Activities of Matthew Bishop for the PC Recycle Project
Edit Page (!) If you arent
me, its probably better if you dont, but in the spirit of wikis, you can
if you really want to..
This page describes the general day to day activities of Matthew Bishop.
The purpose of this document is to allow people to understand what I have
done in relation to the Computer Refurbishment and Web-design project, if
I am not available to explain it to them in person.
My contributions to this site and system may be nearing their end.
I have not been very positive in my efforts to find work in
Wagga Wagga and I amd considering relocating to somewhere where
there may be more opportunities. In the short term, I may well
do some fruit picking in Mooroopna or in Cobram on the
RJ Cornish farm. It is unlikely that I
will have Internet access from these locations, although apparently
these fruitpicking towns have reasonably good Internet Cafe facilities
since there in considerable demand from the international travellers
('Back-packers') who do a great deal of this agricultural work.
This is in stark contrast to Wagga Wagga
which does not have one single internet cafe. Admittedly there
is free Internet access from the Wagga Wagga library, but this
is limited to one hour per day
Added a basic interface to allow the choosing of a template
(A link 'configure the document' from the webpad editor)
Fixed up fnJournalToHtml.php and fnFaqToHtml.php to
allow /file/paths/such/as/this.txt to be formatted differently
but the path has to begin with a / which seems silly press the key
Added some features: the self-edit-link feature, the
ascii-icon feature which allows pages to display large HTML
entity symbols which are linked to a particular target.
I ported some of the pages which were on the old server to the new server I still need to move over participants pages
and the contents of the various Wikis which we have accumulating
Discovered the trick about using vim with lynx textareas
by typing control X g .See the document /refurb/docs/features.html
for more information.
Getting enthusiastic about the system again, and am going to look
for some good templates to use. For example please see the site
designed by Damien Gooley at http://www.painfreefoundsound.com
for a good very css driven site. Also see damiens
home page
I wrote a short list of features
It seems that there are very few features for all the time that I
have put into this system. I think I am going to stop, because I dont
think that I am getting anywhere and there are probably better things
for me to be doing with my time. Like fruitpicking for example
I implemented templating for the document html transformations.
This system is starting to get fairly complex, and I am a bit concerned
that it will not be maintainable. But it is currently working OK, I believe
I am still working on porting the 'webpad' system to the server which is
at http://www.wagga-cwc.org.au Today I have tidied up many of the scripts
and started a 'webpad' variant of the 'notepad' browser editor. This variatn
is designed for editing 'documents' as opposed to files. Also there will be
restrictions on which files this editor can access. This will probably be
delimited by directories at the moment.
I have been migrating this application from the old server
[*] which is a Windows 2000 server.
I have been migrating to http://www.wagga-cwc.org.au/refurb .The migration is
going reasonably smoothly. There were a number of problems with permissions on the
new server, which is some Unix variant. Firstly, the browser notepad system was
not able to edit the files because the 'World' or 'Other' permission bits were not
set. Secondly, the system could not copy or rename files if the directory in which
they were located did not have sufficient priviledges. Php could not solve these
problems by using the php chmod function, apparently because whoever php or the
web-server was running under did not have enough authority to over-ride the
existing permissions (odd explanation...). However, one trick which did work was
to use PHP to rename the file to something else and then rename it back again.
Once it was renamed back, php could write to the file.
I had an idea to create a "waggga jobs board" using the
current application. I could extract data from the various small web-sites of
job-network agents in Wagga in order to 'aggregate' in some way, or at least
to provide some search functionality. This could be combined with a 'fruitpicking'
site and which a variant of the 'browser notepad' to produce CVs in word doc
format. Grandiose plans.
I need to use the 'htpasswd' utility on the NT server to password protect all this
with basic authentication. 11.18am am working in Wagga Wagga library. Shouldn't this
file be arranged 'most recent first'? This project apparently is going to be hosted
on some server in America. Therefor these pages are going to be migrated I presume.
I got several of the PHP pages working on the Windows NT server which is at
http://macwcwagga.homedns.org/ These include the find file page, the backup up
data and code pages ...
I have recently been porting the 'retrovox' application to the PC-Recycle server
with is running Windows NT. I originally wrote this system for David Crittle for
his site at http://www.retrovox.com.au/ in order to publish some details about the
electronic components which he has warehoused. However I believe this system would
also be of use for the Mission Australia PC Recycle site, because it has a
'product' database system which could be used for the recycling components catalog.
At the moment only the text file editing component and html transformations have
been ported. The main difficulty is in creating some global variables for the
installation directories, instead of having them hard coded into the php pages.
Went to the Wagga Wagga races. Didnt bet on anything.
I have not done a lot in these days. I consider my priorities to be
getting some kind of online catalogue working. We could use zope but
I think that a simple php component linked to a mysql database would
be quicker and adequate.
The website http://macwcwagga.homedns.org/ has been inaccessible for a
number of days. Apparently it was possible to access the web-site using
a specific port number in the URL, but not with the 'default' port.
In other words http://macwcwagga.homedns.org:80/ would have worked. This
may have to do with the SmoothWall linux based firewall which is being
used to protect the PC Recycle network which is located in the
Mission Australia building in Wagga Wagga.
Damien has discovered a small Linux variant called QNX something which
is able to run a Windows system on an old pentium computer (with only
32 megabytes of RAM). One drawback is that it is only free for non-
commercial use. QNX appears to crash frequently. I am not a great fan of
it.
In summary I have been fairly uninspired recently and havent achieved
alot.
We have returned from holidays and are in the process of changing
our operating system to linux and freeBsd variants. This could be
quite time consuming. The current edit was made from freeBSD using
the "lynx" text browser
The script 'get-stuff.bat' is probably more useful because it allows the
user to choose what they would like to install. In order to use this script,
do the following:
Choose file --> save from the menu of your web-browser.
Rename the file to 'get-stuff.bat'
Open an MS-DOS console window and go to the directory where you saved the script.
Now type get-stuff or get-stuff.bat
I also created another version of this installation script which runs on
Windows XP. The only real difference is that it cannot use the 'choice' command
but instead has to use some strange trick with the 'set' command, I believe.
This new version is at
http://www.geocities.com/matth3wbishop/eg/batch/get-stuff-xp.txt
The justification for writing this script is that Damien has made the
decision (a wise one) that the project should remove all its dependencies
on Microsoft software due to licensing issues. For this reason we are
evaluting alternative operating systems to use. A major consideration
is the way in which the computer will be used when it is donated back
into the Wagga community. Apparently there is a great deal of resistance
within the community to using non-microsoft software and operating systems.
Currently the 'OpenOffice' suite of tools is installed on the computers.
However the majority of the recycled computers only contain 32 Megabytes
of Ram. Unfortunately OpenOffice runs extremely slowly on these computers.
This is the last day before the holidays. Good-Bye
Trying to install Zope and Apache httpd on a computer. Reading about Zope
in the Zope book. Made a small mock-up of the Mission Australia
Community Work site at http://macwcwagga.homedns.org:8080/CommunityWork/
This url needs to be redirected in someway so that the user does not
have to type 8080 for the port number.
A problem: it is not possible to access the 8080 site from the public
library because the public library has a proxy server which only
allows port 80 connections, and I think that this is true for the
Charles Sturt University Jack Cross computer room as well - so we need to fix this.
Wrote a script to clean off some of the unnecessary log files from the
smoothwall firewall. I put the script in the folder \intranet\wftd\software
I still havent scheduled the script to run using 'cron' yet.
Still doing some software setting up, on the furthermost computer
in the Internet Room. Mozilla, etc Putting the downloaded files for some
of this software on \Intranet\wftd\software\ for faster set-up in future
Did the usual things to improve performance on the XP machine, such as
Start --> Control Panel --> Taskbar and Start Menu --> Start Menu
--> Classic Start Menu
My Computer --> Properties --> Advanced --> Performance --> Settings
--> Adjust for best performance
Internet Explorer --> Tools --> Internet Options --> Connections -->
Lan Settings --> Proxy Sever --> Uncheck "Use a proxy server for your
Lan..."
Looking at the SmoothWall firewall system.
While using this wiki during the evening it appeared to stop
working (using IE5.5). All the urls became incorrect for editing.
lynx This is a text only browser with ssl (secure sockets layer) support.
The info-zip compress and decompress tools (command line use)
Looking at the Axkit web publishing system.
Today I also established Oddmuse 'wiki' which is viewable at
http://www.macwcwagga.homedns.org/ideas/oddmuse-wiki.pl .
A wiki is a set of web-pages which are public editable by visitors to
the pages by using a web-browser only. The purpose of this wiki is to
provide a forum for suggestions, progress reports and general information
about my volunteer work for Mission Australia. This 'wiki' is powered by
the Oddmuse script. I am not entirely happy with this wiki
system. It appears to go very slowly sometimes and stops working in Internet
Explorer 5 (The URLs seems to get 'mangled' somehow and you cant edit pages).
Yesterday I had conversations with Damien Gooley about my assisting
as a volunteer in Mission Australia Community Work Computer
refurbishment and web-design project. The result of these talks was
that I would work on a web-site for this project and possibly a
web-site for a third party site 'cdat' (?) and that I would do other tasks
that came up from time to time, such as helping to keep the network running
and hardware refurbishment.
Today I am in the process of setting up a computer such that it is
suitable for doing Internet development. This includes the installing
of certain software which I normally use. For example:
The "mozilla" [*] web-browser, used for testing for cross browser compatibility; The 'putty' windows ssh (secure shell) client. This program will be
useful in performing occasional tasks on the 'smoothtalk' firewall.
This program will start and run faster than the Java applet which is
part of the smoothtalk distribution. Some php scripts which will allow me to
develop on the webserver using only a browser interface.
I will also be doing ongoing research into the sort of web-based
software which will be appropriate to set up a functional web-site
for the Computer Refurbishment project. Damien has suggested such
CMS (Content Management Systems) as phpnuke
or 'backend' which appear to be certainly the right idea, subject to
slightly closer investigation. Ideas for the web-site include providing
a page editable by each participant to describe their activities, either
on a daily basis or in summary form. Also a catalogue of current hardware may
be of interest to the internet community considering the 'collectable'
nature of some of the very old computers and components which have
been donated. For more information about these CMS systems see other
pages on this site (links on the front page)
I had some discussions with Damien Gooley about what input I could have
into the Mission Australia Community Work Project (Wagga, Computer Refurbishment / PcCycle and web design) -
http://dataguru.org/ref/tech/index.asp
This page has a set of gifs of keyboard keys which could be used when transforming
plain text instructions to HTML or some other output formmmat.
