Month: February 2009

Welcome again!

Hi, and welcome back on my blog.

Following the progressive migration from epot.org to jepoirrier.net, you landed on the new address for my blog: http://www.jepoirrier.net/blog (new RSS feed here).

The migration process was easy, thanks to the WordPress eXtended RSS that contains posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. But there are two things left I wanted to keep: existing users and images which links are hard-coded in various posts.

For the links to images, I just replaced the old URL by the new one in VIM: :%s/old_path/new_path/g and voilà!

For the existing users, I just exported data from tables wp_users and wp_usermeta. So if you had an account on my previous blog (mandatory to post comments), you can use the same login and password! 🙂

Building on the move, I also changed links to more “sexy” permalink and allowed Gravatar for all comments (if you don’t have a gravatar, an identicon will be automatically generated for you).

One more thing to do: an automated redirection from the old pages/RSS to this one. I guess it would take the form of a HTTP 301 Redirection but I have still to automate the transformation of the 272 URLs …

See you here for the next post!

Photo credit: “We’ve moved” by Brian Gurrola on Flickr (CC-by-sa).

Using Mantis with a reduced mail() function

Mantis is a free web-based bug tracker. As most web trackers, it uses e-mail to notify testers and developers about the evolutions of issues they have reported or they just follow. For that purpose, Mantis uses Codeworx PHP Mailer class that gives you the opportunity to use the PHP mail() function, sendmail or a SMTP server to send those e-mails.

The use of the PHP mail() function is the default option. Unfortunately, some web hosting companies limits the PHP mail() function by forbidding the use of the 4th and 5th (optional) parameters. The result is that you can’t use the e-mail functionality of PHP mailer / Mantis because they use the 4th parameter.

The solution is to edit the file class.phpmailer.php in the directory mantis-dir/core/phpmailer/. Inside the file, look for the two lines containing the string “@mail” and replace the 4th argument by the e-mail address where the e-mail will be sent from. Example:

   $rt = @mail($to, $this->EncodeHeader($this->Subject), $body,
         "From: \"mybugs - Mantis bug tracker\" <me@domaine.tld>");
}
else
   $rt = @mail($to, $this->EncodeHeader($this->Subject), $body,
         "From: \"mybugs - Mantis bug tracker\" <me@domaine.tld>");

Now you have a fully functional bug tracker 🙂

FOSDEM 2009 and Gemvid 0.6c

This year, I only went for the Saturday afternoon session of FOSDEM 2009, the Free and Open Source software developers’ European Meeting. Two years ago, I mentioned the general trend that more women were interested in free/open source software/movement and this trend continues. But this time, I also noticed some really cute babies … and my son Neel-Alexandre was one of them of course! Although he’s only 7-month-old, he was really interested in the FreeBSD, Linux and Firefox mascots (respectively a red daemon, Tux the penguin and a fox). You are never too young to taste the truth 😉

I also gave a lightning talk about Gemvid, my solution to monitor rats general activity. I tried to explain most biological information needed to understand the principles and I think people were really interested in this software, something with an application a bit different than the previous talks. I updated the Gemvid website and I uploaded the latest revision (0.6c) that was “analysing” the audience from my laptop during the talk. Finally, I also uploaded the presentation (PDF, 1.3Mb) and you can directly see it below.

Non-invasive animal monitoring with Gemvidhttp://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=090207gemvid-1234047158004992-1&rel=0&stripped_title=noninvasive-animal-monitoring-with-gemvid

View more presentations from jepoirrier. (tags: gemvid science)

See you next year, for the next version?