Revision [6728]
This is an old revision of IanHayhurst made by IanHayhurst on 2005-03-15 17:17:00.
Ian Hayhurst
A little more about me..
Interests
Photography Some of my stuff on Photo.net
contact info :[http://www.ianhayhurst.co.uk/]
I am an 'Informatics IT specialist' er that's a UNIX sysadmin for a large Agrochemical company, in the Research and Development IS department (as opposed to the IS department that services the business) We support the company scientific research community. More specifically, in my case Chemistry Informatics systems.
My Interest in Wikka
I have an internal (intranet) install of Wikka Wiki. This is quite suprising / unusual / subversive in an organisation that is unfortunatle strongly orientated towards applications that have a particular vendor bias (I'll leave that to your imagination.... you don't have to think too hard to guess which it might be)The use of Wikka is an experiment In our organisation (and seemingly very succesful so far) that sprang from a meeting following a periodic re-organisation of the department that left us very much spread over UK, mainland Europe and the U.S. but with the requirement to work in a much more co-ordinated way. Intranets were used (in my opinion) in a awkward or unimaginative manner and percieved as a mechanism for location of information stored largely wordprocessor / spreadsheet documents. This was something along the lines of a slightly more colourful file share and quite static. Access to this required considerable inertia as the prefered method was via frontpage. Islands of information become stale and if you found what you were looking for it was rarely current.
What I'm trying to acomplish (With this page)
A sort of blog of the journey.stream of consciousness follows for now:-
How the interest grew, Reactions, what worked, what didnt,features that help, ideas for what is required...
how to explain categories to people (harder than you think)
Upgrade Migration experiences (started with 1.1.5.3 now on 1.1.6.0)..
Added GmBowen action to Blog WikkaBlog2 (request of a developer... we'll see if he uses it)
(although the contents require a new table in the database and as such the contents are not searched).....
16 Feb 2005
RSS: This never worked on my Gentoo linux box..
reporting the error
error on line 130 of /var/www/localhost/htdocs/Wikka/3rdparty/plugins/onyx-rss/onyx-rss.php: The specified file could not be opened.
but was fine on A SLES9 box, with a clone of the the wikka site...
The problem obviously futhur afield than the Wikka install....I'm embarased to say how long that took to track down but finally it came down to the php.ini file the line that says
allow_url_fopen = On # this was set to Off in Gentoo linux install! so no working onyx-rss parser
We have a second wiki now (also Wikka)... to avoid having to share out the webroot to windows via samba to allow my old group (Bioinformatics) to maintain their website now their number is reduced and I'm supporting Chemoinformatics I have set them up a wiki, Oohh goodie we can use interwiki links internally now ! The intention was to provide
an 'easy to edit' website but the users are interested in adding stufff so it should get interesting. Firstly they missed the share price applet. a preoccupation of folks in large corporate entities composed of other historical (and smaller entities) seems to be watching the stock of the previous parent companies of which their nest egg consists
Ok so php looks sufficiently like perl that I feel I can have a go....
Looks like I need to create an action to display the applet as quoted html wasn't enough
hint from the freemind.php which seems to do this
Obviously this shareprice.php is only useful to someone with the applet...
but now I can wrap applets up as pseudo actions to insert them in the wiki, easier method anyone?
<?php
$output = "<applet code=\"Basic_Colour_XML_Table.class\" codebase=\"http://chemistry.rt.intra/shareprice/\" h
eight=110 width=450 archive=\"xerces.jar,XMLParser.jar\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfont\" value=\"Verdana\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfontstyle\" value=\"PLAIN\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfontsize\" value=\"12\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletbgcolour\" value=\"eeeeee\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfgcolour\" value=\"000000\">\n".
"<param name=\"filename\" value=\"price.xml\">\n".
"<param name=\"shareList\" value=\"XYZ.L PQR.D\">\n".
"<param name=\"updatetime\" value=\"10\">\n".
" Sorry, your browser just won't let you see the current price - it doesn't run Java.\n".
"</applet>\n";
print ($output);
?>
$output = "<applet code=\"Basic_Colour_XML_Table.class\" codebase=\"http://chemistry.rt.intra/shareprice/\" h
eight=110 width=450 archive=\"xerces.jar,XMLParser.jar\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfont\" value=\"Verdana\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfontstyle\" value=\"PLAIN\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfontsize\" value=\"12\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletbgcolour\" value=\"eeeeee\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfgcolour\" value=\"000000\">\n".
"<param name=\"filename\" value=\"price.xml\">\n".
"<param name=\"shareList\" value=\"XYZ.L PQR.D\">\n".
"<param name=\"updatetime\" value=\"10\">\n".
" Sorry, your browser just won't let you see the current price - it doesn't run Java.\n".
"</applet>\n";
print ($output);
?>
18 Feb 2005
Noticed ChristianBarthelemy has posted something about AD Activedirectory intergration, ActiveDirectory
I'm looking forward to this as getting intranet users to sign on to yet another system is a bar to entry
23 Feb 2005
- Developers trying to link in documents on file shares, (rather than read the reams I wrote about uploading them) so a bunch of links appearing that only work in IE in the form \\servername\folder\file.bla firefox doesn't understand them so leaves wikka.php to parse the link resulting in a request to create a page of with a heavily backslached gibberish name.
- Big interest in actions that pull from Oracle, (and lots of pressure) so I've recompiled my php against the Oracle instant client (10g) and had some sucess in getting usefull stuff back ...now that spells a move off the Alpha Linux box as I don't believe Oracle have a client for Alpha linux that I can compile php --with-oci8 against... and Darn it all Some Major project is using the wiki for awareness updates... (actually it's nice to get the exposure, but very hard to move machines now). At least I have a service alias in the DNS so I can move box, then where alias points and they'll never know (but the Intel box has 2 cpu's with 4 x the clockspeed halving the page creation time.... not an issue yet !)
- Lots of php to pull stuff from oracle (mostly a bug track system) but the guys bring back the data and then use some nasty VB script to hide or show rows based on dropdown selects, shame as it only works in IE, The development has gone a little cold whilst others argue over the most appropriate place to put this stuff.
- RSS: the onyx-rss doesnt cope with proxies so I can pull in intranet feeds but nothing externaly, I did find a sockets based patch to fix this I think somewhere..but lost it again. I thought it was the proxy env var at first but it's probably the onyx-plugin
Hardware
For now I'm running our installation on an HP / Compaq AlphaDS10 with Gentoo Linux, Gigabit ethernet...
(Nothing wrong with Tru64 infact it's a fine OS more later...)
I converted the box to Gentoo linux as an experiment to run some alternative architectures for
a server farm (we do a fair ammount with server farms for compute intensive chemo/bioinformatics)
actually so far I'm very happy with my little Gentoo/GNU Linux on Alpha... for a bigger system I miss the flexability that the Tru64 ADVFS filesystem brings
The second Wiki (development) is on an HP DL360 Dual p4 2.4Ghz, and 4 x 36 GB scsi RAID 0+1 running SLES8
CategoryUsers
