, fehlen in Drizzle: Stored Procedures, Trigger, Prepared Statements und Views. Auch der Query Cache fällt weg; er beschleunigt das wiederholte Ausführen derselben SQL-Befehle. Möglicherweise würden in Zukunft einige dieser Funktionen wieder eingeführt, es sei jedoch keine vollständige Kompatibilität mit MySQL geplant. Wichtiger sei es, Drizzle als echtes Open-Source-Projekt zu betreiben. Die Entwickler wollen wann immer möglich freie Bibliotheken benutzen; als Datenbank-Engine soll das transaktionsfähige InnoDB zum Einsatz kommen.

MySQL verharrt seit Längerem bei der Versionsnummer 5.0, die 2005 als Produktionsversion erschien. Seit zweieinhalb Jahren arbeiten die Entwickler an dem Nachfolger 5.1, der bislang wegen zahlreicher Fehler nicht zum Produktionseinsatz freigegeben ist. Vor Kurzem rief der Chef-Entwickler Monty Widenius MySQL-Anwender zur Hilfe bei der Fehlersuche auf. Parallel zur Arbeit an 5.1 verläuft seit Mitte letzten Jahres die an Version 6, die die selbstentwickelte transaktionsfähige Storage-Engine Falcon enthält. Deren Chef-Architekt Jim Starkey hat das Projekt jedoch vor Kurzem verlassen.

Bislang gibt es keine produktionsreife Version von Drizzle. Interessenten können sich den Code von Launchpad herunterladen. Zu den Entwicklern gehören neben Brian Aker Zak Greant, Monty Taylor und Jay Pipes. “Drizzle” ist das englische Wort für Nieselregen, der besonders häufig in Akers Heimatstadt Seattle auftreten soll.

Via heise online

Yesterday we talked about favorite bash features (on the ##textmate IRC channel). I figured it was worth posting mine to this blog, they mostly revolve around history, hence the title.

Setup

My shell history collects a lot of complex command invocations which take time to figure out. To ensure that I have access to them at a later time, I have the following 3 lines in my bash init:

export HISTCONTROL=erasedups
export HISTSIZE=10000
shopt -s histappend

The first one will remove duplicates from the history (when a new item is added). For example if you switch between running make and ./a.out in a shell, you may later find that the last 100 or so history items is a mix of these two commands. Not very useful.

The second one increase the history size. With duplicates erased, the history already holds a lot more actual information, but I still like to increase the default size of only 1,000 items.

The third line ensures that when you exit a shell, the history from that session is appended to ~/.bash_history. Without this, you might very well lose the history of entire sessions (rather weird that this is not enabled by default).

History Searching

Now that I have my history preserved nicely in ~/.bash_history there are a few ways to search it.

Using Grep

The most crude is grep. You can do:

history|grep iptables

For me (on this particular Linux server) I get:

4599  iptables -N http-block
4600  iptables -A http-block -s 58.60.43.196 -j DROP
4601  iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j http-block
4602  iptables -L http-block
4603  iptables-save -c
4604  history|grep iptables

I do this often enough to have an alias for history (which is just h).

From the output I can either copy/paste the stuff I want, or repeat a given history event. You’ll notice that each history event has a number, you can repeat e.g. event number 4603 simply by running:

!4603

I will write a bit more about referencing history events in History Expansion.

Prefix Searching

Similar to how you can press arrow up for the previous history event, there is a function you can invoke for the previous history event with the same prefix as what is to the left of the insertion point.

This function is called history-search-backward and by default does not have a key equivalent. So to actually reach this function, I have the following in ~/.inputrc (or /etc/inputrc when I control the full system):

'\ep': history-search-backward

This places the function on ⎋P (escape P). So if I want to repeat the iptables-save -c history event we found in previous section, all I do is type ipt and hit ⎋P. If it finds a later event with the same prefix, hit ⎋P again to go further back.

This functionality is offered by the readline library, so if you setup this key, you have access to prefix searching in all commands which use this library.

Incremental Search

It is possible to press ⌃R to do an incremental (interactive) search of the history.

Personally I am not a big fan of this feature, so I will leave it at that :)

Update: The reason I dislike ⌃R is both because the interactive stuff just seems to get in the way (when ⎋P is what I need 99% of the time) and because it fails in cases where I ‘switch shell’, for example I may do: ssh mm press return, then instantly type: f⎋P and again hit return (to execute free -m on the server called mm). I enter this before the connection to the server has been fully established, and here ⌃R would have been taken by the local shell, but it is the shell history at the server I want to search.

History Expansion

History Expansion was what we did above when we ran !4603. It is a DSL for referencing history events and optionally run transformations on these.

Anyone interested in this should run man bash and search for History Expansion, but just to give you a feel for what it is, I will reference a subset of the manual and provide a few examples.

Event Designators

First, an event designator starts with ! and then the event we want to reference. This can be:

«n»      Reference event number «n».
-«n»     Go «n» events back.
!        Last line (this is the default).
#        Current line.
«text»   Last event starting with «text».
?«text»  Last event containing «text».

So if we want to re-run our iptables-save -c we can do: !ipt.

What’s more useful though is to use history references as part of larger commands.

For example take this example:

% which ruby
/usr/bin/ruby
% ls -l $(!!)
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  76 30 Oct  2007 /usr/bin/ruby -> ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/bin/ruby

Or something like:

% make some_target
(no errors)
% path/to/target some arguments
(no errors)
% !-2 && !-1

Word Designators

In the previous section we referenced entire history events. It is possible to reference just a subset of a history event by appending a : to the event designator and then the word of interest, the two most useful are:

«n»      Reference the «n»’th word.
$        Reference the last word.

So for example we can do:

% mkdir -p /path/to/our/www-files
(no errors)
% chown www:www !$
(no errors)

Here we reference last word of last line. We can also reference stuff on the same line, e.g.:

% cp /path/to/important/file !#:1_backup

To reference the last word of last line one can also press ⎋_ which will immediately insert that word.

Modifiers

To make history substitution even more useful (and harder to remember), one can also add a modifier to the event designator.

The most useful modifiers are in my experience :h and :t, these are head and tail respectively or better know as dirname and basename.

An example could be:

% ls -l /path/to/some/file
(listing of file)
% cd !$:h
(change directory to that of file)

Brace Expansion

Somewhat related to the backup example where we reference the first argument as !#:1 and append _backup to this, another approach is bracket expansion.

Anywhere on a command line, one can write {a,b,c} which will expand to the 3 words a, b, and c. If we include a prefix/suffix, that will be part of each of the expanded words. We can also leave the word in the braces empty, and have it expand to just the prefix/suffix, so for example we can do:

% cp /path/to/important/file{,_backup}

This is functionally equivalent to:

% cp /path/to/important/file !#:1_backup

But lack of hardcoded word number is IMO an improvement.

”

(Via TextMate Blog.)

Auf über 80 Seiten gehen namhafte Autoren aus Wissenschaft und Praxis der Frage nach, wie sich unser Lebensstil und unsere Arbeitswelt in Punkto Kooperation, Interaktion und Partizipation in der digitalen Zukunft entwickeln werden.

Die informative und zugleich interessant gestaltete Publikation wird kostenlos zum Download angeboten und ist zudem als Printversion für eine Schutzgebühr von 15 Euro erwerbbar. Sie eignet sich als Einstieg in das Thema für interessierte Privatpersonen und Unternehmen als Überblick über Möglichkeiten, die das Web 2.0 bietet.

http://www.digital-lifestyle.mfg-innovation.de/?page_id=34

Die Erstellung von Formularen für eine Webseite bleibt in aller Regel entsprechend geschulten Entwicklern vorbehalten. Die optische Gestaltung stellt für viele Publisher keine große Hürde dar, bei der Programmierung der Formulare sieht das schon anders aus. Hier sind spezielle Kenntnisse gefragt, um die Formulareingaben in einer Datenbank speichern oder per E-Mail versenden zu können.

Mit der Web Form Factory (WFF) gibt es jetzt eine Open-Source-Lösung zur Erstellung von Formularen für das Web. Die einfach zu bedienende Web-Applikation untersucht eine selbst erstellte HTML-Datei auf verwendete Eingabetypen wie Textfelder, Drop-Down-Listen, Checkboxen sowie Radio-Buttons und generiert daraus automatisch ein an PHP-gebundenes HTML-Formular. Das Ergebnis lässt sich dann in Form einer Zip-Datei herunterladen, auspacken und in die eigene Webseite integrieren.

WFF befindet sich derzeit im Beta-Stadium. Momentan wird nur die Anbindung von HTML-Dateien an PHP (wahlweise 4, 5 oder 5.1) unterstützt, was sich aber in naher Zukunft ändern soll. Außerdem ist die Erstellung eines E-Mail-Formulars möglich, bei dem die erhobenen Daten nicht in eine Datenbank fließen, sondern an eine E-Mail-Adresse geschickt werden.

Eine Hilfestellung für die Arbeit mit WFF inklusive der Erstellung der HTML-Datei bietet ein Einführungsvideo im Tutorial-Bereich.

via t3n

(Via Golem.de.)

(Via Golem.de.)

Egal, wo ein Websurfer auf Videotauschportalen einen Film anklickt – meist wird die Bewegtbilddatei als “Flash Video” abgespielt. Das FLV-Format hat sich in kurzer Zeit zum Standard entwickelt und Videobastler haben meist leichtes Spiel, wenn sie verschiedene Dateien zu einer Komposition zusammenmixen wollen.

Nun möchte auch Adobe, der Anbieter der Flash-Technologie, ein Wörtchen bei der Nutzung von “Flash Video” mitreden. Die Software-Schmiede wird mit der neuen Version 9 ihres Flash Players ein digitales Rechtemanagement (DRM) einführen, welches die Kommunikation zwischen Server und Flashplayer verschlüsseln und alternative Player aussperren kann.

Für Anwender könnte die Einführung von DRM für Flash bedeuten, dass Schluss wäre mit dem beliebten Remixen von Flash-Filmen. Einzige Ausnahme: Man ist bereit, den Kopierschutz zu knacken oder anderweitig zu umgehen – und das gilt als Straftat.

(Via SPIEGEL Online)

Earlier this year, I posted here to introduce Google Desktop for Mac OS X. Today, on behalf of my team, I’m happy to unveil the latest feature of Desktop: Google Gadgets for Mac OS X Beta.

This feature brings hundreds of existing Google Gadgets to Dashboard. You can add fun gadgets (such as bowling, virtual flower pot, or YouTube), useful gadgets (weather maps, driving directions, and news), and others that offer daily wisdom for the ages (Confucius, horoscopes, and even a joke of the day!). These gadgets look and behave just like any other Dashboard widget, so you don’t have to learn anything new.

With hundreds of gadgets available and more being added every week, you might wonder how to get started. No problem! The Google Gadgets application is your one-stop shop for all available gadgets, complete with search to quickly find what you’re looking for. If you’re concerned you might miss out on new gadgets as they come along, don’t be. The Google Gadgets application regularly updates itself so the list of available gadgets is never out of date.

You can download the new software at http://desktop.google.com/mac/.

The best part is that anyone can create a gadget. If you are interested in developing your own Google Gadget, check out the Desktop Gadget API homepage. There you’ll see how to create a cross-platform gadget that runs on both Mac OS X and Windows. If you’re already a gadget developer, download the Beta today to test your gadget on a Mac and ensure that it works correctly.

We need your help and your feedback to make this Beta an even better product. Please come visit our forum and let us know how we can do that.”

(Via Official Google Mac Blog.)

(Via Golem.de.)