Linktivator.com allows you to copy and paste text links that you find on other sites or forums and turn the links into active, clickable links.

1. Install Wine

To install Wine in Fedora, we will use yum. However, for other distributions, it should be widely available in your respective package manager or you can install from source.

[root@localhost ~]# yum install wine*

2. Install Photoshop

I installed Photoshop from the CD. I attempted to run the setup files from Nautilus, but it failed and I continued the rest of the installation from the command line. My CD was auto-mounted in the /media/Photoshop CS2/ folder so I will navigate there to open the setup file. Be sure not to run the installation as root.

[user@localhost ~]$ cd "/media/Photoshop CS2"
[user@localhost ~]$ wine Setup.exe

Now the normal Photoshop setup routine will initiate. I selected my region and continued. Next I was prompted for Gecko integration. This is a result of using Wine and is required by the Adobe license screen to display an HTML version of the license in the program window. I allowed it to install the integration, but it never completed. I canceled the integration and it only affected the next screen that asks me to agree to the license – by not displaying the text of the license. This is fine, so I selected Agree to continue on. From here on out you can continue with the installation as you would on a Windows machine.

3. Execution

Everything in the installation went smoothly and didn’t garner any more attention than had I installed it on a regular PC running Windows. To run Photoshop, I need to locate the executable and run it with Wine – just as we ran the setup executable with Wine. When using Wine, it will create a folder that represents the C: Drive in Windows. On a Fedora machine, this is /home/user/.wine/drive_c/ and contains a Program Files directory.

[user@localhost ~]$ cd "/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS2/"
[user@localhost ~]$ wine Photoshop.exe

This initiated and started Photoshop just fine. I messed around with a few images and was pleased with the installation. My next move was to create a menu shortcut for launching Photoshop. I did this and then ran it again to insure my menu entry worked right and was presented with the following error:

I found that this is an error that occurs in a Windows installation of Photoshop when there is an issue with the preferences. My current workaround is to wrap the Wine command to execute Photoshop in a shell script that will delete the preference file after Photoshop is closed. This means that any saved preferences will be lost each time Photoshop is used. Hopefully I can find out what is precisely going on here soon and come up with a more eloquent solution, but this will have to do in the meantime. Here is the contents of photoshop.sh which I store in my /home/user/bin folder for easy execution:

#!/bin/bash
wine "/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Photoshop.exe"
rm "/home/user/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/path/Application Data/Adobe/\
Photoshop/9.0/Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings/Adobe Photoshop CS2 Prefs.psp"

Be sure the set the script to executable after you write it with:

[user@localhost bin]$ chmod +x photoshop.sh

Now you can create a menu entry or launcher that executes this script.

I just updated the theme of this blog and, to no surprise, it does not render correctly in IE 6 or IE 7. It looks exactly the same in Firefox, Opera and Konqueror though. At Rich’s forum, he suggests that more people rally with him on this cause. I am not yet prepared to cut IE users out entirely, but it is definitely in my head now. If you are interested, he has also posted the short PHP code to stop IE from browsing:

<?php
  if (eregi("MSIE",getenv("HTTP_USER_AGENT")) ||
  eregi("Internet Explorer",getenv("HTTP_USER_AGENT"))) {
    Header("Location: http://www.domain.com/ie_reject.html");
    exit;
  }
?>

You can place this snippet at the top of any page that you do not want to be seen in an IE browser. Replace domain.com with your own domain name and be sure to create ie_reject.html with a little message explaining what just happened. Rich’s message IE page can be seen here.

It would be absolutely amazing if this type of behavior became widespread, but I don’t have much faith in the movement. Unfortunately, there are larger revolutions on the horizon.

A Patent Problem

Patenting software has only been well established in the United States since the early 1990s. There is some controversy to the legality of patenting software. It has been suggested that Microsoft began patenting any computer process they could. Being able to patent a process rather than actual code would bar other developers from writing their own code for the same process – and effectively destroy innovation.

Microsoft has thousands of such patents and has offered deals to certain Linux distributors in order to protect that distribution’s users from being sued. Novell, Linspire and Xandros have all bowed to Microsoft and teamed up with them – buckling under the weight of the fear, uncertainty and doubt that Microsoft is so fond of spreading.

Recently, Microsoft brought this offer to Red Hat – the most widespread Linux distribution in corporate America and the handler of the Fedora Project. Red Hat denied the deal. Red Hat director of corporate communications Leigh Day was quoted as saying: “We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency.”

Popular user distribution Ubuntu has also denied the deal. Canonical’s CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, posted on his blog: “Allegations of ‘infringement of unspecified patents’ carry no weight whatsoever. We don’t think they have any legal merit, and they are no incentive for us to work with Microsoft on any of the wonderful things we could do together.”

I’m glad to see there are members of the community that will stand up to these bullies and fight for free software.

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First we will set up the database table for storing the user login information. We will be encrypting the passwords later on, here is the SQL code for the table:

CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `id` int(4) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `username` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
  `password` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM

I insert the users manually through my phpMyAdmin front-end. If I am doing a site that has multiple users, then chances are good that I will be using a content management system, such as Drupal. I use this authentication method for smaller sites and do not find it necessary to write a script for inserting users, but creating one would be relatively simple. The one thing you need to be sure to do when inserting a new user is to select MD5 under the function section for the password (see screenshot below). MD5 is a form of encryption that is easy to implement with PHP.

Now we have the MySQL end taken care of and we can focus on securing the pages. For each page that we only want to be seen by authorized eyes, we need to put in some PHP code. I put this code snippet as the first text after the <body> tag. If you are using PHP4, then the code must be the very first text at the top of the web document.

<?php
  session_start();

  if (!isset($_SESSION['is_logged_in'])) {
    header("Location:login.php");
    die();
    }
?>

This snippet checks to see if a user has been authenticated for this session. If not, then the user is redirected to a login form and the script dies. If the user has been authenticated for this session, then the page continues to display the contents. Now we need to create a login page. The code above specifically refers to login.php so we will name the new page just that. Here is my code for the login page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <title>Login</title>
  </head>

  <body>
    <form method="POST" action="check.php">
      Username:<br />
      <input type="text" name="username" />
      <br /><br />
      Password:<br />
      <input type="password" name="password" />
      <br /><br />
      <input type="submit" id="subbut" value="Submit" />
    </form>
  </body>
</html>

You should notice in the above code that the form is posting to a file named check.php. This file will query our previously created MySQL database to verify the user's credentials. Here is how it is coded:

<?php
  session_start();

  if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == "POST") {
    mysql_connect("mysql.example.com", "username", "password");
    @mysql_select_db("database") or die( "Unable to connect to database");
    $username = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['username']);
    $password = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['password']);
    $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='$username' AND
      password=md5('$password')");

    if(mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) {
      $_SESSION['is_logged_in'] = 1;
    }
  }

  if(!isset($_SESSION['is_logged_in'])) {
    header("location:login.php");
  } else {
    header("location:authenticated.php");
  }
?>

I have created a page that requires this authentication for you to view, you can visit it here. It is named authenticated.php and that is why the else statement above references that page. It will redirect you to the login.php page unless you have been authenticated. The username and password are user and password respectively. On the authenticated test page you are given to option of logging out. This was done by creating a file named logout.php with the following code:

<?php
  session_start();
  session_destroy();

  header("location:authenticated.php");
?>

That's all there is to it. If you have any questions you can leave a comment or use the contact page and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

First, you need to follow the aforementioned post to set up the click counter. In the interest of not repeating myself, I will omit that code from this post. Following is the PHP code that we will use:

<?php
  mysql_connect("mysql.example.com", "username", "password");
  @mysql_select_db("database") or die( "Unable to connect to database");
  $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM linkcount");

  $num = mysql_num_rows($result);

  mysql_close();

  echo "<table><tr><td>Link</td><td>Count</td></tr>";

  for ($i=0; $i<$num; $i++) {
	  if ($tmp = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
		  extract($tmp);

		  echo "<tr><td>$id</td>";
		  echo "<td>$count</td></tr>";
	  }
  }

  echo "</table>";
?>

There are many different ways to code a front-end like this. I am by no means a PHP expert, but I know enough to usually get the job done. This code will give you a good starting point and you can elaborate on the code with some simple HTML to dress up the display table a bit. I would usually advise against using tables in your web development ventures, but when it comes to returning MySQL queries there really isn't a better way.

To display these results in a Wordpress post, you will need a plugin to allow running custom PHP code. Wordpress does not allow the execution of PHP code by default. In this blog I only show the code and do not have a real need to embed it – so I do not currently use one of these plugins. However, you can view the results of the above code here.

Note: This article will not cover the installation of Drupal. The first thing I do is turn on the clean URLs. This option is available when logged in as an administrator under Administer>Site Configuration>Clean URLs. Drupal requires that you run the test first to determine whether or not your server is set up with PHP's mod_rewrite module. This will enable the use of meaningful URLs, rather than PHP posting text. To further compliment the use of clean URLs, we are going to install a Drupal module that will automatically name our posts and pages for us. This module is pathauto, download the appropriate package and upload the pathauto folder into the modules folder on your server. Be sure to enable it under Drupal's module section. If you have already created content and are only now installing this module, then it is important that you navigate to the pathauto configuration section and have it bulk generate index aliases.

One problem with Drupal is the creation of duplicate pages. For example: if you create a new post, then you will be presented with four different URLs for the same content:

http://example.com/new-post

http://example.com/new-post/

http://example.com/node/2

http://example.com/node/2/

This practice looks bad to search engines. So, we need to edit our .htaccess file, located at the root of our webserver, to prevent it from using the trailing slash. We will then edit our robots.txt file to prevent the search engines from indexing the /node area, thus preventing it from being an issue.

First we open out .htaccess file and add the following to the beginning of the file (replace example\.com with your domain name):

# remove trailing slashes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?example\\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Next we need to edit our robots.txt file to prevent the search engines from indexing our /node area. Add the following line:

Disallow: /node/

That should take care of the basic SEO setbacks that come with a default installation of Drupal. You may also want to implement the XML Sitemap module to automatically produce a sitemap when new content is created. It will also notify several search engines when it is updated.

We will be creating a script that, when activated, will call up Firefox and send us to the composition section of Gmail. Then we will set this script up as the default e-mail client and send the target e-mail address to it. So, first we will put together a simple script and name it gmailto.sh. Here is what it should be comprised of:

#! /bin/sh

firefox "https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=
`echo $1 | sed 's/mailto://'`"

I placed this script in my /home/user/bin folder as I do all of my personal scripts and then made it executable with:

[user@localhost bin]$ chmod u+x gmailto.sh

Now all we have to do is specify this script as our default mail handler. In Fedora, using Gnome, this menu is listed under System>Preferences>More Preferences>Preferred Applications.

It is important to place the %s after calling the script in the Preferred Applications window so that it places the target address into your new message.

The problem had always been that there was not a suitable program written for Linux. There were plenty of Xbox utilities for Linux that would extract or extract and upload an ISO, but nothing seemed to handle the repackaging task. I had tried to run C-Xbox Tool under the Windows emulator Wine, but to no avail. So, I just basically quit creating ISOs. Until this weekend when I had encountered the glitch that occurs in Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. There is a part in the very beginning that requires you to use the game disc to bypass the glitch. I have long since lost the game disc and needed to make another one. This is when I decided to see if I could get a different Windows Xbox utility to work – enter Qwix. This program is developed by the entity responsible for the Avalaunch dashboard for the Xbox. I was able to run this under Wine without any special parameters (see screenshot below) – but you cannot run it exactly the same as you would under Windows.

There were two issues that I had to work around in order to get this to work. First, I could not get the FTP to work in Qwix to get the game files. So I had to transfer them, before creating the ISO, using my regular FTP client – in this case gFTP. Second, I could not get Qwix to open the transferred game folder to create an ISO from it. My solution for this was to move the folder into Wine's simulated C: drive environment. There is a hidden folder under the user directory labeled .wine, and just below that is the drive_c folder. The contents of this directory will look familiar to Windows users. I copied the entire game folder into the drive_c folder and selected it on the Local folder line of the Source section of Qwix under the Create ISO tab from the left sidebar. It created my ISO pretty fast – considering the size – and I was able to bypass the glitch in the game.