SourceForge is running their fourth Community Choice Awards – you could vote for ‘Best Project for the Enterprise’ or even ‘Best New Project’

Wow, it seems we’re almost winners

I was just asked on IRC how to protect some attachments without forcing all requested attachments to go through the viewfile cgi script (as that causes your foswiki images and css to load incredibly slowly), and here’s the howto I answered with:

I coded foswiki 1.0’s viewfile script to work as an apache ErrorDocument, so If you can find a way to trigger a 404 or 401 error, you can get apache to run viewfile -

ErrorDocument 404 /foswiki/bin/viewfile
ErrorDocument 401 /foswiki/bin/viewfile

If you place your pub dir somewhere outside where apache serves files and then softlink the non-protected webs into apache’s path (so it serves them full speed), then the secured webs will generate a 404, triggering the viewfile ErrorDocument – which will thus serve the file only to authenticated users

This will work irrespective of the authentication choices in your foswiki setup – and as the files that require securing are outside apache’s file serving areas, can be considered as secure as possible.

As an added bonus, any request to a file that does not exist will show a foswiki error page, rather than a static html.

I’ve just updated the Experimental TWiki and Plugins repository. It now contains TWiki 4.2.0 and 212 Plugins, Contribs and Skins that you can simply apt-get install

To use them, add the following 2 lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib
deb-src http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib


then type

apt-get update

to update the available packages.

you can now see all 212 packages with apt-cache search twiki-

and install (assuming you don’t have twiki installed yet)

apt-get install apache2 twiki

and TWiki Contrib installation is as easy as

apt-get install twiki-bugscontrib

You will still need to use configure to enable Plugins.

Please report your experiences to me – bugs, gripes, you name it – its a work in progress. and I need your help!

The obvious one is …

Work from home.

In one fell swoop, you reduce the impact on the transport system, remove the duplication of building works like highrise office buildings and cube farms, and reduce the electricity impact, by using your windows to make environmentally friendly light and air conditioning.

There are other indirect benefits – by working in your local area, you will keep your local area alive, by buying lunch locally, and buying your coffee from the local shop (hi Bubba ).

The second, is to work on or support the use of open source software.

Closed source is based on restricting access to software, which inevitably leads to pointless, non-innovative duplication of efforts. I’m not talking about the duplication of competitive features, or key differentiators that make your business a success either. There are a myriad of tiny internal tools written in every company or project, to just get stuff done, which if shared could improve your bottom line, just by sharing the code amongst all the other companies in the world that do a similar thing.

Do something for the environment today. Share.