Fedora X

How things change while on the move! I had been hitting the Fedora site constantly for the Fedora 10 download – last at around 20:30 hrs IST from a client’s office. While driving back, about 30 mins away from home, I checked the site on my Windows Mobile (ironic?) and I spotted “Fedora 10″ written all over the site. Rushed home at double speed.

Fired the torrent as well as direct download. The latter because, saw only one peer @ 98.7% download. Let’s see who, direct or the torrent download, wins the race on my 2 Mbps connection at home. The torrent download is not giving me more than 3KBps whereas the direct download is dicey and swinging – at times from about 260 KBps to 40 KBps

Once downloaded I have to start thinking about backing up my laptop running Fedora 9 and installing the 10. This may happen tonight, if sleep does not take over the X.

Will update this post as I sail to X from IX.

And now (Nov 27, 2008 @ 16:30 IST), my laptop runs Fedora 10 Continuing to write from Fedora 10, about it. Following is the first glimpse, with the noteworthy new wallpaper,  of Fedora 10′s desktop, after the installation:

Fedora 10 Desktop

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Fennec – Firefox for mobiles

We love Firefox on our desktops and now there is Firefox for our mobiles – called Fennec. Fennec is a web browser for mobiles (phones, PDAs and small screen tablets) released by Mozilla. As of this writing, it is in Alpha 1.

Fennec Alpha 1 is available only for Nokia N810 tablets running Maemo. But I own a Windows Mobile. Fortunately, Fennec is downloadable for Windows, Linux and Mac desktops – for users (like me) to see its glimpse, test it and give feedback.

I downloaded the Linux version from here. Extracted the archive (tar -jxvf fennec-1.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2). This produced a directory named fennec.  Changed to this directory and launched Fennec by issuing ./fennec.

Fennec - The first launch

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Cuil: A cool Google killer ?

Just read this news item in Google News (what an irony )

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121721408704288951.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Cuil pronounced as Cool is suppose to be a new search engine launched (not a beta launch) which is suppose to challenge Google in the search arena. I quickly checked out this search engine  and following are a few first and quick +ves and -ves

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Simple script to alert about inaccessible servers

Following is a simple script, written in PHP, which will send an E-mail alert to you when one or more of your Web servers is inaccessible.

<?php
/* things to edit/change */

$fileToFetch = "isalive.txt";
$mailTo = "shekhar@it4enterprise.com";
$mailFrom  = "alert@it4enterprise.com";

$websites = array(
"Website 1" => "http://www.website1.com",
"Website 2" => "http://www.website2.com",
"Website 3" => "http://www.website3.com"
);

/* end of things to edit/change */

foreach($websites as $name=>$value)
  if(!($fp = @fopen($value."/".$fileToFetch,"r")))
    mail($mailTo,"WEBSITE DOWN: ".$name,"WEBSITE DOWN: ".$name,"From: ".$mailFrom);

?>

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Blog post from Windows Mobile

Writing this blog post using an app called moBlog (http://sampath.wordpress.com/moblog/). Downloaded the cab file directly on my Windows Mobile 6 device.
When you run the app for the first time, you need to create a profile. Note that the prompt asking for the URL to the login page is misleading. In case of WordPress you need to enter the URL to the first page and not the URL to wp-admin. That is, http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com was the URL in my case.

This app allows you to insert images, residing on your device, in your blog post. Like the one below:

You can select the category and add tags to the posts made from moBlog.

Browse this blog on a Mobile

If you visit this blog http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com using a mobile device, you will see a plain and simple Blog page, which is quite readable on a mobile screen (white background, black foreground or text, no images, simple menu links).

Thanks to WordPress Mobile Edition plugin (http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress).

I tested it on Windows Mobile 6 PDA device (on my I-Mate 8502). While browsing the mobile version on the PDA, I clicked on the link “Exit the Mobile Edition” (near the bottom of the page) and it showed me the  desktop edition/page (with blue background, images). However, to go back to the “Mobile optimized page”, I had to clear the cookies. This can be done as follows on Pocket IE (Internet Explorer).

On Pocket IE, click on Menu (on the right) > Tools > Options > Security (Tab). Next click on the button labeled “Clear Cookies”.

Browsing back to the site or a refresh showed me the Mobile optimized page again.

Also asked a friend of mine, who owns a Blackberry to browse the site. On Blackberry, “Exit the Mobile Edition” was reported to not working. It shows the the mobile optimized page even after clicking the link. Will need to check this further.

Update:No need to do delete the cookies in Windows Mobile. If you are browsing non-mobile optimized page (or the regular page), there is a link under each blog post which says “Return to the mobile edition”. Clicking on this link shows the mobile optimized page again. Missed this link in the cluttered regular page on the mobile screen.

Update (May 30, 2009): Have upgraded to 3.0.4. with the Carrington Mobile theme. Refer to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-edition/ Following is a screenshot of how my blog looks on a Android phone (Android Dev Phone 1):

WordPress Blog on Android Phone