I've just moved this site from Wordpress over to the latest build of Movable Type 4.1, using the new Universal Templates.

I've also decided to retire my old blog - scalefree, and have imported all the content across to here - I'll be redirecting everything from scalefree shortly.

MT4.1 really rocks - and the new template set mechanism will allow for Wordpress-like easy styling - and enabled me to get this complete site up and running in a couple of hours.

Contact me if you want more information, or if you'd like a site like this for yourself !

The blogosphere and twitterverse have been dominated today by Steve Job's Macworld Keynote. Lots of speculation and anticipation beforehand, including several versions of the leaked speech. The event itself was more notable (to me anyway) for the traffic it generated, causing several well known blogs to creak and splutter under the load, and Twitter essentially went down for a few hours as it failed to cope with the pressure.

Anyhoo - the big news for me was the announcement of the Macbook Air - a lovely and incredibly thin laptop. Unfortunately, with tech hotness comes an associated price - starting at $1799 in the US and £1199 inc VAT here in the UK. Sharp intakes of breath as Macheads struggled to reconcile tech-lust with a price that was several hundred of dollars higher than the pre-keynote rumours. The pricing differential between the US and UK also came up in quite a few conversations - so I decided to work out what the cost difference really was.

Google Spreadsheets came to my aid - so here's a table showing the true cost difference - which for me means stripping out UK VAT - in the US sales tax is never mentioned or shown - it's like the dirty secret of American retail that only bites you when you come to pay at the cash till !

So - as can be seen - there isn't actually that much of a difference - if, and it's a big if, you're VAT registered. Add in the US sales tax, and the chances are that you'd actually pay more in the US than you would in the UK.

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