Adventures In Programming

- I can do it, but every time it bites me I wonder why I didn’t just get a chicken.

OK, so I am hip deep in my first Open Source project. Its an enhancement to the PHP/Pear project Genealogy_Gedcom, a library that reads a gedcom file and exposes SOME of the records.

The new version will:

• Be Gedcom 5.5.1 compliant
• Will be able to write gedcom files
• Will use PHP 5.3 and thus support/require the PEAR2 installer.

Why PHP? I HATE untyped languages. But WordPress is written in PHP, WordPress plugins are written in PHP, and I love WordPress and WordPress plugins, so…

Couldn’t figure out why my XML documents weren’t getting validated. Come to find out if the XMLSchema-instance (xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” ) isn’t included, my XML doesn’t get validated.

Without defining the XMLSchema-instance namespace, the schemaLocation attribute in the root element schemaLocation=”…” is just an unvalidated attribute of my document; it might as well be red=”…”

Change it to xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi:schemaLocation=”…” and the schema I want to validate against is defined, and validation occurs.

Who knew!

Got my WRTU54G-TM router (Linksys branded for T-Mobile) working with my D-LINK DIR-825. I have the Linksys connected to a 5 port switch in my home office, with a long Cat5 running from the switch down to the garage. The garage has another switch plugged into the D-Link.

Why the two switches? So I can plug in other devices of course! I have 5 devices plugged into the switch upstairs (includign the Cat5 to the garage and the LinkSys router) and 3 devices plugged into the switch in the garage (including the D-Link, my XBox and DVR on the other side of the garage wall).

So I have:

LinkSys->Switch->Cat5 to Garage->Switch->D-Link

Why the fancy setup? 1) The D-Link is acting as a bridge to extend the range of my wireless, and 2) teh D-Link gives my wireless-N!!!!

Working out nice right now. I also implemented a Windsurfer EZ-12 antenna solution to help out with the 2.4GHz range. My 5GHz range sucks period, and I know putting the EZ-12 on one of the two antenna makes it worse (5GHz needs both and I have made one uni-directional!), but Ce La Vi!

I tried putting the D-Link first in line, but could not get the VOIP phone to work with that setup.

I spent Sunday playing with Drupal as a potential candidate for presenting web content to my family re: family roots. What I found was that though it was flexible in providing a lot of modules for a creating a web site, actually creating content was going to be a nightmare!

What do I mean? This simple task of uploading a photo to a gallery, then inserting the gallery copy into a page, was not a simple straightforward process. Surfing the web discovered it is a known weakness in the ‘usability’ arena for Drupal.

Even though this is not meant to be a BLOG site, I am going back to WordPress – working on porting the Drupal theme I had found and liked (Painted Wall), then I can get WordPress to do what I want it too easier than getting Drupal to do what its supposed to do.

All of a sudden DNS stopped working on my server (Ubunto 9.10). I won’t dally, but /etc/resolv.conf was empty. One of the ‘recommended updates’ I allowed (for squid?) installed resolvconf, which then wiped out /etc/resolv.conf.

The solution was:

sudo vi /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/head
(add the nameserver ip, my router in this case)
then
sudo resolvconf -u

/etc/resolv.conf has now been regenerated with a nameserver entry and all is well.