laura-dreyer.com redesign

Laura and I spent the past three days re-designing her website, adding a blog, re-vamping the gallery... it was hectic but fun!

6 days and counting till I'm married :-)

new kenandaudrey.com coming up

We're re-designing our wedding website to be more interactive, and it's getting a facelift in the process. Here's a sneak preview :)


Also, I've re-vamped the website for Gingrich Enterprises at www.gei-1.com.

RAID1 on nslu2

Can RAID1 work on the nslu2 for big drives? Yes! I've got two 750 GB SATA drives hooked in, and it's humming along. I had to upgrade to SlugOS5 in order to be able to boot to the md device. Be ready for long RAID sync times though... it's taking about 21 hours to sync a 650 GB partition :)

Authenticating Wordpress with multiple domains in Active Directory

Recently I've been working on a project involving authenticating Wordpress to Active Directory. There's a great plugin on wordpress.org for doing AD authentication, but I needed it to do a bit more than the author intended. The main thing I needed was support for authenticating users from many different domains.

In the original plugin, there is a single, universal "account suffix", stored in the Wordpress settings database. I'm guessing the intent here is to have a user simply enter their username, like "kdreyer", and have the suffix automatically appended to it ("kdreyer" + "@example.com"). Since we're using multiple domains, this won't work. I could have a "kdreyer@example.com", or a "jsmith@xyz.com", and I need to authenticate both.

So here is my hacked version of the Active Directory Authentication plugin. It pulls out the domain from the user's account using split('@', $username), and uses the user-supplied suffix instead of the universal suffix. This means I can get rid of the global Account Suffix and Default Email Domain settings altogether.

There are one or two other modifications here as well. I'm using SSL in my adLDAP instantiation... and so should you ;-) I've also added a bit to update the user's display_name to be "John Smith", instead of jsmith@xyz.com... the info's already there in AD, so, why not help our user out and put it in there for him :-)

I'm using Wordpress 1.7.1, and the patch is against Active Directory Authentication plugin 1.0.5.

• plugin
• patch

Laura's website

Just finished 1.0 of my sister Laura's website, www.laura-dreyer.com. Laura designed the whole thing in Inkscape, I carved it up with GIMP, put it into a custom Wordpress theme, and put the finishing touches with jQuery. It was really fun and I learned a lot along the way. Laura's a great designer (and sister :)

Going to pick Audrey up in a few hours from the airport... our final un-married New Year's :)

"trick" interviews

Apparently giving "trick" interviews is as popular as it is unprofessional.

Ethically, is there a difference between what Michael Moore does to Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine and what certain creationists have done to Richard Dawkins?

Fedora 9 impressions

I've been running Fedora 9 for a while now. Although some things in F8 felt half-baked to me (I had trouble with PulseAudio + Audacious), F9, like each Fedora release, feels more polished.

Improvements:

• Yum is much faster - not as fast as apt, but getting there.
• PackageKit is much more polished than the package manager GUI F8 used (Pirut and Pup).
• Swfdec works pretty well!
  

Gripes:

• Firefox 3 occasionally crashes, and many plugin authors haven't updated their plugins to version 3.
• Gkrellm: I haven't seen an error window like this in a while :)

summer internship

I'm interning this summer at Community Bible Church, at Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania. I drove up to the area on May 24, met the pastor that night, and met the church congregation on Sunday the 25th. They are a nice bunch of folks! I was so surprised to see the sign outside the church welcoming me.


So far I've been able to teach Sunday School on Sunday mornings, lead Bible study on Wednesday nights, and redesign the church website: poconolakechurch.org. Tomorrow I preach my first sermon there on the book of Esther.

My fiancée, Audrey, is on a plane to the Philippines for her internship this summer, where she'll be working with the missionaries there and discipling women in the church group.