Wordpress and Gallery2

Over the Christmas break I found myself setting up a blog and associated picture album for my wife and me to use to share our travel experiences and pictures. I came across the excellent v-slider theme from Rui Pereira. It is a great theme that integrates smoothly with the equally excellent Gallery2. One of the big plusses is that Rui has created many option pages for the theme. One of them is the colour editor, you can change all the colours simply by clicking on a colour and using the colour wheel to change it; no messy fiddling with set-up scripts.

Changing the v-Slider theme colours

One or two things I came across when I was installing it that might be useful for others include:

Photo and WPG link appearing on the links line.
The Gallery2 embedding is done with the help of a Wordpress plugin called WPG2. This automatically creates a link to the gallery called WPG at the top of the page. The v-slider theme also creates a link to the gallery called Photos. The v-Slider link cannot be removed easily but the WPG one can be removed by going to manage pages in Wordpress and changing the status of the page to private or unpublished. It disappears from the link line. Don't delete the page otherwise the gallery linking no longer works.

More columns in Gallery
After setting everything up I found that gallery only had two columns for the thumbnails but I wanted three or four. First, I changed the column width in the v-slider2 theme in Gallery. I set it to 200 pixels (from 250, I think), saved it and found that I now had three columns.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that Gallery2 is embedded within wordpress, I found that larger pictures were getting chopped when I looked at them. I had also set v-Slider to be fluid width rather than fixed and the gallery was certainly too narrow now. I increased the size of the embedded Gallery to 900 and now have a wider Gallery and four columns of thumbnails. Very nice! To switch the Gallery width, go to WordPress admin and click on WPG2. Choose the "WPG2 Output" tab and change the width in the header, this is my finished one:

.g2_column {width: 900px;margin: 0px 1px 0px 12px;}

Save it and go back to the Gallery.

Subclipse - old client?

After updating my Mac with Subversion 1.4.4 and running a status on one of my Java folders I go the following error in Eclipse:

Unsupported working copy format svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '/Users/fred/workspace/Project/lib'; please get a newer Subversion client

Well, I immediately made sure that I was up-to-date, I am running Subclipse 1.2.4. To find your version, go to Help|Software Updates|Manage Configuration. You will see your version number there.


Obviously Subclipse 1.2.4 is running the old Sunversion client. I searched in several places to try to find a newer version but to no avail. I then explored SVNKit and found instructions for switching it on in Subclipse. SVNKit uses the newer Subversion 1.4 protocol and comes with Subclipse but it is not enabled by default.

To turn SVNKit on, goto Eclipse preferences and select SVNKit under the SVN option:



Click OK and you are ready to go with the latest version of SVN under Eclipse.

You will be asked to enter your password again or to choose your private key to use with the remote site if you are using ssh.

OpenID

OpenID is a new way of authenticating yourself on the net. "[It's] an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity." (http://openid.net) It's very simple and seems to me to be very versatile although the descriptions of it leave a little to be desired. I've had a close look at it and I like it, so here's my interpretation of OpenID.

One Username for all

The idea is that you create a unique id that you register somewhere with a password. Then you use your unique id and password at all the sites you visit. One id, one password, very simple. Sounds very much like the derided Microsoft Passport, right? Well, the basics are there but OpenID is so very much more versatile and not in the control of one single corporation.

One way of creating a unique id is to use a URL that you can prove you are the owner of. You register a name and password at any OpenID server, you can have your own on your own server if you want. You get back a URL that you can use to sign in to OpenID enabled sites. Mine is http://specialk.myopenid.com. When I give that name to a site, it contacts the OpenID server at the URL given and the OpenID server asks me for my password.

Ok, so far, neat but not earth shattering, it's still very much like MS Passport.

Persona

The OpenID server tells me which site wants me to login (well, that's obvious) and also about the fields of information that the site is asking for. It allows me to create a new persona showing optional and required fields that the site is asking for or to use an existing persona. I can then opt to allow the login and give the credentials once, or always.



One Password Site

From a security point of view, my password goes to the server site, not the site I am logging in to. One nice thing about this is that the server does not always require my password because once I have signed into the OpenID server site, the server knows who I am, it just asks which persona I want to use.

Myopenid.com also keeps track of sites that have asked for my credentials but there are anonymous servers around too, one where you can just make up an OpenID URL and start using it.

Ok, pretty neat now, but what if I want to change my OpenID server or it goes belly up, do I have to re-register with all the sites I want to use? Well, no, because I don't have to use the server's URL for my identity I can use one that I will always have e.g. one from my own domain and redirect that page to the OpenID server of my choosing.

I have set up a page on my site to use as my OpenID URL, it is at http://www.somewhere.com/openid/myname. This page contains:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<link rel="openid.server"
 href="https://www.myopenid.com/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate"
 href="http://specialk.myopenid.com">
</head>

<body/>

What it does is redirect the request from the site you want to log into, to the real OpenID server. This allows mt to have a permanent OpenID URL entirely under my control and I can change the server whenever I like. The sites I log in to will know me by my somewhere.com URL.

Neato or what?

Links

There are only a handful of sites using OpenID so far but Digg are planning to use it, Microsoft and AOL are involved, this could be big.

There are already many software libraries to make it easy to use OpenID for your sites.

Public OpenID servers offer different service extras, you can shop around.

The Rudest Place On Earth?

This location in Austria has to be the rudest place on Earth. Not only that, where else can you get nine F***ing swear words on one single Google map? Literally! There is no trickery to this, just zoom out and see for yourself.

If you want to go there, the town's GPS co-ordinates are 48' 03"N 13' 51"E. Apparently the Brits have been heading over in droves and nicking the signs. I looked for the town on Google Maps after someone sent me this clipping, which I think has been making the rounds for quite a few years now. Click on the image for the full text:

Cygwin and Eclipse over X11

Problem
My MacBook HD has died. While I am awaiting its repair I've switched to my Windows XP machine. I needed to run Elcipse on a remote site where I will be running some demos next week. Shouldn't be difficult, simply run ssh into the remote Unix system, allow X11 to use the open connection and "Bob's your Uncle."

So, I installed Cygwin with X11 on XP and Eclipse on a remote Linux system. I opened the ssh connection, tested X11 with an xterm then started Eclipse but received several of the following errors

winMultiWindowXMsgProcErrorHandler -
     ERROR: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)

A few seconds later Eclipse/Java gave a fatal error and died. I tried running Firefox remotely, it had the same BadWindow errors but carried on running and worked perfectly.

Solution
After a long search on the Internet I came across CISC474, Unix Knowledge. It suggested using -Y instead of -X to start the ssh session i.e.

ssh -Y user@host.example.com

I tried Eclipse again, same errors but this time Eclipse carried on running.

The difference between -X and -Y?
From NC State University

Trusted vs. Untrusted X11 Forwarding

Due to security concerns (highlighted by a vulnerability in using SSH with Trusted X11 Forwarding), OpenSSH (as of version 3.8) now supports both untrusted (-X) and trusted (-Y) X11 Forwarding. The difference is what level of permissions the client application has on the X-server running on the client machine. Untrusted (-X) X11 Forwarding is more secure, but unfortunatley most applications do not support running with less priviledges as of yet. So when attempting to remotely access applications, using Trusted (-Y) X11 Forwarding will have less applications problems for the near future.