MindlessCode.net

How often have you seen this posted in my blog? I do have to admit that I’m not really happy with most of the CMS’s around. I like Typo3, but it takes a lot of system resources and also doesn’t give me enough “control” over some of the content on the pages. For example, say I wanted to create myself a database, for example with a list of “Evil” companies. Now, to interface that database with a Typo3 website would require writing an extention, something I don’t like at all. Of course, if anybody thinks I’m several light-years out of my skull, and it actually is possible to do what I’m saying without an extention. So, unless somebody tells me otherwise, I’m out looking for other CMS’s.

Drupal looks nice (it’s used by SpreadFirefox) and looks powerful at first glance. I’ll have to play around with it some more, but it may be the CMS I choose for my website. Other nice CMS’s are Mambo and phpMyNuke…I’ll have to play with them later.

Anybody have any other suggestions for easy to use, easy to theme, fast, and reliable CMS’s?

Hi All,
We’re finally finished with our seed catalog (see this for the cover–it’s based on the Fibonacci sequence). On to other more exciting stuff.

I’ve also been hacking on our install of osCommerce for our website. We haven’t been getting any orders, but lots of catalog requests…strange. Looking at the log, it might be that it’s too complicated for people to place orders :S. Does anybody have any suggestions (feel free to place test orders www.wildgardenseed.com, just leave a comment saying test) and we’ll send you a pack of seeds :D.

<PLUG>
Also, if you’re looking for good, cheap, and excellent hosting, then I recommend D4Hosting. Chris Jordan is running it along with me. The server is located at Ezzi. The control panel is cPanel. If your site has any sort of special needs, contact Chris (chris&d4hosting.com, replace & with @, of course), as he is very flexable and happy to accommodate you and whatever your site need. Anyways, give him a try!
</PLUG>

Came across this recently:
“Bush’s second term: Your views”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/4184023.stm

Here’s some quotes that I found:

Hopefully the second four years will be as successful as the first. Regime change in Iran before they finish their nuclear weapons is an important objective but getting rid of federal income tax is also an exciting project. My own recommendation would be to make us energy independent within ten years and to redirect NASA away from space temporarily to help achieve that. It’s good to know that the American people, despite being labelled as deeply divided, show so much good sense as to have chosen the man who will not offer to surrender America’s freedoms to all and sundry.
Dave M, Tonopah, Nevada, USA

President Bush is one of the world’s greatest leaders. He is the best president we have had since Reagan. He is concerned not only about America, but the world. He is doing his best to bring freedom to all nations. God bless our great president!
Lynn, USA

Are these comments susposed to be jokes? If anyone really, truly believes that “He is the best president we have had since Reagan.”, I think I’m going to “…to make like a cicada and hide under the bed for four years.”.

I mean, seriously, what’s so great about what the president has done in the past for years, and what he’s promising to do in the next four years (we’re starting to sound a little more like Capitalist Russia, if you know what I mean, but more of that tomorrow).

Of course, there are some funny, smart people too:

It’s so hard for non-Americans to understand how this man got a second term. God help us all.
Bob, Switzerland

Help me too, please.

[OK, OK, I think the post by “Dave M, Tonopah, Nevada, USA” is a joke, and if it’s not, I’m going to be reeeallly worried].

Oh, and an interesting post over at IO ERROR.

I’ve got 14. Leave your email, First and Last name. (Emails won’t be shown). First come, first serve.

Interesting article on cNet

Hi Everybody,
No, I haven’t died, been taken off to Guantanamo Bay, or had our ADSL line cut/disconnected… The server that hosts our website (D4Hosting) got broken into on Christmas Eve (December 24, 2004) and turned into a spam zombie. Then, on Christmas Day, at about 8:30 AM PST (I Know, I saw it happen!), the datacenter (Ezzi) then reformatted the harddrive of the machine in an effort to stop the machine. Why they didn’t just “pull the plug”, I’ll never know…but that’s what they did.

So, we more or less lost everything that was sitting on the server–the Wild Garden Seed website, the Gathering Together Farm website, my blog, and all the Slackware Packages I had created (>35).

But, I was able to find most (yes, most–not all) of the websites on various backups, search engine caches, the Wayback Machine, and, of course, just files laying around that I had copied for no apparent reason.

After poking around, this is what I found:

• The Wild Garden Seed website as of March 2004 and data as of December 19^th. (Whew, that was lucky…the data for the website was the most important part of the website, more or less).
• My blog from a cached copy by Yahoo! Search. (It’s not totally up to date–but pretty recent).
• The GTF Newsletters (Found on a local machine).
• My Email (I use IMAP, and I lost it all).

What actually happened?

• 25/12/2004: The server went down.
• 28/12/2004: I put up a temporary webpage on my friend Paul Hampson’s server. Thank you, Paul!.
• 29/12/2004: The server came back up…blank.
• 31/12/2004: I spoke with Chris (who runs D4) about running FC3 instead of the outdated RH9. He agreeded, and now I’m helping him admin the system.
• 2/1/2005: (*2005*, w00t!). FC3 installed, I start rebuilding the GTF and WGS sites. GTF is easy, just uploaded what I had (most of it). The Wild Garden Seed one? Not so. I lost my mail as you recall, and thus the SSL certificates that secured www.wildgardenseed.com. So, I had to generate a new CSR. Fortunately our certificate from GeoTrust had “Reissue Insurance” (whatever the hell that means, and why should you have to pay more for it? I don’t know).
• 2/1/2005: So, I got it reissued. Whew! Of course, in accordance with Murphy’s Law, the certificate didn’t work. Damn. I spent at least 3 more days trying to figure out why OpenSSL was giving me:
  unable to load certificate
5648:error:0906D064:PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:bad base64 decode:pem_lib.c:747:
• 7/1/2005: Turned out that SquirrelMail was causing the certificate to be invalid by wrapping it funny. Of course, it did it in such a way that all the lines looked even, and I couldn’t see what the problem was. I switched to NeoMail (also included with cPanel), and, lo-and-behold, the certificate worked perfectly! Boy was I happy. But not for long.
• 9/1/2005: Well, SSL is working now, that’s nice. But why do I need SSL? To handle credit cards? Oh, maybe that means that when you enter your credit card number, it’s actually processed. Yup, you guessed it, our integration with TrustCommerce wasn’t working. In the past, I’ve used cURL through SSL, and that worked fine. However now for some reason, cURL wasn’t working, it was just giving me “Error processing card.” The integration also has an extention for PHP called TCLink. “Great! I though, I’ll try this, it should work.”. Well, given my previous luck, guess what happened. Yup, that’s right, it didn’t work. The test script worked fine, but when I actually tried to integrate it with osCommerce I got an error telling me that the “Extention could not be loaded, could not find file”. Grrr, tclink.so was right there with the osCommerce TrustCommerce plugin. I tried outputting $_ENV[’PWD’], that pointed to ‘/’, so I tried copying tclink.so there…no go.
• 10/1/2005: w00t! I got it to work! :) :). I put tclink.so in the same directory as checkout_payment.php (top osCommerce dir). That worked! Credit Cards went through and everything (on the WGS site, anyway) was back to normal (except a few orders that aren’t logged–luckly they were printed out).

So, that’s what happened to me over the holiday. I’ll work on reposting all my blog posts from the Yahoo! Search cache (some image will be missing, but that’s hopefully all). Of course, that probably won’t happen very soon because we’re right in the middle of being “Chaos Design Inc.” and designing/writing our 2005 seed catalog (kinda late, huh? We’re always the latest seed company to get our catalog out :P). Not only that, but I’ve got to get this QuickI (my invoicing program) thingie up and running (it’s almost there, promise!).

So, don’t expect me to respond to your emails any time soon or anything, but I will sometime! By the way, you can always email me at the following if my normal, taj at wildgardenseed.com is down: .

Well, that’s all for now and I hope you all had a good holiday!