HaLe Communications Blog

I threw out Vista on my laptop today and chose Ubuntu 8.10 as OS. What a great OS it is… The install is easy and clear, even for a noobie like myself . Well, noobie, i have played around with linux before (mainly with Gentoo), but this time, i went for the real 100%. No dual boot. No more Bill.

As i said, the install was easy and everything worked out of the box (as far as i have checked), but typical fears such as wireless network, soundcard, etc… seemed to be no issue at all. Next, connection to our outlook server, no problemo! Evolution is a very very good mail client if you ask me.

And what do you know, i could even see the bluetooth symbol on top of my screen, telling me that i have a working bluetooth device on my laptop. Because Sony does not (yet?) have a PC Suite for Linux, i went on a search for alternatives. After looking around a bit, i chose Gnokii. Mind you, this little program was built for Nokia phones, so no guarantees for other brands.

I could easily connect it via USB, see my contacts and even send sms messages. So far so good. But off course, i don’t want to play around with cables all day long, i want to use the power of bluetooth. Well, that did not work like a charm.

The bluetooth device manager just did not find my phone. At all.

Trial and error and lots of looking around on the web finally brought succes. After performing the command below, i was able to find my phone via the bluetooth manager and pair it to my laptop.

sudo hciconfig hci0 reset

Now just to find a way to sync over bluetooth with Gnokii. This is what i did:

First you will need to edit the config file.

sudo gedit /etc/gnokiirc

Make sure to set these parameters. The config file itself contains a lot of very useful comments. Be sure to go through them.

model = 6300
port = aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
connection = bluetooth
rfcomm_channel = 1

Little hint: to get the mac address of your phone’s bluetooth device type *#2820# in your phone.

We have set up an Ubuntu machine in our network to have a real LAMP stack. It’s just the best way to have a decent working Drupal installation. While you can off course manage a Drupal site from outside of you LAN, adding modules still requires you to put files into the modules directory (/sites/all/modules) of your Drupal. That means, you need FTP access to those folders.

So we set up ProFTPD. Installing it was no issue, but getting users to be able to connect to the ftp server from outside the network, that was another story all together…

It would take us a long time to go true all our trials and errors, but the key actions we finally did to get it to work are the following:

- Create a new user

• set any username
• chose /bin/sh as shell
• chose “normal password” (for webmin users)

- Edit your proftpd conf file (on ubuntu : /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf)

• set AuthAliasOnly to off 
• comment out the UserAlias line

- Make sure your ftp client (CuteFTP in our case) uses “auto” as data mode. I had it set to PASV first and that did not work.

After completing these steps you should be able to connect to your FTP server. If it still does not work, you should have a look at your firewall. Make sure that port 21 has been opened. If you want to use FTP over SSH2, you should open port 22.

We had to make an HTML mailing for a client. Enters our problem : Outlook 2007. So you thought you could use divs with fixed widths and background colours. Forget all about it, in fact, forget all about css based design.

Instead, use… tables.

In pre-school we were all taught “Tables are evil”, and should only be used for tabular data (duh). Thank you Bill, we’re back to square 1.

Let’s say you would like a red border around the  500 px wide content of your html mail, common sense tells us to use a div. However, our “favourite” e-mail program shows us it can’t be done. It joyfully extends the width of the div to the whole screen width.

So, the solution is to go back to some old-school table based html code, the nightmare !!!

In fact, we can forget about a lot of common html goodies, like background images, css floating or positioning.

So, the number one advice is : make sure you get a well designed html mailing that is both attractive to your customer, and plays nicely with e-mail clients, how good or how bad they are.

PS : don’t trust wysiwyg editors, trust notepad.