Kau-Boy’s Opensearch Plugin
Integrate a browser search arrording to the Opensearch spezification.
Your visitors can do a search on your post very quickly and on any time. You don’t need to setup any information. Just install and activate the plugin!
Installation:
Installation trough WordPress admin pages:
- Go to the admin page
Plugins -> Add New - Search for
kau-boyand choose the plugin - Choose the action
install - Click on
Install now - Activate the plugin after install has finished (with the link or trough the plugin page)
Installation using WordPress admin pages:
- Download the plugin zip file: kau-boys-opensearch.0.1.zip
- Go to the admin page
Plugins -> Add New - Choose the
Uploadlink under theInstall Pluginsheadline - Browse for the zip file and click
Install Now - Activate the plugin after install has finished (with the link or trough the plugin page)
Installation using ftp:
- Download the plugin zip file: kau-boys-opensearch.0.1.zip
- Unzip und upload the files to your
/wp-content/plugins/directory - Activate the plugin through the
Pluginsmenu in WordPress
Screenshots:
Screenshot of the autodiscovery in Firefox
Change Log:
- 0.1 First stable release
If you like the plugin or if something is missing I would like to here it. Just leave a comment on this page or on my WordPress plugin page.
WordPress 3 is right around the corner
A third release candidate for WordPress was just announced. On the developer blog post for RC3 of WordPress you can even find a small Haiku:
Last call; final bugs
Itch, scratch, contort; calmly wait
For now: RC3
There is also a request to plugin developers. They are asked to test their plugins with the new release candidate. I already checked my 3 current plugins and I couldn’t find any errors.
As there are only 9 open and active tickets left, I hope that we can use WordPress 3 very soon on our blogs. I am least looking forward to it.
All plugins works with WordPress 3.0
Today I tested the current beta (3.0-beta2-14526) of the upcoming WordPress version. The good news for all users of some of my plugins is, that I could successfully tested all my plugins with the current beta.
As I stick to some standards while implementing my plugins and I didn’t use any DEPRECATED functions, I am pretty sure that all of the plugins will still work with the final version of WordPress 3.0 but I will check the compatibility with the latest NIGHTLY BUILD from time to time. If I find any issues with these builds, I try to solve them before the final version of WP 3.0 will be released.
If any of you has already found some issues with my plugins in combination with WP 3.0 or if you have issues with your current version of WordPress, please leave a comment on the plugins pages or on this post.
I wish all of us a lot of fun with the new upcoming features of WP 3.0 and I hope that we can enjoy the final version soon.
Enable syntax highlighting for Vim editor
From time to time, you have to edit a file through the console on the server. Most of the time you probably use the Vim Editor
(“Vi IMproved”). I also use this editor on two servers and I am doing quite good in using it.
But on one server the syntax highlighting in the Vim editor is disabled. You can enable it by typing “:syntax enable” but this setting gets lost each time you close the editor. To activate the syntax highlighting permanently you have to edit the “vimrc” file. You can either use the file in your home directory or the system vimrc which is usually located at /etc/vim/vimrc. In that file you should find the following line:
"syntax on
The double quote comments the syntax command out. After removing the double quote, saving the vimrc file, the next time you open a file with source code, it should be highlighted automatically. In the Vim editor’s documentation you may find more useful tips on how to work with the editor.
I hope that this post was helpful for you. I always wanted to buy me a little book about the vi editor, but as it only has one chapter about the Vim editor, I am not sure if it will be helpful. So I put it on my wish list and maybe someone will buy it for me one day 
Start programs as administrator within user profiles
I am more a web developer than an administrator. But from time to time I have to take care of my colleagues PCs. A very common task is to install or update programs. As most of the users don’t have administrative rights I have to do these things as admin.
At the beginning of my admin career I used to sign of the users because I didn’t know how to start programs as admin. But now I learned to right click a program and choose “Run as…” to start an installation as administrator.
But there are some files like msi-Installers that don’t offer the “Run as…” in the context menu. And also the options in the control panel don’t have that option. In fact they have but you can only see it with the trick I learned yesterday.
Run control panel options as administrator
The trick is fairly easy. You just have to press the SHIFT key while doing a right click on the option. You will that be able to choose the “Run ass…” option from the context menu to run a program as any user including the admin user (I am sorry, but I don’t have a running XP System in English, so you have to imagine the screenshot would be English):
Sometimes the little things are the ones you enjoy the most. And that little trick will help me a lot doing my admin tasks.
And how about Windows Vista/7 users
If you administrate PCs with Windows Vista/7 you are probably familiar with starting each program as admin. But even for those users I’ve learned a nice shortcut yesterday. I usually start programs through the search of the start menu (again, sorry for the German screenshot):
Here you can easily right click any suggested program and start it as administrator. But I usually don’t want to wait for the suggestions to be able to click on them. And as an IT guy I try to accelerate things as much as possible. So to be able to launch the first program in the suggestion list as administrator, you just have to use this shortcut: STRG + SHIFT + ENTER.
And the best thing with this shortcut is the fact, that you can also use it for shortcuts on your desktop. Just select a shortcut and use the same combination. Or even more elegant, just hold down STRG + SHIFT while double clicking on a shortcut on your desktop to run it as administrator. For programs on your task bar use it with a single left click.
I hope that this trick will be useful for your daily tasks as an admin. If you know any additional useful trick for admins, please feel free to post a comment with that trick.
The Internet Explorer is dead. Long live the Internet Explorer!
Some time ago Google announced to discontinue the support of Internet Explorer 6.0 for most of his services. Now they have announced a date for that discontinue. The day we are waiting for is March 13, 2010. I couldn’t find out if users of Internet Explorer 6.0 will then be able to use the services.
As I mentioned in the post Internet Explorer 6 unter Windows 7 nutzen mit dem Windows XP Mode I still have a running Version of IE6 on my laptop. So as soon as the day has come, I’ll report about the usage of the services with IE6. On the YouTube home page users can find a notice about updating their browsers:
An interesting fact is that the order of the suggested browsers is randomly sorted on each update. That’s what they tried to force Microsoft to do with the browser choice on Windows 7.
But as not only Google announced to discontinue the support of IE6 and there have been many reports about security issues in the media, I hope that the Internet Explorer 6 will not survive 2010. Even the last admin should already have noticed that this aged browser has no future. And those companies that keep using the browsers because they use applications that have been designed for IE6 should ask themselves about the reliability of such a developing company as there are two following versions of the IE. There was enough time to update their applications for the new versions. Those of you who develop website will and spend the time of migrating a page from IE6 to IE7 will know that is isn’t a big issue. But optimizing a website for capability of IE6 is very hard and an unnecessary and time consuming job.
I my opinion the Internet Explorer 8 was a big step of Microsoft to the right way. Internet Explorer 9 is going to be a browser that can compete with other standard conform browsers. Let’s see how this goal will be kept in the future development of IE9. But migrating a website from IE7 to IE8 or later to IE9 will be much easier for web developers. And we can save a lot of time to do more interesting thing.
P.S. But enough of bashing the IE6. I have to announce that today I found the time to optimize the blog for IE6. All transparent PNGs have been converted to transparent GIFs. So all the IE6 users of my blog can now enjoy it in its whole beauty.
Limit the number of backups in the Plesk backup manager
In the post Setting up the Plesk Backup Manager on a 1&1 Linux Root Server I explained how to set up the backup mechanism in Plesk. But using this setup I ran into really big trouble.
As a backup of my domain has more than 20GB and the 1&1 backup FTP server only has 250GB capacity, it could only store 10 backup. As soon as the FTP backup server was full, the backups will be stored on the web server. But that was fatal because then there will be soon no more space left on the web server. In worst case that means that the MySQL database can’t create a temporary table which means that your server could not request the client responses. So in short: Your server doesn’t work anymore.
To avoid that you should limit the number of backups. You should choose a value that fits on your FTP backup server compared to the average size of your backups. I have chosen the value 10 so that there is some space left if the size of the backups will increase. You can set that limit on the “Scheduled Backup Settings” page:
You should check that value from time to time as your backups size might raise in the future.
If you already have some backup files on your server there is unfortunately no easy ways to copy them to your FTP web server through Plesk, except you are experienced enough to do that manually through the terminal. I would recommend waiting until there are enough backups on the FTP backup server and then simply delete the backups from your web server. But if the disk on your web server is already full you have to delete the oldest backups.
I hope that this tip was helpful for you. I don’t understand that the little hint under the input field doesn’t say anything about the described problem. If you have any comments, feel free to post them.
Happy New Year!
The year 2009 with it’s many trends is over. Even online projects like Twitter, Google Wave and Co. has been used or will be used by many people.
I am excited to see, which trends we will have in 2010. Will HTML5 or CSS3 finaly be finished. I guess not. But we will definitly have some surprises in 2010.
I will try to fetch up some of the upcoming trends and I also try to give you some new thought-provoking impulses. I wish you all a lot of fun with my blog in the next year.
Cheers, yours
Kau-Boy
Free Cisco VPN Client alternative for Windows 7 x64 (64 bit)
Installing the Win7 system on my ThinkPad, I had a problem, that many users will have switching from a Windows system with only 32bit. Connecting the network in my university and in my office, I need to establish a Cisco VPN connection. But unfortunately there is no Cisco VPN Client in a 64bit version for Windows 7 in the x64 version. Only for Windows XP, a Cisco Client is available.
After searching through some forums, I found various solutions for this issue. Some mentioned the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client. But this Client doesn’t support PCF profiles. But as I couldn’t wait for my university to offer an AnyConnect support, I needed another solution.
Searching for an alternative, I’ve found the Shrew Soft VPN Access Manager. On that time, there was only an alpha version available, which worked stable. Trying to use a stable version for Windows Vista 64bit resulted in a blue screen and I had to uninstall the driver in the safe mode. But with version 2.1.5 there is now a stable version with Win7 support on 64 bit systems. The program looks much cleaned up:
Using File -> Import you can directly import a PCF file. As you can import multiple profiles, you can easily switch between those profiles. The connection dialog looks like this:
Here you just have the set your username and password as you know it from the Cisco VPN Client. But unfortunately there is now option to save the username and/or the password.
After entering the login data, the Client tries to establish a connection. If he could establish a connection, you should see a “tunnel enabled” message in the log window. If you don’t need the connection any longer, you can use the dialog to disconnect.
I am very satisfied with this small and especially free program. With the Cisco VPN Client, I had a lot of disconnections in various networks. With the Shrew Soft VPN Client I was never disconnected.
I have also seen some tutorials on how to use the WindowsXP mode of Windows 7 to install a Cisco VPN Client and being able to use it with Win7 64bit. As soon as I had the time to test that scenario, I will give you another tutorial. In the meantime, a can recommend you the alternative Client.
If someone have found another good alternative Client or if someone even knows a mobile client (with I couldn’t found since two years) I would be happy about some comments.
The Blog has a new domain!
Last weekend I succeeded to move my domain kau-boys.de to my ROOT server. Before doing so I used a frame redirect for this domain. But with a little extra fee and waiting for the term of notice I can now present you the blog with the desired domain.
All external links should still be working correctly as they are rewrited to the new domain. Therefore all of your bookmarks should still work. I hope that Google will soon recognize the moving of the domain and updates it’s results.
I hope that I will be able to provide you more regularly with useful tips in the future. At the moment my master study takes a lot of time and I don’t have the time to do something fun. And beside study I has to work a little as studying isn’t for free.
Now I wish you a lot of fun with my blog!
Bernhard
@My english readers: I am sorry that most of the last posts haven’t been translated, yet. Some of them are only interessting for German readers. And I don’t had the time to translate the longer ones, yet.
