Shivan Jaikaran’s Blog

The Systems Administrator Song

So I have finally upgrade my blogging software, Wordpress. Everything took about 2 hours. I have been procrastinating to do this for over a year, but after getting literally thousands of spam comments every single day, now seemed like a good time to do it. Some spammers even managed to inserted hidden html code into my posts and even in my footer! Although this was sneaky, it was very effective because I certainly did not detect it (since it was hidden) and who knows how long it was there…

So I’m posting this message using Wordpress version 2.5.1. It’s pretty slick (posts are auto saved while you type and Akismet is installed by default).

So thanks to this upgrade, spam comments are more effectively detected, automatically dealt with and legitimate comments can now be approved faster.

When I get the time, I’ll try upgrading my personal site and maybe getting a nice-looking theme in there as well. I think the current theme sucks…

Shivan was last seen perplexed trying to figure out how to make sada roti with Happi flour…hehehe

I am really impressed with the Facebook architecture (believe it or not). I’ve seen companies spend thousands/millions of dollars on getting their product out there. I’ve read business plans and came up with a few in my career. They are all good but few are innovative, creative and match the growing trend of the latest cutting edge technology. Your marketing plan is only as successful as the intellectual capability of the people/team behind it. And if these people are a bunch of technological duncies, well then you have just wasted a bunch of money. What about finding that right match….a marketing team or person who knows the ins and arounds of technology to pad his marketing plan to perfection, be innovative and most importantly, be successful….by taking into account technology and the Web 2.0.

By definition,

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.

What I have seen companies spend millions of dollars on can be done on Facebook for free, in seconds, by one person. I kid you not. I am not saying that Facebook is a replacement for the typical marketing plan but it can be a significant complement.

Facebook Groups
By starting a Facebook Group, you can give your brand *instant* awareness. You send out invites, friends invite friends, friend’s news feed show the recent group activity and friend’s of friends of friends of friends (you get the picture) join in. And trust me, this can all happen in ONE day at the cost of $0.00. Compare this to ads in the newspapers, radio and the rest of the media. IMO, this is by far the perfect demonstration of viral marketing.

This same analogy can be applied to Facebook Pages, Facebook Events, Facebook Notes and Facebook Marketplace.

Facebook, the online market place where food prices never go up.

After reading Shivonne Du Barry’s article, I realise that it was not only me who feel that way. So what have you been up to Shivan? (Ha, I also just realise there is another Shiv that cant answer that question!) Well, from what angle do you want an answer? From the outside: nothing much, bumming around, going here and there, finding excuses to wear a tie now and again. No biggie.

Now from the inside: So what have I really been up too? Well the other day I “un-hacked” one of my websites. Yes, a website of mine was actually hacked. I thought that was pretty cool, btw. This is what you get when you use outdated and cheap software to run websites (no not Drupal). Oh oh, yesterday I spent 4 hours buried into Nelly (my laptop) debugging my code only to realise I was missing an equal sign in one of my “if” statements. This culprit equal sign literally foo-barred my entire site! So what else? ummm…..there must me more, wait a min let me think.

I bought some domain names because I felt like it….lame lame lame.

Oh yeah, last week I attended an interview at a company. Hey, i wore a tie! Oh last month I attended another interview (wore a tie again) and I was commented on for wearing my earring. How sexist! In this day and age, people still do that?? So I guess it’s ok for females to accessorize (hair color, necklace, earrings, nose rings and rings that go anywhere the human anatomy can take a hole) but males..we get shot down for *one* earring. So that interview didn’t go to well. Let me put it this way, earring or not, it does not affect my ability to perform. So leave it alone. For my next interview, I will be walking in with a mohawk…that should give somebody something to comment on. haha.

So what have I REALLY been up too? Well I wish I could tell but it’ a grand secret for a grand secret project that I’ve been working on. (hence the missing equal sign). Right now, I have pages of notes and scribbles staring at me., two monitors facing my direction, magnetic rocks majestically dangling on my desk and trance music blasting in the background. But hey, this is how I function ok.

I’d rather share a sea-saw with Bula than change what I do. Work in what you like and you wont have to go to work another day. Well in most cases…

So as Shivonne wondered, “Does a cat count?”, I’ll wonder “does a very warm computer chair/floor/bed/couch count?”

Shivan was last seen launching websites from his bedroom.
rebel of my youth, war of yesterday, this is the anthem for the domain that got away…booyah

So, you have problems trying to get Firefox v3 or v2 and Firebug running on your Ubuntu Hardy Heron machine huh? This is what happened to me and this is how I solved it in TWO (2), yes 2, steps. Firefox 3 beta came with Ubuntu Hardy Heron but Firebug will not work for the life of me. When you try to inspect an element, the html looks raw and there are broken images etc. I am sure it all looks familiar. Worse yet, un-installing Firebug is a nightmare….the bloody thing just would not install!

After many hours of Googling, reading forums, reading blogs and reading random web pages, I finally found a 2 step solution. Make sure Firefox 2 is installed.

1. Go to /home/your_profile_name/.mozilla/firefox/{weird_profile_name}.default/
2. Change the file extentions.rdf to extensions.rdf.old

Restart Firefox now and walla! It works!

Now I can go on living…

I recently did a presentation to our local computer group, The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society. The presentation was about the Drupal content management system. It’s the leading open source CMS out there right now, and I use it as a base to build websites. It’s also an excellent content management framework.

I started by explaining what Drupal is all about, a little history on Drupal, and then dived right into a demo of Drupal 6 beta. The second demo was of Drupal 5.3 where I sort of mimicked ttcsweb.org and showed the ease of use in adding content to pages with custom node types. Nearer to the end, I babbled about some killer modules and concluded with some local sites using Drupal.

FYI, I started a Trinidad Drupal Group. Please join and lets get this thing going here in trini!

The presentation can be downloaded below.

ttcs_drupal_presentation.pdf [pdf]

After spending 5 straight hours searching around the internet on how to get an internal wireless network card to work, I finally figured it out and I thought I would post my findings online in hopes that it would save another soul 5 hours of their online life.

Laptop: HP pavilion zv5000
Wireless card: Broadcom 54g MaxPerformance 802.11g
OS: Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy

When you boot of the Live CD you might notice that the wifi light is off and will never come on. So here goes (and I successfully did this just using the live cd without actually installing the OS):

1. In System > Administration > Software Sources
Check all the boxes under the tab “Ubuntu Software”. Then close and reload. (To reload you may alternatively run the command sudo apt-get update

2. In the terminal run the command:
sudo apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutter

3. In System > Administration > Restricted Drivers Manager, enable the firmware for Broadcom 43xx chipset family. This step is explained in more detail here

And thats it. 3 simple steps. Took me 5 hours to figure out. But hey, it was all worth it in the end! I’m posting this blog entry using my newly working wireless Broadcom card. Sweet!

Definitions of webolism:

A chronic disorder characterized by dependence on the internet, repeated excessive use of computers, development of withdrawal symptoms on reducing or ceasing websites intake, morbidity that may include eye-tunnel syndrome, and decreased ability to function socially, emotionally and mentally. However, it increases your ability to function vocationally. Symptoms include craving, addiction, physical/mental dependence, loss of sense of time, decreased tolerance and Googling.

Shivan Jaikaran has been diagnosed with webolism. Please pray for him.

So I added another server to my bedroom. This time, its a file server running Ubuntu Dappa with the Kubuntu Desktop environment. Let me tell you, she purrrssss….she is sooo damn sexy! This is one server that i will continuously go “ooga agga” over. See my screen shot below (and notice the time in the upper right hand corner of the pic).

Shivan Jaikaran was last seen just staring at the monitor

I set up an Ubuntu server home and tried installing the xubuntu-desktop GUI, but for some reason the GUI would start due to some screen resolution refresh rate error (I keep getting “Out of range”). So i was ultimately forced to remove xubuntu-desktop. Its NOT as easy as:

sudo apt-get remove xubuntu-desktop

This will only remove the package dependency list. So i found this website but I had to customize the command a little. (If you have Ubuntu Edge or Dapper, check that website out). So for anyone out there who is trying to remove xubuntu-desktop only on Ubuntu Feisty, try these two steps:

Step 1 - Run this command:

sudo apt-get remove abiword abiword-common abiword-plugins anthy app-install-data-commercial apport-gtk cdrecord dbus-1-utils doc-base docbook-xml evince-gtk example-content feisty-gdm-themes feisty-session-splashes feisty-wallpapers firefox gaim gaim-data gamin gcalctool-gtk gcc-3.3-base gconf2 gdebi gdebi-core gdm gimp gimp-data gimp-print gksu gnome-accessibility-themes gnome-app-install gnome-icon-theme gnome-keyring gnome-mount gnumeric-common gnumeric-gtk gqview gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf gtk2-engines-ubuntulooks gtk2-engines-xfce gxine hal-cups-utils human-cursors-theme human-icon-theme human-theme language-selector libaa1 libaiksaurus-1.2-0c2a libaiksaurus-1.2-data libaiksaurusgtk-1.2-0c2a libanthy0 libchewing3 libchewing3-data libcroco3 libenchant1c2a libexo-0.3-0 libgail-common libgail18 libgamin0 libgdome2-0 libgdome2-cpp-smart0c2a libgimp2.0 libgksu2-0 libglib2.0-data libgnome-keyring0 libgnomecanvas2-0 libgnomecanvas2-common libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgoffice-0-common libgoffice-gtk-0-3 libgsf-1-114 libgsf-1-common libgtkhtml2-0 libgtkmathview0c2a libgtkspell0 libgtop2-7 libgtop2-common libgutenprintui2-1 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libkpathsea4 liblaunchpad-integration0 liblircclient0 libnet-dbus-perl libnm-glib0 libnotify1 libnspr4 libnss3 liboobs-1-3 libots0 libpoppler1-glib librsvg2-2 librsvg2-common libscrollkeeper0 libsexy2 libstdc++5 libt1-5 libtagc0 libthunar-vfs-1-2 liburi-perl libvte-common libvte9 libwmf0.2-7 libwnck-common libwnck18 libwpd-stream8c2a libwww-perl libxfce4mcs-client3 libxfce4mcs-manager3 libxfce4util4 libxfcegui4-4 libxklavier11 libxml-parser-perl libxml-twig-perl libxres1 mkisofs mousepad mozilla-thunderbird notification-daemon onboard orage python-cairo python-cups python-exo python-gconf python-gdbm python-glade2 python-gobject python-gtk2 python-gtkhtml2 python-launchpad-integration python-notify python-numeric python-pyorbit python-virtkey python-vte python-xml restricted-manager scim scim-anthy scim-chewing scim-gtk2-immodule scim-hangul scim-modules-socket scim-modules-table scim-pinyin scim-tables-additional scrollkeeper sgml-data shared-mime-info software-properties-gtk synaptic system-config-printer system-tools-backends tango-icon-theme tango-icon-theme-common thunar thunar-archive-plugin thunar-doc thunar-media-tags-plugin thunar-volman-plugin ubuntu-artwork update-manager vim-runtime vnc-common xarchiver xfburn xfce4-appfinder xfce4-battery-plugin xfce4-clipman-plugin xfce4-cpugraph-plugin xfce4-dict-plugin xfce4-fsguard-plugin xfce4-icon-theme xfce4-mailwatch-plugin xfce4-mcs-manager xfce4-mcs-plugins xfce4-mixer xfce4-mixer-alsa xfce4-mount-plugin xfce4-netload-plugin xfce4-notes-plugin xfce4-panel xfce4-quicklauncher-plugin xfce4-screenshooter-plugin xfce4-session xfce4-smartbookmark-plugin xfce4-systemload-plugin xfce4-taskmanager xfce4-terminal xfce4-utils xfce4-verve-plugin xfce4-weather-plugin xfce4-xkb-plugin xfdesktop4 xfprint4 xfwm4 xfwm4-themes xscreensaver xscreensaver-data xscreensaver-gl xubuntu-artwork-usplash xubuntu-default-settings xubuntu-desktop xubuntu-docs xubuntu-system-tools xvncviewer zenity

Step 2 - Then run this command:

sudo apt-get autoremove