File uploads and CKEditor

I’m personally very satisfied with CKEditor 3.0, it became a very polished version of FCKEditor with a new API, but there is one heavy downside of it all: it isn’t documented. When I installed CKEditor on a site, it was all good until I noticed that the file upload is missing and there is no way to configure it server side like there was in FCKEDitor, so I googled and found this: http://docs.cksource.com/CKEditor_3.x/Developers_Guide/File_Browser_(Uploader), this link was good because I realized that I need to write the file upload server side component myself, unless of course I want to use CKFinder, which I think has way too many features.

Writing my own upload PHP script isn’t all that bad, since I can do things that CKEditor/CKFinder wouldn’t do otherwise, like image resize. After actually writing the script I realized that it works, but it doesn’t pass the dialog the link. I noticed, that my server side JavaScripts actually get parsed, so I figured, why not write this simple feature myself. After 1-2 hours of finding out how the whole CKEditor plugin/dialog system works I found out that for some reason the script I generate server side doesn’t see my global variables in the document, not even, if I use the window object, so I figured, this could mean only one thing: this whole thing runs in an IFrame, but not only that, there is a strange way that this should work, basically instead of the AJAX style it uses IFrames and JavaScript callbacks .

After realizing all this, I finally found the proper solution here, which looks like this(if of course we are using PHP server side):

<script type="text/javascript">
window.parent.CKEDITOR.tools.callFunction( <?php echo $_GET['CKEditorFuncNum']?>, '<?php echo "$uploaded_file_url"?>' );
</script>
This is what is needed to be generated server side for the upload dialog to function correctly, absolutely not a simple concept but only needed here.

QuantZ under Linux!

It looks like smaller game companies see the point in developing for the Linux platform, well Gamerizon has joined this camp, and they made a Linux version of their upcoming game QuantZ.  The game comes at a descent cost(12.99$) and is very enjoyable and innovative. They made the Linux version because there was demand for it, and I am personally considering on buying it because it looks like something that’s worth the price.

The original post was made on reddit, and here is a little video that shows what’s the game like:

KDE icons in HINET PROPERTY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

KDE(Oxygen) icons are widely used by people outside of KDE, this is just a recent discovery:

Richard Stallman dances to Soulja Boy MIT style

I think the video requires no introduction:

Google Chrome/Chromium is on the path to perfection

It fascinates me how good Google Chrome has become, a few months back I considered it to be only a proof of concept that browsers shouldn’t be slow, but now it’s basically what a browser should be, the only weak spot it has is the extension part, but I bet that the developers are working hard on it.

Now what me and a lot of people didn’t get is why did the Chrome developers choose GTK over Qt on the Linux port without any real reason, they should have went with Qt it would have suited better the purpose of Chrome, because what I like is that Chrome tries to be really platform independent, it tries to avoid platform specific things as much as possible, which is a very good thing, I agree that the browser should have a world of it’s own and not to be tied with the operating system.

Another major innovation that I think Chrome pioneered, is the compactness of the browser’s user interface, they god rid of those useless menu bars and made used the title bars as a place for tabs, this conserves space and makes the browser a lot more clean and easy to use.

The Google Chrome team expressed that they wanted to do a browser from scratch, and do it the right way this time because most browsers are pretty much stuck in the last century, they highlighted that back then there were web pages, but now there are web applications, that is why they did thing differently than other modern browsers. They fixed a lot of issues that have plagued other browsers for years, like speed, security and stability.

Although Chrome is the best for browsing, it lacks extensions and developer tools, that I was familiar with from Firefox, so I still use Firefox for development, because it beats most browsers when it comes to developing.

The bottom line is, give it a try, it’s worth the time.

Update on the Karmic MSI Brightness bug

Good news is the dev. team is taking matters seriously, bad news, that my bug duplicate status, which I find unfair, since it was reported earlier

This is considered the ‘original’ bug.

They even have a patch, which tough only works for KDE, but since I’m still not used to KDE 4′s look and feel, so that’s out of the question. So I guess that they are working on it, and they said that even it it doesn’t get fixed they will at least mention it in the release notes.

Keep up the good work guys!

Ubuntu Karmic has strange priorities

To be clear, I have 3 machines and all of them are running Ubuntu Karmic, but I am being a little annoyed about how are bug reports treated at Launchpad, while it has some really neat features it’s very overcomplicated in some places, I still have trouble marking affected packages, but that aside the biggest problem is that some bugs simply don’t get attention, I don’t mean getting fixed, I mean getting attention. I posted some really serious bugs a few months ago, and they still did not get addressed, it’s like the developers don’t even know about them.

There are two particular bugs that I think that should have been addressed long ago:

1) [Karmic] [i945] Screen flickers due to constantly changing brightness level

Reported on: 2009-08-14

2) [Karmic] USB hotplug system doesn’t detect anything after boot

Reported on: 2009-09-07

None of these seemed to get the deserved priority and Karmic is going to be released but it will fail on a whole product line, well at least for the general consumers, I still love and use Ubuntu, but I wish they would take a deep look into issues that matter, it’s a pity because on the UI front they really outdone themselves. Let’s hope for the best.

Hello world

Hello, my name is István Miklós Antal, I’m a web developer, and I decided to post my opinions on stuff that I care about, I had a previous blog on blogspot, but I wasn’t comfortable with it so I decided to make a big switch. This blog will be a mixture of highly personal rants and highly professional  technical points. I love to hear opinions, but I won’t make the mistake again of reacting to personal attacks. Stay tuned!