Oct 9 2007

.NET Framework Going Open Source

Open source software is appearing in more and more places. It was started by people rebelling against closed source, commercial software, but its being used frequently today by commercial software developers as a marketing tool.

Free As In Free Software

Why would a software company give away its products? If a product couldn’t be sold, giving it away would be great link bait. People would download it, talk about it, blog about it, and hopefully use it. This is a great way to get free publicity for a product and scoring points with the open source community.

The .NET Framework is a product which Microsoft already gives away. It wouldn’t make sense to sell it since they want people to install the framework and run .NET applications. Its competitor, the Java Runtime Environment has always been free and today enjoys an overwhelming market share on a widespread array of devices.

An Open Source Framework

I read on ScottGu’s Blog that Microsoft will be releasing the source for the .NET Framework libraries. This has received much praise from many of Microsoft’s critics, but its really a clever marketing tactic. There’s nothing wrong with this, though. Microsoft can’t make money selling the .NET Framework. It has always been a free download and releasing the source will be of great benefit to software developers who want a deeper understanding of how the framework functions.

The source code will be released with the Microsoft Reference License as opposed to GPL.

imageIn one of the .NET server applications I use, when Microsoft released .NET 2.0, various functions in the web app no longer worked properly. Both the software developer and Microsoft blamed each other for the bugs. Now, with the source for .NET becoming available, a developer can examine the framework source code to pin point the cause of bugs.

.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

The source code will be released with .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. This may be an incentive to upgrade to the latest programming tools since the source code will likely be incompatible with earlier compilers. Software developers tend to be slow in upgrading their programming tools since it means making their old programs work with the new compilers.

The .NET 3.5 libraries source code can be downloaded as a standalone install, but really, do you think anyone will be using it and debugging code without Visual Studio 2008? Not likely. This will definitely help the sales of Microsoft’s latest programming tools. Perhaps that’s why the framework is going open source.

By Johan • Technology • 0

Oct 7 2007

Thunderbird: Connection to Server Time Out Error

Recently, my installation of Thunderbird stopped downloading e-mails. Its strange because I don’t think that I’ve changed anything on my computer. It was working earlier without any problems. The following error message appear after a long delay of trying to get e-mail:

image

The first thing you should do when software fails is shut it down and then restart it, and if that doesn’t fix the problem, reboot the computer. The next course of action taken was uninstall Thunderbird and all of the files that it installed were deleted.

These things didn’t solve the problem with Thunderbird and the mail was not downloading. I tested Outlook Express with one of my e-mail accounts and it was able to send and receive messages without problems.

After some thought, I checked the virus scanner (McAfee SecurityCenter). E-mail protection was enabled and I turned it off. Thunderbird was then able to send and receive e-mails.

I don’t know why the POP server was being blocked. It must have happened after an update to the McAfee software. Every virus scanner has the option to scan incoming and outgoing e-mail messages. Turning this feature off may prevent the time out error from occurring in Thunderbird.

By Johan • How To • 3

Oct 3 2007

Installing Joomla on 1&1

Joomla 1.5 RC2 (Endeleo) was released on September 1. There will probably be one more release candidate before the stable version is released. The current version has made major improvements in the software and fixed many bugs. Users of previous versions should upgrade soon.

I’m not sure why this version of Joomla is a second release candidate. RC2 (Mapya) was released on July 21. The current version should be called RC3 (Endeleo).

The Best Way to Install Joomla

Installing Joomla on 1&1 can be challenging. The typical way of setting it up is to first decompress the files in Windows and then uploading these files to your domain’s root folder by FTP or SSH. This is not a good way to transfer the files unless you don’t mind the 2 hours of time that it will take. Even though there are only 11.2 MB of files, there are 3,393 files in 650 folders. It takes time to create the nested folders and upload files to them. I should note that the Linux hosting package is required to install Joomla on 1&1. The Windows package doesn’t have the required PHP or MySQL.

A better way is to upload the .zip or .gz Joomla file you downloaded (i.e. Joomla-1.5RC.zip, or Joomla-1.5RC.tar.gz) and then upload it to your server. It can be decompressed there which will be a quick process. You need to login to your SSH account (available only in Business or higher packages on 1&1) and then use one of the following procedures (depending on which file you downloaded) for uncompressing Joomla. I recommend you install WinSCP which will give you PuTTY for using your account at the command line. Of course, you can install PuTTY on its own, but WinSCP is a great tool for managing your files and folders in 1&1.

Steps for Uncompressing Joomla

The Joomla-1.5RC.zip should be in the folder that it will be installed on your server.

  1. Login to your account with SSH.
  2. Move to the folder where the .zip file is (this is where you’ll be installed Joomla). You can move around in Linux with the cd command, i.e. cd MyCMS, which moves you to the MyCMS folder

Uncompressing a Zip File in Linux

  1. Enter the following command to unzip the Joomla files,

    unzip Joomla-1.5RC.zip

    Linux is case sensitive so enter the command exactly as displayed. Once you run the above command, the hundreds of files and folders will be uncompressed.

Uncompressing a Gzip File in Linux

  1. Enter the following commands to uncompress the Joomla files,

    tar -zxvf Jooma-1.5RC.tar.gz

    Linux is case sensitive so enter the command exactly as displayed. Once you run the above command, the hundreds of files and folders will be uncompressed.

Run the Setup Program

  1. After the files are uncompressed, open the URL in your web browser where the files were copied to and start the Joomla installation.

You will save a great deal of time by uncompressing Joomla on your server instead of uploading them from your computer using an FTP client.

Making Joomla SEO Friendly

The URL created by the default install of Joomla are not SEO friendly and could prevent your site from being properly indexed by search engines. Turn on the SEO Settings in Global Configuration and then make the following modification to the htaccess.txt files in the root folder:

  1. Rename the file to .htaccess
  2. Open the file in a text editor (this is where WinSCP is useful).
  3. Scroll down the file until you find

    # RewriteBase /

  4. Remove the comment so it looks like

    RewriteBase /

Your website is now SEO friendly.

Banner

By Johan • How To • 13

1 2 3