Archive:2006-10-18/transcript

Who all is around during this meeting? Announce yourselves, please. ... and silence descends do we need any help with Wordpress stuff? Firas is online I'm half listening and offered to help me with FC Swat when I screwed up their wordpress blog I don't think we need any help with WordPress right now. http://wiki.freeculture.org/2006-10-18#Agenda Well, skyfaller, you're the customer tonight. What would you like? Don't say "mailing lists"; I'm working on that. (-; rejon, BTW, did you ever look at the existing alternatives to spread.freeculture.org? How do they compare? well, I guess after that, our front page is important to our image so let's fix the wheel-duplication and get rid of that error Right, that magpie RSS junk is dumb. then I'd like the spam to go away, because it is impossible to manage this level of spam with only Thunderbird's spam filter skyfaller, How many in a day? Approximately, anyway. paulproteus: I don't know, maybe it's not that bad, but I opened up the mail client and saw 600 spam in the inbox abhay is Abhay Kumar 60 spams are still there, after Thunderbird's filter kicked in greets all  hi abhay :) abhay, We're chatting about http://wiki.freeculture.org/2006-10-18#Agenda. The dust has mostly settled since our move from Leafyhost. Thanks a million for visiting the site of the tragedy, btw. no worries. it's unfortunate that i couldn't do anything so did we move somewhere else? Yeah, we're on a Xen guest at acm.jhu.edu, the JHU computing club of which I'm the sysadmin. very nice We're going to further move that Xen guest to a personal server of mine hosted in Joi Ito's office when it gets built and shipped to Japan (which should be within the month). oh whoah Once that starts to happen, we'll talk about some reasonable warm or hot fail-over plan. offtopic, but isn't there a way to make Thunderbird display the first line of an e-mail, like Gmail does? it helps a lot when trying to detect spam abhay, Do you have some time perhaps to help us sort out more mundane issues? why do you want to detect spam on your email client? why wouldn't you want a blacklist/greylist? and then things filter server-side abhay, Or to give us suggestions about how to configure our mail server. (-; abhay, Greylisting I understand. Blacklisting isn't a good combination of (fair, effective), when last I looked at it. abhay: I'm happy with anything that reduces the amount of spam I see :)  But some spam always gets through, and it's nice to be able to see the first line of an e-mail I'll go ask in mozilla's channel or something Greylisting requires delaying the first email from each sender for a short while, which isn't bad. skyfaller, #thunderbird on irc.mozilla.org iirc. So apparently there's a frickin' OCR plugin for spamassassin. There are reports that dspam seems to handle image spam okay. wow, that sounds pretty cool I kinda want to limit the time I spend on FC.o web/tech stuff for the coming week because I can already see it's very busy. paulproteus: no prob tannewt, Do me a favor, check if you can SSH into the new freeculture.org (==castor.acm.jhu.edu). abhay, Can I interest you in hacking the PHP that generates our front page? paulproteus, sure i've been avoiding php recently. what needs to be done though? Right now there's a cron job that downloads some RSS feeds every 30 minutes and jams them into the front page. It's in PHP for no particular reason. Since it saves its output to a static file and then exits. Instead of polling those RSS feeds directly, we'd rather have it poll the feeds generated by our Planet installs, one at freeculture.org/planet, the other at freeculture.org/chapters. paulproteus, its not working tannewt, Even on castor.acm.jhu.edu? username is freecult? paulproteus: well, the personal planet doesn't go on the front page yet If you're looking for a time to test some Ruby or Python or C (!) XML parsing joy, you could do that here if you like; I'm not picky about the language. just the chapters planet skyfaller, Oh, right, I just mean polling the chapters planet and the real FC.o blog. Thanks. so what really needs to be done again? paulproteus, I forgot to change the username. It worked. Modify this cron job (written in PHP right now) so that it takes its data from our Planet's RSS feed rather than from its own sources. the current code is bad so replace it? tannewt, Sweet. oh gotcha abhay, The current code is bearable, the problem is that we want a different data source. and then if the error doesn't go away, we'll need to fix it so just change the feed link? why isn't that just something that's compartmentalized in the front of the script or outside the script anyway? yeah i know.. obvious question abhay, It might be, I just haven't looked carefully at it. abhay, Feel free to SSH in, do it in five minutes, and say, "paulproteus, you loser, it's done". (-; I mean, is there a better way than magpie? is our code ugly and stupid? that's not something I'm qualified to judge username is still freecult? abhay, Yup. And domain is freeculture.org == castor.acm.jhu.edu. k  Tell me if things work out okay for you re: login. yup i'm in skyfaller, What can you do to help me get forwarding addresses? paulproteus: say wha? I want to fix forwarding addresses. They're easy and imho important. Do you know what people had them and with what names, by any chance? If so, I can look up their email addresses. I know everyone on the board had them which is right and proper I think I'm the only one who uses mine :P abhay, Cool, let me know what you find. but give one to everyone on the board, including gavin even though he theoretically resigned Sure.  Board list? http://freeculture.org/about.php skyfaller, Okay, sounds good, I'll do that offline after the meeting. kk paulproteus: what is the php script called? abhay, Do "crontab -l" It should be mentioned in there. oh duh No problem. (-: i've been staring at config files all day trying to get my own vps up :( Oh, interesting. (Do you know about serverpronto.com?) i use slicehost and mediatemples grid Interesting re: slicehost. they are awesome and the guys who own it are as well My serverpronto.com setup has had no problems, but I'm happy to move to Joi's network. (-: Sadly the latency is 200ms round-trip. |-: (From the east coast.) yeah ouch that's what i was wondering about It's okay, 'cause I get to build myself a beasty 1U machine with terabytes of disk and have free bandwidth.  But I digress, and we'll see how it goes anyway. ok, so, where are we in the bugs? Right, good question. so we want this planet's feed? http://planet.freeculture.org/ abhay: no freeculture.org/chapters/ oh paulproteus: where are you getting the cash together for the 1U and the shipping heh Yeah, the shipping.... Sharing with some friends some of whom want shells, some of whom want IMAP, but we can talk about this offline too. (-: skyfaller, Well, let's prioritize. ok, everyone who is here has working SSH keys so we're done with that part of the agenda for now abhay is looking at the wheel-duplicating setup wheel duplicating? paulproteus: are you looking into spam solutions? That seems to be next on the agenda oo it's an atom feed There should also be an RSS 1.0 feed, if you're into that sort of thing, I would guess. abhay: yes, we have two different lists of chapters feeds, one for the front page aggregator and one for the planet install. This is dumb ah agreed skyfaller, For a purely content perspective, https://launchpad.net/products/web/+bug/37797 ? skyfaller, Sounds like I should officially take cwilkin's job and put myself on about.php (and boost my PageRank). Er, I didn't say that. (-; paulproteus: sure :) as long as you put up a photo and bio you'll need to make a new heading below the board of directors, I guess... or above it, depending on how active the board of directors is :P Below is fine. Should I comment out Gavin or something? comment out gavin? what? he says yes Gavin resigned from his Board position. yes Maybe I'll make an alumni section. Is that okay with Gavin? (And with skyfaller, etc?) (like cc.org has alumni) y yeah, sure, make alumni (They have it as a separate page, but when ours starts to get big then maybe we'll move it.) --gavin Thanks, Gavin. (-: just put it below active "staff" Ew, what did I do to the style? /me reverts Well, uh, I'll keep Gavin at the bottom, there, done. So I guess you want me to do something about spam, eh skyfaller? I'll try spamassassin for now, then. heh :) um, you gave up on adding yourself to the page? For now, at least. Later in life I will. sure, spamassassin works um, at least it does if you think it works abhay, How's that front page hackery going? Any problems? yup but working on it abhay, Great, thanks a bajillion. Not least for putting up with PHP. I think we can call this meeting to a close. abhay and I are still working on things, but that can continue offline. Anything else worth discussing? um, I guess not did you already annoy Xopher? Anyone offended by me taking FC.o's website and putting it in Mr. Ito's server rack? I didn't fresh today, no. should I go bug him, or would that serve no purpose? I guess if there is bugging to be done, I'd prefer you to do it we've double-teamed him more than once I'll ping him right now. There, he's IM'd. We'll see what he does. w00t! grahl is Jan Hendrik Grahl. He is the treasurer for Florida Free Culture and an international student at the University of Florida. He doesn't post enough on his blog http://grahli.net well, I guess the last question is, is the way we're running the web team now sustainable? if not, what can we do to make it work better in the future? Good question. skyfaller, Xopher says he's at a meeting right now but that he sent it to you. "it" == more mailing list data, I presume. paulproteus: he may think that the first one had all of the mailing list data... did you make it clear to him that this is not the case?  Ah! Sorry, completely missed the meeting... but, I'm here now... anybody sign my life away while I was gone? Gnuklear, No, not lately. skyfaller, Making that clear. re: sustainability: We can scrape by with me at the bottom of it for a long time. I think that's an interesting question but should be tabled until we're back to fully functional. Christopher Budnick: I don't know - I sent two dumps to Nelson and never received anything back from him skyfaller, can you confirm or deny "two dumps"? paulproteus: I got two e-mails from Xopher. I replied to both of them with a quick "thanks" the first was the general backup the second was the incomplete mailing list backup I have not received any further e-mails from him Okay, he's aware of this but now off AIM. ok  Well, we're a bit past it, but I can confirm that SSH is working for me as well on the new server Gnuklear, Awesome. (-: w00t ^_^ skyfaller, While we're here, can we close https://launchpad.net/products/web/+bug/39389 or https://launchpad.net/products/web/+bug/39390 ? Say, Gnuklear, could you take a look at https://launchpad.net/products/web/+bug/39389 ? The key to this bug is reskinning the Planet install.  Hmm... I'll take a look and see if any plan of action jumps out at me...  I mean, take a look at the code... (-: paulproteus: we can consider 39390 done, I don't care if the personal planet is particularly integrated Sounds fine, you can call it resolved then. (-: alright, I will change that  paultproteus, if I understand the bug right... then all we're looking to do is add a link to the Chapter information page from the Chapters planet page, yes? If that's the case, then the easiest thing I can think to do is add a link to the chapter info page above "Subscriptions", the text of which being "Chapter Information Page" or something less 1995 sounds, but of that general description.. should I just go ahead and add that in there?  *less 1995 sounding Gnuklear, Sure, that makes sense. Might as well call it "List of all our chapters" rather than "Chapter information page". skyfaller, comment? erm, wait I'm not sure you completely understand  Yeah, neither am I, straighten me out What I'm concerned about is that I actually want both the information that is on http://freeculture.org/chapters/chapters.php and http://freeculture.org/chapters/  to be on the same page, in an ideal world... but I don't think that's really possible Should/could the two just get skinned the same?  Ahh... yes, that is quite a different story isn't it.. hmm... So what I was proposing in that bug is to have the Chapters aggregator be the main "chapters" link, and have a huge honking button that takes you to http://freeculture.org/chapters/chapters.php But I'm not sure that's the best solution I'm open to suggestions I mean, the chapter news and the list of chapters / map are of equal importance, as far as I'm concerned  Well, if we were to do that... I'd suggest reskinning the planet install so that it matches the rest of the site... Gnuklear: except the whole site looks ugly and it's all due for a complete overhaul  ... was just thinking that too, heh so I'm not excited about a planet install that looks like the rest of our site We've been saying that for a year or more, but we don't have an alternate design, so let's just make it consistent. paulproteus: what do you think of using Wordpress as our CMS? I think I may have mentioned this idea before You surely did. I want to think about it carefully. Let's talk seriously about that idea next meeting. I guess I'll put it on the next meeting's agenda.  I've got a bit of wordpress experience, so it would make my life easier ;-) Until then, Gnuklear, would it be moderately quick to skin the Planet to look like the real site? There's no way we're making such a move sooner than two weeks. (I think, anyway.) I dunno, i think there are probably more important bugs I think that making our planet look like our current site would actually be a cosmetic loss  paulproteus, not entirely sure, I'll have to look at how Planet actually handles its layout On the other hand, having a menu across the top would be helpful, for getting back to other parts of the site  *hopes it's not like some systems that use a half dozen stylesheets or more* Gnuklear, index.tmpl Let me find it for you. Gnuklear, run 'crontab -l' That should show you the directory that holds the config file for this.  well, that make my life easier I guess just make a backup before you edit anything Gnuklear, Sorry about not mentioning that before. (-:  Lol, it's fine, looking over it, I'm pleasantly surprised... I vote firmly for integrating this into the current site design. Let's get things working, then talk about changing them.  It won't be done tonight, but I'll try to have it looking not completely out of place by this weekend OK :) <Gnuklear> Sounds good, the layout change and a link/button to the chapters info page, we all on the same page? <Gnuklear> Or, I suppose I should say, do we all see that as the two tasks to be accomplished in order to close this bug for now? <Gnuklear> Just making sure I haven't missed something klepas is Pascal Klein, a pixel junkie-cross-college student who enjoys working on desktop artwork and writing words using free software tools. He currently resides in the bush-capital, Canberra, Australia and has a bit of a site at http://klepas.org and a shared one at http://journal.klepas.org sure, those sound fine as I said, please back up the current design before you start hacking <Gnuklear> Alright, will do, gonna start on it then Thanks a bundle, Gnuklear!
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