But if you consider that this is not the right thing, you could thing a more organized (but less readable) description of LDAP: “Basics of LDAP” which is also very much Linux-oriented, of course.

Everything changes as I found some freely available information available on the Internet. For example, AMD-ATI (designer and manufacturer or graphics cards for personal computers) published a small presentation video.

You can’t see much, it’s too short? Here come detailled videos from the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits (IPC): IPC Training/Certification Videos. You will find there videos detailling all the stages of manufacturing and nearly all the significant technologies included in the manufacturing of electronic boards.

Most of them are available on YouTube and Google Video.

For those who went through all these steps and are still willing to learn, I also have a very intersting and much more technical presentation on a parallel issue and technology item: lead-free soldering. As a matter of fact, for years, the electronic industry has used a large quantity of lead (a cheap metal very attractive because it can become luidi at a relatively low temperature). but with the disappearance of a lot of the other sources of lead in our environment (lead poisonning (also known as saturnism, plumbism, Devon colic, or painter’s colic) is a medical condition caused by increased levels of the metal lead in the blood leading to neurological damage) electronic waste was adopting a bad sheep reputation. We are currently in the center of an intense transition to safer technologies. But it’s a whole industry which has to adopt completly new techniques and abandon very solid body of evidence and state of the art knowledge to learn uing “lead-free soldering”.

If you are ready for 30 minutes of concentration and listening, here is a video conference about this issue and a specific part of it: Electronics engineers like me will learn a lot about reliability of lead-free soldering.

Some easy-to-follow advice:

• Start using the Auto exposure mode of your camera, then switch to Manual to shoot in these exact same conditions (of course, the ambient light must not change, so don’t wait too much and avoid times when light is changing quickly -sunset, storms, etc.).
• Use a tripod, but if there are not too many objects in the front of the subject don’t worry about computing the exxact optimcal center of the camera+lens.
• Disable the autofocus after setting the focus correctly and maintin this focus position on all the images.
• Do not keep the Auto White Balance on the camera. Instead, select one single WB mode that will be used on all images.
• If you do a horizontal panorama, shoot in vertical (portrait) orientation (to increase the usable surface and to improve the final resolution).
• Make sure that you have a wide cross-image section to ease the merging process. The merging software package will thank you.

You must start by studying the lessons from PhotoJojo.com’s Ultimate Guide to Time-Lapse Photography.

When you think that you’ve mastered the technique, you can think again and look at the following example created by Lucas Oleniuk, photographer of the Toronto Star. Taking 20,000 of his still photographs, he built a 20-days sequence re-hashing the issue of global warming for us.

Direct link to video

• Dual-Boot Windows and Linux, Step 1: Get Ubuntu
• Dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux

Aim

The first objective was to install two sets of forums (in French and in English, as for the news blogs) in their respective URLs.

• English forums
• French forums

The locations have an influence on the rest since I still wanted to have a good integration with the wordpress blogs. You are expected to install the forums inside the blog.

So, here is how I did it.

Configuration

The main issue is to install the software on the web site in the right location. The package is prepared to be downloaded into a bbpress sub-directory inside the wordpress directory, so I had to change the directory name just after decompression (And I did it twice: Once for each language).

The config.php file is set according to the following:

In order to get a more direct access to the forums I also corrected slightly the web site .htaccess file to add the following redirecting lines that lead to more user-friendly addresses used here.

redirect 301 /forum/en http://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wordpress/forum/
redirect 301 /forum/fr http://www.roumazeilles.net/news/fr/wordpress/forum/

Additional steps

Directory access rights

I also directly had to modify the directory access rights on the web server.

chmod 644 ./forum/ (this may not be critical)
mkdir ./forum/bb-cache/
chmod 644 ./forum/bb-cache/ (this is needed to update the site-management options)

Theme

bbPress is using themes very similar to WordPress. This is helpful to reduce the amount of work involved in preparing the forums for a nicer presentation when you already have a WordPress theme.

However, it is clearly painful to create the many files expected by bbPress (I hope that this will be simplified in the future). Anyway, thanks to DreamWeaver 3.x and its very good support of HTML templates, thanks to the organization of my pages with a significant part located in the CSS file, it has been relatively easy to do this task. But it still is too much pain for a good software package. At least, if you don’t do anything, the Kakumei theme is used by default ensuring that your forums are displayed conveniently.

Internationalization

Now, since my web site is set both in English and in French, there is no reason for the forums to be set differently. The installation in English is standard, but the French bit is a little different. You need to update a separate file (named bbpress.pot) that will provide all of the needed text transalations.

I installed one in the language directory. That’s all. It’s unofficial translation, but that’s good for me.

Last comments

In the end, after a rather long testing phase on a hidden web site, I have been able to set the forums up rather easily (it could be better, but bbPress is still in development stages, so the issues were understandable -and they were not overwhelming). The documentation is very terse, but the community is active and supportive.

One thing I had difficulties with is that bbPress does a heavy use of page caching. When changing something in the configuration, you have to remember to reload from the site (not from the cache) or you get the feeling that nothing is ever happenning whatever your moves. Annoying if understandable for performance reasons.