from Pico to nano; from Image::Magick to Crypt::DSA
from AntBlog701

from Pico to nano; from Image::Magick to Crypt::DSA

The entire SillyDog701 server was down time last week, it was actually my fault. It was my mistake that I tried rebuilding the software resulted scripts/software incompatible in SillyDog701 Server. I chose to rebuild the entire server instead. That means I now have newer version of OS and other back-end scripts.

The front-end of SillyDog701 server is open and functional to public; however, the back-end is not completed yet. The server still needs to be fine tuned. Today, I installed Image::Magick. The server has ImageMagick installed, but not the Image::Magick (Perl module). And I need it for the creating thumbnail feature for Movable Type.

I know the alternative method is to use NetPBM instead. However, since I have the full control of the server, why not installing it?

To install Image::Magick (Perl module), you simply need to install ImageMagick, and install the matching version of PerlMagick, available from ImageMagick.org.

Since the server is newly built, it does not have the popular Pico text editor installed. vi is there, but horrible to use. Pedro suggested me to use nano (The GUN nano, http://www.nano-editor.org/). I have no idea about nano, but it looks promising to me. The good thing is... both Pico and nano ports are available in the server, just need to be built (that's an easy task actually).

At end of deciding, I ended up not installing either. Although I am not an expert on vi, but it's good enough for small files to be edited over shell. For larger files, I will stick with my current solution... scp the file to my Mac, use BBEdit or TextWrangler, then scp back to the server. Editing locally is always a lot easier than over shell.

Both BBEdit and TextWrangler are from Bare Bones, the company that made Yojimbo. TextWrangler is a very capable text editor. It's slightly less powerful than BBEdit, but it's enough for most people, even coders. Most people don't use all the additional features of BBEdit. TextWrangler is complete free!

Back to the topic of Movable Type, another module I might install is Crypt::DSA, it will accelerate comment registration sign-ins, but it's optional. According to SixApart, installing Crypt::DSA is a bit complicated.