I’m using the book and learning more about in-depth aspects of WordPress and the results are actually visible in my “Blog-Playground” area at http://knowandshare.de/wptry/

Once I have more info and knowledge, I share it surely with you all. This might also lead to me restructuring this main page, but we’ll see.

So back into the combined learning, using, sharing.

More to come early January latest.

One of the important aspects in all parts of our life, but specifically in our professional life, is to stay informed. While this was done in previous times using only a limited number of sources and resources, it has become a typical aspect of today’s knowledge workers to ensure that we are not overwhelmed by the offerings of information. The number of emails in your inbox is increasing, calls are happening all the time and there are numerous channels for news which are competing for getting your attention.

And yet, this diversity of information sources and formats might fulfill a demand which is present in our desire to stay informed. As is true with so many things in life, there are multiple ways to achieve the goal of gaining more expertise and/or keeping current. And doing so might be done by reading books, surfing to some blogs, getting input from listening to webinars or watching videos created by other experts.

Differentiated learning from my perspective means to enable people to use the best vehicle for them. Also, some format present a better approach for certain needs than other. Examples: Sharing best practices might go very well in a discussion, which could be recorded and listened to live. Last minute updates would be nicely done through blogs and up-to-the minute discussion can be facilitated not only in conference calls but also using Chat/Instant messaging.

So an effort for all Technology companies is to ensure that their field has the ability to keep updated and hence providing that multitude of formats is playing well in that arena and it also supports the needs of a flexible workforce (working remotely, different timezones, different access).
Formats that can be offered are eBooks, Blogs, Wikis, Video, Chat, Forums and not to forget the other formats like “real” books, newspapers, magazines etc.

Nicely fitting into this is the idea of asking experts to share their way of keeping up to date. This has the advantage to get real world lists of information which are proven by colleagues. Similar to recommendation lists on existing online-shops this is something that fits well into the human nature to check what others are doing and it has the additional benefit of enhancing networking between people with common interest. This further drives establishing networks of expertise.

A great combination is to actually use Social Web techniques to propagate this information to the employees. So in contrast to just put this information up on a webpage, how about putting this on a wiki, enabling the “crowd” to update and enhance this information (building a “wisdom of crowd”) and through comments drive ongoing discussion amongst experts. You can also then use RSS for these pages so people are informed about those areas that they are interested in (in contrast to do mass-broadcasting) and if you have micro-blogging in youur company, you might even use that to inform about updates or new additions.

So while there is material out there to get more information on the the inner working of WordPress, reading books about this topic is a great way of expanding your knowledge.

So I was looking for a book on this subject and I happen to know that one book is currently in the works and will be out in early 2010. This book will surely provide a good deal of information and insight.

You can already pre-order the book, here are links to the German Amazon store: http://www.amazon.de/Professional-Wordpress-Hal-Stern/dp/0470560541 and to the US Amazon store: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-WordPress-Hal-Stern/dp/0470560541

Now, you might be wondering what the content of the book will be and it so happens that there is a bit more available: see below image.

As soon as the book is out and/or more information is available, I’m surely will be happy to tell you more about it. I’m really looking forward to it.

First: Installation of Glassfish

Let’s take the easy approach and use the built-in graphical tools. This is specifically easy as both applications are integrated into OpenSolaris Package Manager. So startup the Package Manager (you can see a link to it on the Desktop). There is an icon called “Add more software”, just double-click on this and the Package Manager will start up. It will look like this:

Initial View of Package Manager

Give it some time to update it’s catalog. Then select the category Web and find Glassfish. Click on the selection and then press the “Install”-Button.

Select Glassfish Package

The Package-Manager checks the dependencies and downloads Glassfish plus potentially additional packages which Glassfish depends upon. All required packages will be installed and Package Manager keeps you informed about the steps taken:

Package Manager keeps you informed

Then you can do the configuration and there is a great entry on this blog:  http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/en_US/entry/glassfish which describes creating domain1 (in a self-defined directory) and also setting up Glassfish as a Service in OpenSolaris.
NOTE: in order to change the default path for the domain and go along with the blog’s author, I needed to use pfexec vi /usr/appserver/config/asenv.config as the file is writable for root only.

I also recommend to save the output of the create-domain command as it includes the list of the network ports to which Glassfish will listen.Using the SMF Service for Glassfish makes it easy to administer the service and this is another great feature of OpenSolaris.

Second: Installation of MySQL

The installation of MySQL can be done as a single package, but there is a pre-configured package which makes it a lot easier. So I recommend to install the AMP Package. And a good description of how to install the AMP package, set the initial passwords and enable SMF Service for it, can be found at this blog-entry: http://blogs.sun.com/trawick/entry/setting_up_amp_with_glassfish

That’s it for now, next post will talk about configuring VirtualBox so that from the Macbook and specifically from NetBeans running on the MacBook we are able to connect to Glassfish and MySQL running on OpenSolaris in the VirtualBox.

Here is a summary of the steps I’m taking:

• Installation of IDE (Netbeans)  (done in Part 1)
• Installation of hypervisor software to run Opensolaris on the MacBook (VirtualBox) (done in Part 1)
• Installation of OpenSolaris into VirtualBox
• Installation and configuration of Deployment environment (MySQL and Glassfish)
• Configuration of VirtualBox for secure network connection of Host-System and IDE towards MySQL/GLassfish
• Configuration of Netbeans to Deploy to MySQL and Glassfish on Opensolaris within the VirtualBox
• Test of the Development and Deployment environment with a simple application

So no on to the next step.

Step 3: Installation of OpenSolaris

By now, you probably have downloaded an ISO-image of the OpenSolaris version (see the last section of post if you need a refresh). Given that you have the ISO-image available, start up VirtualBox. Once started, you’ll press the “New” Button to start the Wizard for creating a new virtual machine. Follow the Wizard which is easy: Give your machine a name, then choose Operating System “Solaris” and Version “OpenSolaris”.

Wizard for adding a new virtual machine

As for memory configuration: in order to balance between NetBeans and other IDE-Tools or further aspects running on MacOS compared to Opensolaris in VirtualBox, I decided to go for 1024MB for the virtual machine.

Important Tip: In order to get your mouse detached from the VirtualBox , press the left Cmd/Apple-Button and this will release your mouse. If you again want to continue, simply click into the VirtualBox Window and the mouse will focus again into that window.

The virtual Disk depends on what you want to do with OpenSolaris. As the purpose for this configuration was to act as Deployment-Testenvironment, I have decided that 16GB is fine, might even be on the upper limit. So I went with the recommendation of the Wizard. In order to save space, I went for the dynamically expanding storage which is a great feature of VirtualBox: only taking so much of real diskspace on my MacBook Pro as is really needed.

Once you have finished all parts of the Wizard, VirtualBox will show you a summary of the virtual machine

Virtual Machine is ready for start

Now you are ready to get OpenSolaris installed. When you click “Start” on the VirtualBox overview screen, you are presented with the “First Run Wizard”:

The "First-Run" Wizard

As we have downloaded the CD in form of a Media-File (ISO-Image), choose that option in the lower part of the presented window. Initially the wizard will show the VBox GuestAdditions to be the target file, so you need to click the small button on the right and in the following windows add the downloaded ISO image and select it. The resulting window will look similar to this:

Opensolaris ISO Image selected

And if you click the final “Next” button, a summary is presented and you can startup the virtual machine.

The virtual machines then starts and the OpenSolaris installation commences.

After you’ve selected your keyboard and the desktop language, you get the initial desktop of Opensolaris, which looks like this:

OpenSol Initial Desktop

In there you find the “Install OpenSolaris” icon. Double click and you start the Opensolaris installation. Use the respective buttons on the bottom of the Installer-window to get the next screens respectively.

As for Disks: I prefer to give OpenSolaris the whole Disk as we anyway have a dynamically growing virtual disk.

Below are further screenshots of the OpenSolaris Installation Wizard:

Once the installer is done, OpenSolaris will ask to reboot.

Remember that we still have the OpenSolaris ISO image mounted and so when the reboot happens, it will be like you would again boot into the Install CD.

When the reboot happens, there will be a new entry on the Boot-Menu:  “Boot from Harddisk”. Select this option presented to start from the disk onto which you just installed OpenSolaris (Be aware that if you don’t actually choose this option, the system will automatically boot into the LiveCD (in our case the ISO-image) again.

Don’t worry about the next step: Opensolaris will boot from the harddisk and present this window and might run for some minutes with this window:

Window during first run from fresh installed Harddisk

This is part of the installation still.

The next effort we need to do is install the VirtualBox Guestadditions. This will allow for smooth integration with MacOS.

This is what I did: I did a shutdown (using “System->Shutdown” from the OpenSolaris menu) to bring down OpenSolaris. This also stopped the virtual machine after OpenSolaris was shutdown. I then ensured that for the next start, we have the Guest-additions ISO Image mounted. For that I clicked in the summary pane of the virtual machine on “CD/DVD-Rom” which opened a pop-up window. In that I selected  “VBoxGuestAdditions.iso”. Then I restarted the virtual machine so that I can perform the task of adding the Guest Additions.
Note: I’m sure there is a more elegant way than first holding the system, getting the CD mounted etc. , not sure why I needed to do that. Also, for any other effort it is simple in VirtualBox to un-mount and mount a real CD or a CD/DVD-image.

The essential task on hand (adding the Guest-Additions) itself was simple:

• Once you are logged into Opensolaris, you will see a CD-icon labeled with  “VBOXADDITIONS_3.0.10.54097″
• I double-clicked on this icon to open the File-Browser for the CD
• On that File-Browser there is a “Open Autorun Prompt” Button. I clicked this
• A pop-up window asked me to confirm I want this to be run. And I confirmed
• Then the autorun worked without any further questions. At the end I was asked to press enter in the Terminal window that had opened
• I then restarted OpenSolaris and now have a snappy graphic (it was slow before) and a complete mouse integration

Next steps in next post are further configurations of OpenSolaris and Installation of Glassfish and MySQL.

So see you at the next post

The Goal which I’ve set myself for this is:
Use Open Source Solution and latest Technology to create a Development and Deployment environment on one system (in my case: MacBook Pro).

Here is a summary of the steps I’m taking:

• Installation of IDE (Netbeans)
• Installation of hypervisor software to run Opensolaris on the MacBook (VirtualBox)
• Installation of OpenSolaris into VirtualBox
• Installation and configuration of Deployment environment (MySQL and Glassfish)
• Configuration of VirtualBox for secure network connection of Host-System and IDE towards MySQL/GLassfish
• Configuration of Netbeans to Deploy to MySQL and Glassfish on Opensolaris within the VirtualBox
• Test of the Development and Deployment environment with a simple application

Today’s part of the effort: Let’s start easy and first do the IDE installation and the pure VirtualBox install.

Step 1:  Installation of NetBeans
This is straight-forward: Just go to the Netbeans Website and download the MacOS version of Netbeans. The Website will recognize the browser of your system and propose the version for your Operating System.

Decide if you want the full version or a sub-version, that table on the website is quite helpful. If you are looking to do a full-featured development in Java, use the “Java-Bundle”. If you also want to do some work in Ruby or PHP, give it some extra space and use the “All-Bundle”.

The download will typically be a DMG-File, which will contain the installer and the application. While your system downloads the bits and bytes, you might as well check out the latest news from the community or search in the Document section which has a great repository of current tutorials and learning trails.

Once fully downloaded, open the DMG file. It will look similar to this:

Window of downloaded DMG File for Netbeans

It is quite easy to follow the steps of the installation. Just click on the package-like symbol and you will soon have Netbeans installed on your system.

Step 2: Install Virtualbox
This also is quite seamless given the latest Version of VirtualBox. When you go to the VirtualBox Download page you can select the right version for your system. For the Macbook just select the latest one for “OS X Hosts” and download it. The downloaded DMG file again will have the installer and the app and you can install Virtualbox by clicking the installer in the opened DMG file:

Window of DMG File for VirtualBox, ready for install

Again, as for the Netbeans install, simply click on the package-like symbol, follow the respective instructions and you’ll have VirtualBox installed.

What have you got now and what’s next?
Well, you now have a fully installed IDE so you can already start with your development efforts. Go and explore Netbeans and test out it’s functionality

Next week we go and start the installation of OpenSolaris.

You want to prepare for that?  Well, then download the latest version of OpenSolaris. You can either go for the official release (as of the writing of this post it is 2009.06)  or (same as I’ve done) go for the latest development. For that you might want to download from genunix.org which holds candidate builds and get the latest build as an ISO-file

Remember, these are large files (772MB for the candidate build and the official release is 677 MB ) but you only download them once and after the install you can use the much faster update mechanism of OpenSolaris

See you at the next post

I’ve worked on a new blog entry today (which is about installation and setup of a develop and deployment environment for developers on MacBook, using OpenSolaris, VirtualBox, Glassfish, MySQL and Netbeans).

Wanted to add a screenshot to the post and got an error: Unable to create directory /www/htdocs/…./wp-content/uploads/2009/03. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

Searching the web I was first directed to check the settings:
using the Admin section of WordPress, go to Settings -> Miscellaneous and see if the first of the entries (called: “Store uploads in this folder“) on the resulting page is a full path or rather (as it should be) just reads  “wp-content/uploads”

However, for my installation this looked fine so I was wondering what was wrong. Further search revealed that WordPress expects high permission levels specifically for the wp-content directory. So to resolve the issue, this is what helps:

• using an ftp client, connect to your WordPress ftp directory
• select the “wp-content” directory and have it changed to 777 permissions (Read, Write and Execute set for Owner, Group and Others)
• make sure that you have the ftp-client apply this recursively to all sub-directories of wp-content
  (I first only did the change to wp-content itself and this is not sufficient)

Having done that change, media and other uploads work (or at least seem to work) smoothly now.

Communities in is new, Web2.0 and related, form (like Facebook) and also mikro-blogging efforts (like Twitter) provide a new and nearly real-time ability to stay on top of the developments in areas which usually would be remote to the audience.

Example? See this: One possibility for the interested person to follow what is happening at NASA is to join the respective Facebook groups like Nasa: 2Explore which even can provide the feeling to be part of that group. While the standard website of NASA is also well done and regularly visited by myself, the Facebook group through it’s direct feed and posting drives people into being part of a virtual community.

The effort of being interested, the ability to stay connected has driven positive developments in all parts of societies and thus moved forward lot of areas. It has enabled people to contribute their ideas more rapidly than before even though they were originally not working in these areas and it has also enabled companies and public organizations or agencies to more directly get feedback from the society as well as explain their visions.

One of the passions of SpaceFan is to look into the possibilities of virtual communities and the expanding abilities provided with new technologies and see what these can contribute. The above is only a first outline of why this topic is of interest to me and it shall be expanded upon.

Well, specifically in IT, this word has special meanings. And it seems that specifically those of us in the IT world who follow the security topics might get caught in a way they don’t expect:

When an application asks you to pass on the username and password for operating on it’s own on your website, most of us would be very cautious. So was I when WordPress asked me to perform the upgradde to the latest version automatically. I created an ftp-user and allowed it to access only the directory (and sub-directories) where WordPress is installed. The upgrade did not work. Thought it was a configuration error in the wp-config.php file but it wasn’t.

Turns out that WordPress expects to be trusted and then performs its action only in it’s own installation directory. So once I gave the ftp-user full path access, all worked well with the upgrade.

In summary, while we should be aware of and know about security, sometimes we should allow ourselves to trust an application