i got tagged by Double Dubs - to my mind the best HR technology and systems blogger around. It's a shame he still has to blog anonymously, but I understand why. Anyway - here goes with 5 things you may not know about be, and certainly won't care ;)

1. I'm a pretty intense Liverpool FC supporter, and one of the best days of my life was being in Istanbul in May 2005 when we came back against AC Milan to win the Champions League trophy (or European Cup to give it its proper name) for the 5th time. Some pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anu/sets/382000/
2. 10 years ago cooking for me involved pressing buttons - either on a phone or on a microwave. Now, after the support and encouragement of my partner, I like to think (in my head) that I'm ok in the kitchen. Come try my lamb..it's tenderlcious :)
3. I went back to India for the first time in 2 decades last Christmas and felt at home. I'm hoping to spend more time there over the next few years.
4. I'm planning to move to Montreal sometime in the next 12 - 18 months. My partner is Quebecois, and she's missing the snow ! Any Canadian social software agencies around ? Get in touch !
5. A true desert involves chocolate. There can be no argument on this :)

Marcel de Ruiter asked "What corporate functions should lead in Enterprise 2.0?'.

I left the following reply:

Having HR lead an Enterprise 2.0 initiative is probably the quickest way to consign it to irrelevance and indifference. HR typically has credibility in HR and benefits – and should be focusing on that. Attraction and retention are bonuses from E2.0 – not the core benefits.

An Enterprise 2.0 initiative (which sounds unwieldy, cumbersome and committee driven, and thus doomed to fail) has to be driven from need and controlled by the people it’s trying to serve – normally those at the sharp end of the business

Now this isn't meant to denigrate HR - but most HR led systems I've seen (when I was at Mercer) are shining examples of bad usability, bad design, and ivory tower mentalities - causing employees to swear under their breath as they use click through flexible benefits systems. (This is true of most corporate driven IT systems).

So, not a good starting point to design something that should be people focused, nimble, adaptable and emergent.

[tags]HR, Enterprise 2.0, corporate, Web2.0, internal[/tags]

Movable Type relies on a number of libraries and additional pieces of software to perform certain functions - especially where images are concerned. Thumbnailing and captcha both rely on ImageMagick to perform various feats of graphic trickery.

However, getting ImageMagick playing nicely with Perl and Movable Type is not always straightforward. If you're on a good host, then this work may already have been done for you (leave a comment if you're with a host that has this sorted out), but even good hosts don't always get this right, and if you're on a dedicated server, this is probably something you'll have to do yourself - as I've just done with my MediaTemple (dv) server.

I'm documenting the steps I took to get this working - hopefully it will be useful to someone else (and me in the future, the next time I have to do this). Please note that the steps require that you have root access, and are for dedicated servers (or dedicated virtual servers), and you need to be running Linux - I'm using CentOS, but I'm pretty sure this works for any distro.

Ok - so first up, browse to mt-check.cgi and see whether Image::Magick is already there. It's in the same directory as mt.cgi, so just replace with mt-check.cgi in your normal URL for MT.

If you're lucky, and it's already there, then you're done. Congrats, and enjoy !

If you're not lucky, then you'll see somethinng like "Image::Magick. Your server does not have Image::Magick installed...". Time to roll up your sleeves.

• Get the latest version of ImageMagick (6.3.6 at time of writing). You can get it from here (ftp link to imagemagick.tar.gz). If you're rabidly anti-ftp, then go to this page and follow links until you get what you want.
• Ungzip and untar it (tar -zxvf ImageMagick.tar.gz), and change to the source directory (cd ImageMagick-6.3.6).
• Build imagemagick

./configure
make
make install

• This will build and install the main ImageMagick binaries and libraries
• Now we've got to build PerlMagick - the Perl interface to ImageMagick (which is what Movable Type uses to communicate with ImageMagick). The PerlMagick library should be below the ImageMagick folder you're in now.

cd PerlMagick
Perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

• In an ideal world, we'd be done now. Unfortunately, it seems as if there are often some problems with where ImageMagick puts its libraries such that PerlMagick can't find them.
• Test by running mt-check.cgi again. If it's working, congrats again - if not, read on.
• Take a look at the error log (probably something like /var/log/httpd/error.log) and look for lines mentioning ImageMagick - chances are you might see something like this

[error] Can't load '/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto/Image/Magick/Magick.so' for module Image::Magick: libMagick.so.10: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 230.\n at /var/www/vhosts/xxx.xxx.com/httpdocs/test/perl/image_test.pl line 9\nCompilation failed in require at /var/www/vhosts/xxx.xxx.com/httpdocs/test

• Basically this means that PerlMagick can't find the ImageMagick libraries it needs. To resolve this issue:
  • Edit /etc/ld.so.conf and add /usr/local/lib below the last line.
  • Run ldconfig
  • You should now be done ! check by running mt-check.cgi again or by running this perl -MImage::Magick -e 1

 

• If it's still not working, you can try this kludgier way:
  • Check what libraries ImageMagic.so needs by running the following (you may need to change the path to match what you're seeing in your own error.log file)

    ldd /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto/Image/Magick/Magick.so

  • This might give you something like this:

    libMagick.so.10 => (missing)
libWand.so.10 => (missing)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0xb7ca4000)
libtiff.so.3 => /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3 (0xb7c57000)
libjpeg.so.62 => /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 (0xb7c39000)
libbz2.so.1 => /usr/lib/libbz2.so.1 (0xb7c28000)
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0xb7c18000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0xb7bf4000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7be2000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7bde000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fea000)

  • OK - so there are 2 libraries - libMagick.so.10 and libWand.so.10 that can't be found. The chances are that PerlMagick is expecting to find these libraries in /usr/lib, instead of /usr/local/lib. So let's put them there:

    ln -s /usr/local/lib/libMagick.so.10 /usr/lib/libMagick.so.10
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libWand.so.10  /usr/lib/libWand.so.10

  • And that should be it. Run mt-check.cgi again, and you should now see that MT finally agrees that ImageMagick has been installed.

[Updated with a better initial method - editing /ld.so.conf which removes the need for the symlinks]

Good luck !!

Shimla, December 2006

The days and weeks since leaving Headshift have been a bit of a blur. I took a week off and did very little except watch the Twenty-20 World Cup, read feeds, drink tea and ponder my forthcoming attempt to take over the world. After that, it's been all action - much of which has been all the various things one needs to get sorted to enter the world of the self-employed - bank accounts, VAT registration, choosing a trading name from the small portfolio of catchy domain names I've built up, buying Moo cards, reading though a book on tax (more fun than it sounded !), catching up on some long overdue tech immersion (Movable Type 4, WP2.3, backups to Amazon's cloud, etc) and thinking about the kind of things I want to do. The thing is, I enjoy so many aspects of this industry (where this industry = Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, tagging, intranets, information architecture, social networks [and analysis], user centred design, linux, OS X, Windows XP and Vista, command line systems administration, mashups...you get the picture) that it's hard thinking about narrowing down my focus. And I guess I realised what I already knew - I'm best at being a generalist and having fingers in many pies, some of which may well be a little bit too hot and end up burning me. But that's ok - failure is ok if you've tried your best, and you learn from it. I've met many many people in the last 10 years who are excellent at what they do, but who have a very narrow focus and steadfastly refuse to lift their heads up and look outside their valley - 'not my problem, get <insert name of different specialist here> to look at it'. I can't do that - I find being constricted an uncomfortable experience - and it quickly bores me. All this to say that although my main tag line may say social software and intranet consultant, I'll be looking to do more than just that - whether it be some simple sysadmin for a client I'm already doing work for, or some card sorting and analysis, or providing strategic advice on developing an social infrastructure within an organisation. So -if you need someone smart, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and committed - get in touch ! Oh - hello, by the way. Welcome to my new site. my new business, and the first post. I've been blogging for many years over at scale|free, but I'll be spending more time here from now on. I'll mainly blog about professional stuff that interests me, as well as some of the things someone starting up in the UK should know about. It's all very exciting !

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

Samuel Johnson, London resident, September 20, 1777

"Get me out of here"

Anu Gupta, London resident, September 20, 2007

It's no secret that over the years that I've lived in London, I've enjoyed it less and less. The sub-current of irritation that constantly and insistently accompanies almost any public interaction resonates through me and starts to feel like tinnitus of the soul. So, time to change, time to get out. The plan, or should that be The Plan, is to move. Far away to Montreal where seasons are seasons, cost of living is low, and everyone walks around with an adorable French accent. Well, everyone except me. My language skills are virtually non-existent, a failing that I acknowledged around the time of 'le singe est dans l'arbre'. I don't speak French, despite the constant prodding of my French speaking girlfriend. I can get away with it here, but over there it'll be harder. So, rather than waste more money on a French tutor (because that was 6 weeks of Wednesday evening back-to-school torture), and various flavours of Learn French CD (I won't even start on how bad they were), I've been digging around to see if there's any help available online. And of course there is - but two recently announced sites look like they might be pretty cool, and one of them had me almost slapping my head (I had to stop myself) as an obvious solution that no one had thought about before (not to my knowledge anyway). So - first up is Mango, billed as "the first Free enterprise language learning course available on the Internet.". What you get is a Flash application delivering learning in a slide show format. Different situations are covered (at the post office, at customs - I didn't check whether at the Apple Store was included). Pretty conventional, but free. Much more interesting is LiveMocha, which adds a Web 2.0 social something to the mix, and not only provides the basics of language tuition, but also provides a community of like minded people to practice with. So, sign up, say what languages you speak, and which you're learning, and you can match up with people doing the opposite, so that you both get something out of it. You can friend people, and there are scoreboards to encourage you to keep on going, and probably some more stuff that I haven't seen yet. Initial impressions are good - the site looks clean and well designed, and this is a great idea. Let's see if it can take a language dunce like me and get him conversing en francais. A bientôt. [tags]web2.0, web20, language, learning[/tags]