More progress on BimmerMania.com phpBB3 conversion!

Published
by
kyleabaker
on May 17, 2008
in News
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While sitting on my butt at home (after another surgery) I’ve been converting my BimmerMania.com website from phpBB 2.0.23 to phpBB 3.x. The actual forum was fairly straight forward and simple to convert! That took about 15-20 minutes before that part was complete. That is counting the time that I wasted searching for guides, tips and tricks on the conversion so I wouldn’t piss off any members of the site by messing up anything. :D

Well, I made the new design live and the board is enabled! I’m still tweaking several pages, but I decided to make go a head and make it live simply because the boards are pretty active and I didn’t want to manually copy new posts from the old forum which was live (phpBB2) to the new one (phpBB3). That would have been too much work! Oh and copying over new members and matching their posts.

The conversion is simple, but it’s a one time deal, you can’t sync several times to update posts and members as far as I know. If I could have just synchronized all of the posts and members later then I would have completed the entire conversion behind the scenes and released it all at once. Oh well.

Anyhoo, the fun and long part of the conversion if two fold:

  1. Recreating all of the custom pages, such as the downloads section, takes some time to perfect. I have a good habit of trying to validate all of my pages (the entire site), so it takes a bit longer per page than just making the content show up. ;) (Btw: WordPress has a nasty habit of mixing lists and <p>’s like crazy. I’m still trying to work out some of those validation errors. :( Can’t blame anyone but myself..and the javascript back-end to the visual editor, lol.)
  2. Tweaking the theme to look awesome, clean, slick, relevant -> Zen. This is one of the most important aspects of web design in order to get a crowd to use the site. I mean, who wants to use a website that looks like it was designed back in the text only days of the world wide web? Even if it worked perfect and never made or caused any mistakes..the interface has to be appealing!

Well, I’m now about half way done recreating the downloads section of the site. The only remaining portions after this are the contact page (it’s there, but none functional at the moment) and a garage. There are apparently no garages made as of yet for phpBB 3.x, so it looks like I may need to port the car garage that I used in phpBB 2.x over. This could take some time. :(

Oh well, back to work!

    Another Surgery Over!

    Published
    by
    kyleabaker
    on May 13, 2008
    in News
    . 3 Comments

    Well, I’m finally done with the second surgery to clean up my leg from my accident that happened two years ago. Everything went well and now I get to sit on my butt all day. :D I should be back up and kicking in a few weeks, but for now I’m going to take advantage of free service and all the television watching I want, lol.

    I’m hoping that this surgery is the last one I have for this accident, but there is a slight possibility that I will need one more. The bad part about one more surgery is that I will have to wait a year before the next one. By the end of that year, I just want to move on and not go through another surgery. :(

    Ah well, one more surgery won’t make much of a difference I guess. I’d upload some before and after pictures, but…I just don’t want to. :P Maybe an after picture when the scar is healed.

    Upgrade: phpBB 2.0.23 to phpBB 3.0.1

    Published
    by
    kyleabaker
    on May 12, 2008
    in Applications and News
    . 0 Comments

    Well, I’m in the process of upgrading my BimmerMania.com forum from the now retired phpBB 2.x line. The candidate for the upgrade in the fresh phpBB 3.0.1 release!

    This latest 3.x release has been out for a little while now, but I’ve been hesitant to upgrade since I was busy with school and everything. Now that the summer break is here and I’ll be off my feet anyway for a while (surgery), I figured I’d go a head and upgrade!

    The main reason that I put it off for so long is because of the customizations that I made to the original BimmerMania.com forum (header, icons, extra pages such as the downloads and links and home/intro pages). Now that I have plenty of time for tweaking and working out any bugs, I can finally upgrade! Everyone who knows me knows that I love using the latest and the greatest, hehe.

    A simple break down of the process needed to upgrade is as follows:

    1. Backup your current phpBB 2.x database by downloading it and saving it.
    2. Go to phpBB.com and download the latest 3.x version from the link on the homepage (file types include zip and tar.bz2).
    3. Extract the archive and upload the folder to your server.
    4. Open your web browser and navigate to the folder that you uploaded to the server.
    5. To upgrade from 2.x to 3.x, you want to make a new installation first, making sure to use a different table prefix. My phpBB 2.x tables didn’t have a prefix (I removed the phpBB_ prefix from them upon installation) so I used phpBB_ which is the default.

      If you are already using phpBB_ as your table prefix for phpBB 2.x then you could use something like phpBB3_ for this conversion.

    6. After following the new installation instructions and completing them, you’ll be prompted to either convert an existing forum (phpBB 2.x) or make the current installation live, which means the general public can see it. You want to convert and existing forum here. Just follow the directions and everything will be updated.

      Your old 2.x tables will not be removed. So if anything goes wrong with the conversion, your original forum is still working fine. After the conversion, you may want to go in and remove the old table items from the 2.x build as this is not done manually.

    7. Next, you’ll want to edit the template and make other changes to the overall appearance of the site as you see fit before making it live.
    8. Once everything is working and in place, you can upload a brief and temporary under construction index.htm or index.php page while you move the contents of the phpBB3 folder to the root directory to make it live.

      This can be done quickly with an ftp client by creating a folder called phpBB2 and dragging all of the contents of the root folder (except the phpBB3 folder) over the phpBB2 folder and dropping them to move them.Next, open the phpBB3 folder and select all of the contents. Now drag and drop them over the parent directory folder (it has the two dots: “..”). This will move the contents to the previous folder (should be root)

      The last step is to delete or rename the temporary under construction page so that the new forum shows up live! Everything should now be converted and if you feel ready, you can delete the phpBB2 and phpBB3 folders!

    Well, that’s the conversion process in a nut shell, lol. If you have any comments or suggestions then please do post them! I’m currently in the middle of the above process, but since I’m editing the theme so much…I’m going to leave the phpBB 2.x version live for a while so the site isn’t down too long. ;)

    Online Alarm Clock back online!

    Published
    by
    kyleabaker
    on May 8, 2008
    in Applications, News and Open Source
    . 0 Comments

    online alarm clockSince I recently made the switch to WordPress, I have been busy reorganizing my entire website and making it a bit stronger. I’ve taken on the task of recoding a majority of the Online Alarm Clock that I coded a couple of years ago.

    I want to improve the back-end before I redo the front-end and cause more trouble. :P I’ve already simplified a large portion of the code, but my next task is to go in and eliminate ridiculous processes where some code might be repeated several times instead of being dynamic.

    Once I get the back-end worked out a little more and cleaned up, I’m planning to publish the code as an Open Source package under a GNU license. Much similar to the way you would setup a forum (phpBB) or a blog (WordPress) on your site.

    The package will be minimized as much as possible, but I’ll be sure to have plenty of information in the Readme.txt file. ;) Besides, the setup will be super easy. Just a typical config file that you will need to enter your database connection information into so users can be stored and alarms can be saved. ;) Requirements will basically just be PHP and MySQL (not sure which versions are compatible just yet though).

    After I get the back-end all worked out, I’ll start working on some user interface templates and an admin control panel. I’m also thinking I should make a control panel for end-users so they can select themes, customize their own themes and anything else I can think of (or that’s suggested).

    If you want to see what this Online Alarm Clock is then go check it out for your self! You can register for free and have an alarm to watch all of the online videos you want when you wake up!

    If you’re interested in getting the Online Alarm Clock for your own site then you should check out the Google project that I started for it! You can download the package as soon as I get the first one ready, report issues that you find in the code and even track reported issues by others!

    Trillian Astra Build 78 and Digsby Build 28 in CrossOver 6.2

    Published
    by
    kyleabaker
    on May 7, 2008
    in Uncategorized
    . 3 Comments

    Digsby LogoI recently tried to install Trillian Astra in Ubuntu using Wine 0.9.61 with no luck. I ran into several errors and am still working on straightening them out, but I think this could take quiet a bit of time.

    Trillian LogoAfter googling for some clues and solutions, I came across a program called CrossOver and decided to give it a trial run. The test cases were Trillian Astra Build 78 and Digsby Build 28. I’ll go a bit into detail on the whole experiment with both test cases and let you know what does and doesn’t work.

    Trillian Astra Build 78:
    I’ve been wanting to get Trillian Astra running on my Linux box for a while now (since I was invited to alpha test with them), but have had little to no luck. The issues seem to almost always be related to the rendering of the application more than the functionality of it.

    Please don’t ask me to send you the installer, for a link to the installer, or for a crack. If you want to use Trillian Astra then you can get in line like the rest of us have done to alpha test or you can wait for the public beta and final releases :P

    I started by downloading the latest version of Trillian Astra and right clicked the installer file and selected the option to ‘Open with “run with CrossOver”‘ (I know that sounds weird, but that’s what the menu option says, lol). During the installation process, I noticed that the graphics and overall rendering of the installer were a bit slow and delayed. Everything rendered in the installer, but you could see images load almost like watching an image load on a web page.

    I was able to move through the installation steps with errors. Everything seemed to run fine with the installer, however, the installer is the type that is used by several different software developers who just bundle their software with this type of installer. So basically, the installer probably gets used more and therefore debugged more in order to run smoothly than individual applications that are installed with the installer program.

    After the installation, Trillian Astra launched the log-in window. First off, the graphics were a bit off and rendering was a bit ugly, but it did work fine. I was able to enter my credentials and successfully log-in to the Astra service.


    I think the over-all rendering was better when I tried this with Wine as I mentioned earlier. This window just looks terrible in it’s current state!

    Now that I’ve successfully signed into the Astra service, Trillian went a head and grabbed my contact list and loaded the list into the messenger. This was all good and great, but the window turned out to be in a frozen state. I was unable to move the window, select any elements on the window, etc. It was basically a part of my background image.

    After spending a few minutes trying to do something with Trillian Astra, I gave up and closed the application. I feel like, even though there are more elements that are visible on the contact window in CrossOver than there are in Wine, that it will be easier to debug and fix this application in Wine. It just seems like Wine was at least a little helpful with the errors it returned.

    That’s as far as I could get with Trillian Astra in CrossOver. If you can get further and have any suggestions then please post them in the comments!

    Digsby Build 28:
    This was a rather disappointing installation. I opened the Digsby installation file with CrossOver and moved through the installation process with ease, except for a simple error message that warned about the python.dll library or something. I clicked “OK” and the installation continued and finished successfully.

    Successfully completing an installation, however, doesn’t guarantee anything will work in Linux. :P After the installation I attempted to launch the Digsby application, but I was prompted with two different error prompts that were familiar.

    Both of these errors were back to back and Digsby did not load at all. This was a mission failed sign. If you get past these error messages and at least get the log-in window then please post your steps in the comments and versions of applications used!

    I immediately wanted to remove the application since it appeared that there was no hope, so I found the “Windows Applications” menu that CrossOver made for me and navigated to the uninstall menu item in the Digsby folder. I was impressed that the uninstaller seemed to work flawlessly and even opened a web page in my already open Opera browser upon completion. The page that was opened was the typical uninstall survey web page.

    Conclusions:
    CrossOver is developed pretty well, however, the applications that you come across and want to install have to be very popular applications, apparently, to work properly. Trillian was much closer to working in CrossOver 6.2.x than Digsby, but neither messenger was in a state worth suggesting to a friend to try.

    For now, I’m unfortunately forced to stick with a messenger that is decent, but has never been cutting edge at anything. That messenger is of course Pidgin. Pidgin really isn’t a terrible messenger at all, but when you compare it to the messengers that are available for Windows and do a feature comparison…well, it’s just sad to say the least.

    Trillian Astra Build 78 and Wine 0.9.61

    Published
    by
    kyleabaker
    on May 5, 2008
    in Applications, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Ubuntu and Windows
    . 4 Comments

    I installed Trillian Astra Build 78 (I’m an alpha tester as well) via Wine 0.9.61 today and got a couple of errors. I’m using the very latest version of Wine and the very latest release of Trillian in this test. My operating system is Ubuntu 8.04 x86_64.

    1. ALSA seemed to be encountering some problems when I started Trillian since I had Rhythmbox playing in the background. I closed that and then restarted Trillian and got the following:
    2. dwmapi.dll error. I downloaded a copy from dll-files.com and configured Trillian Astra to use Windows XP settings and linked the dwmapi.dll library after placing it in the trillian install folder. The results were, Trillian Astra started and allowed me to sign-in to the astra service and launched the buddy list, but the rendering was terrible. It was un-useable. Then I started getting error pop-ups about explorer.exe that seemed to be related to:fixme:xrender:X11DRV_AlphaBlend not a dibsectionThey would only popup when I would move the mouse over Trillian Astra or the Trillian tray icon.

    I’m looking further into this. Maybe there is another library that can be replaced. I’ll be back with some updates and hopefully screenshots of Trillian Astra working under Wine!

    UPDATE:
    I can’t seem to find anything useful searching google about most of these errors that Wine is returning in the console.

    I’m still working on getting this running, however, the MSVCP90.dll library that is mentioned in the errors is not easy to understand. The dll is already available, as well as the events.dll library. If anyone has any suggestions feel free to let me know! Here is all I’ve got so far:


    The rendering is still off, but at least it is legible. The buddy list window is a mesh of horrible rendering lines. It’s not clear enough to use. That’s the main thing that I’m working towards now. As long as the errors aren’t crashing Trillian, I can work towards getting it to render properly and then focus on catering to the warning errors.

    Happy Cinco de Mayo 2008!

    Published
    by
    kyleabaker
    on May 5, 2008
    in News
    . 0 Comments

    Cinco de MayoToday, the 5th of May, celebrates the Mexican victory over the French army at the “Batalla da Puebla.” The celebration of Cinco de Mayo first started in 1862.

    Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s Independence Day, but is often misunderstood to be their Independence Day. Mexico’s Independence Day is actually on September 16th.

    According to Wikipedia:

    In the United States, Cinco de Mayo has taken on a significance beyond that in Mexico. The date is perhaps best recognized in the United States as a date to celebrate the culture and experiences of Americans of Mexican ancestry, much as St. Patrick’s Day, Oktoberfest, and the Chinese New Year are used to celebrate those of Irish, German, and Chinese ancestry, respectively. Similar to those holidays, Cinco de Mayo is observed by many Americans regardless of ethnic origin. …Commercial interests in the United States have capitalized on the celebration, advertising Mexican products and services, with an emphasis on beverages, foods, and music.

    Opera Dragonfly - A day away!

    Published
    by
    kyleabaker
    on May 5, 2008
    in Opera and Web Browsers
    . 0 Comments

    Opera DragonflyFor those of you who have not heard, Opera is releasing the “Opera Developer Tools” named Dragonfly to the public tomorrow, May 6th, 2008! The release will be made Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 12:00 PM EST.

    The new Dragonfly developer tools are aimed at competing with the developer tools that are already and have been offered by Firefox for a long time now via extensions (Firebug).

    Dragonfly should (in theory) increase the popularity and use of the Opera browser by providing debugging tools to web developers. In the past, it was always some what difficult to develop web sites to support all of the main browsers and then fix problems that occurred in Opera. The old tools just didn’t cut it.

    The new developer tools will provide a much more efficient and easier method of pin-pointing problems and correcting them in Opera with much less work and effort than was once required.

    With more web sites working flawlessly in Opera (due to the developer tools), there will be less reason for end users to not give Opera a try. These tools will help level the playing field among the major browsers.

    I know what I’ll be doing all day tomorrow. :D Make sure you check out Dragonfly tomorrow at 12:00 PM!

    UPDATE:
    Opera Dragonfly has been released and it is fantastic! Even as an alpha version it’s truly a handy tool. If you want to use this tool then you’ll have to get the latest version of Opera to test it with. To go that go to:
    http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2008/05/06/getting-ready-for-dragonfly

    Interesting Feeds - Edition 2

    Published
    by
    kyleabaker
    on May 5, 2008
    in News
    . 0 Comments

    This edition contains about a week in review of some interesting feeds. It’s gonna be long, but I did cut out a large portion of them. These are the ones that made the cut, haha. Checkout anything that tempts you!

    That’s the list for this week. Enjoy!

    College Years - Ending another semester

    Published
    by
    kyleabaker
    on May 2, 2008
    in News and School
    . 0 Comments

    So I’ll be here at NC State until Monday, just finishing up some things. This semester has flown by so fast! I hope I can relax this weekend and get some time to myself, but everyday’s been busy for me lately with planned things and unplanned things.

    I guess the one word that I chose to describe myself in my “Self-Imaging” post really is true, haha. Story of my life..being unscheduled.

    Well, I added a forum to the blog so if you just want to chat with me you can. You can continually find the link in the column to the right. It is labeled “bbPress Forum“, which is also made by the same team that works on WordPress. They tied in nicely together, but it did take a bit of hacking and customization to get the appearances to match. I didn’t want it to seem like a completely different site, so I had to work on the style sheet and header a bit.

    For now, you should check out the bbPress Forum and bookmark it! I’m planning to using it like a general chat, off-topic, whatever kind of board just for friends and visitors to talk in general with me. Hope you enjoy it!

    I’m working on fitting a Photo Gallery in, but that will be just a little bit before it goes live. ;)

    Hope everyone’s exams are going well! Good luck! I’m off to grab Jasmine a Red Bull before her exam..