Soliciting Fame

This morning I noticed that Open-Mesh introduced a new logo.

I certainly hope it’s a stop-gap before a better logo because this one looks like someone spent five minutes learning Photoshop while making it.

To Mike and anyone involved with Open-Mesh, I suggest you check out Worth1000. It’s an awesome site where you can get a really quality logo for only a couple hundred dollars.

I wrote a neat little script to simply read a directory, search for thumbnails, then print a list with links to the larger images. I look for the thumbnails so it doesn’t get images that don’t have small versions.

There are limitations, for example if you put a PDF with ‘.thumb’ in the directory it will try to link it as an image. This is ok for me because I’m controlling what goes in the directories. I suppose I could add a check for it later if I need to.

<?php

/* This little snippet takes the directory and looks for any files with ‘.thumb’. Then it takes out the ‘.thumb’ to link to the big image. Then it makes a nice little list. */

$dir = ‘gallery/gallery2/’; /* Point to the right gallery directory */

echo “<ul>”;

if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {

while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) { /* Loop over directory */

if (strpos($file, ‘.thumb’)) { /* Look for the .thumb */

$filebig = str_replace(’.thumb’,”,$file); /* Remove .thumb for our big files */

echo “<li><a href=\”$dir$filebig\” rel=\”lightbox[1]\”><img src=\”$dir$file\” border=\”0\”/></a></li>\n”; /* Make the list with both file names */

}

}

closedir($handle); /* Finish */

}

echo “</ul>”

?>

I posted earlier about buying a Meraki Pro Wireless Repeater. So far it’s been doing pretty well sitting in the window. This last week I’ve had over 100 people access it and most of them were not in my cafe. I’d say that’s pretty good for the first router.

Because it’s doing well I decided to order 20 of the Open-Mesh routers. At that number I get them for $39.99 each. The plan is to cover my street in wireless and then go and sell ads to the businesses that operate in the area.

The reason I’m switching to Open-Mesh from Meraki is pretty clear cut. First the price of a Meraki router is like three times more than an Open-Mesh one. The gain isn’t that much smaller and I can easily stick a bigger antenna on them.

Open-Mesh also comes pre-flashed with RO.B.IN which is an open source mesh network. Meraki has proprietary, locked down, restricted software that doesn’t let me properly implement a good splash page, which is essentially my goal.

At a municipal WiFi focus group a month ago I learned about the proposal of having an Edmonton WiFi portal of sorts that shows you information about the area you are in. I think some sort of Wiki would be perfect for this and I’m going to look into it for my project.

My friend, Mack, suggested that I demo the mesh network stuff at the next DemoCampEdmonton. While it would be interesting to show, it’s not my technology, I’m just doing an implementation.

On March 5th I purchased an account with DreamHost. I’d heard good things about them and they’re a fairly large name in the world of web hosting. Unfortunately our relationship was not meant to be.

The last two months have been pretty frustrating as DreamHost was constantly having problems and my blog was extremely slow. Even just navigating their control panel was a boring nightmare. And Wordpress! It’s slow enough as it is but when I have to wait a full minute to post something it’s not bearable.

So I switched to GoDaddy. My friend Rob and I pitched in for a Virtual Dedicated Server together and it’s only costing about $35/month total. So far it’s going well and I have a lot more options for customization with their full cPanel install that DreamHost’s dumbed down manager.

I am still well within the 90 day refund policy that DreamHost has so I emailed them today asking for a refund. Hopefully they don’t make up an excuse and just give it to me.

I’m reading up on Joomla! It’s a seriously kick-ass open-source application. I’m a bit miffed that I haven’t taken a closer look at it until now.

The reason I’m reading up on Joomla is because I accepted the IT Director’s position for the Alberta School of Business Students Association (BSA). It’s not a “real” IT Director’s position where I implement new grandiose technologies and run a huge department or anything. This is basically a service position for the students where I help maintain their website, publish updates, work with the Students Union to do our BSA elections, and help students get personalized business cards if they want. The great thing is I can do this while I’m in Germany.

Rob, one of my best friends and my employer for the summer, and I are going to try and rework his old site Equine Edmonton, I’m going to suggest we use Joomla! to streamline any problems we’ll run into.

Does anyone see a problem with doing contract web design and then implementing prefabbed infrastructure like WordPress of Joomla!?