Update: in the newest versions of dokuwiki it is now much easier to simply extract the files and visit /install.php in a browser instead.

In my opinion DokuWiki is the best wiki software out there (see features). In addition to all those cool features like namespaces, it stores pages in plaintext files, thus no database backend is required. Setting it up is pretty easy also. I promised to investigate the steps needed to set up DokuWiki with the simplest authentication scheme for a friend and I thought others might benefit from it too, so here it is.

Am I sick enough if a single SQL command can cause happiness for me? :)

INSERT INTO subsgroups
SELECT id AS subscriber_id, group_id FROM subscribers;

Simple. Efficient. Awesome.

The smallest things make the biggest differences in life.

Blogger fellow John Richardson over at Success Begins Today has started Podcasting. In his first episode he talks about Employee Evangelists.

"Employee evangelists
- tell everybody how great it is to work at XYZ company
- like their bosses
- agree with the vision and direction that the company is going
- they feel passionate about what they are doing
- they definitely have a purpose in life
- they're great team players
- they look at life through a positive lense

Reinventing workplaces: actively decide to create these employee evangelists:
1. communication between management and employee (top-priority): face2face, open and honest, on a regular basis; the daily 5 minutes
2. vision: cohesive vision for the company; workers need to know: where they're going, how soon they'll get there, what's expected along the way
3. passion: evangelists need jobs that they're good at and need to feel like they're making a difference"

John says creating employee evangelists should be the top-priority of any leading-edge company: make it fun and exciting and give us a vision of where are we going.

In the second part of the podcast John talks about why some brands are extremely successful while others are not (even suggests a book in this topic).

Give his blogs/podcast a try, he always has great ideas. Besides the Success Begins Today blog, he's the guy behind MBA On The Run and other interesting projects.

Below my notes of the eye-opening Eckhart Tolle audio recording "Lasting Happiness". Enjoy.

--

The collective is always looking to the next thing, the next moment in the hope that happiness will be found there or that I will find a more complete version of myself there. Seeking it/looking for a state that lies somewhere in the future. That becomes a pattern built into the very structure of the human mind. The seeking pattern.

Thats a very "normal" thing to be doing:
- The bank robber does that because he's not interested in the money but what promise the money holds.
- Spiritual seeker who is looking for the answer. Enlightenment perhaps. That will finally provide lasting happiness.

"The human seeking mode" - so normal for most human beings to be in the seeking mode that too many it hasn't even occured that they are in this mode or a different state of consciousness is possible. Wherever you watch (TV, media, films) almost everybody is in that seeking mode.

The present moment is regarded as insufficient. I am not yet enough. I am not happy. I can only be happy if I finally arrived at that sense of completion within myself. The bank robber seeks that through the money.

"I need more time to find it". Time-bound consciousness: whatever you do is governed by the notion of time. Unless you're very old it will be future that is greater importance to you. In older people the past assumes a greater importance. They remember it. Memory of me and my past. Think about it & talk about it. Because future has shrunk. Some of them haven't realized yet that they don't have too much future left so they are still looking for "more".

Mentally constructed image. Conceptualized me. Memories, conditioned patterns, experiences, all kinds of identifications which became thoughts make up a bundle of thoughts and emotions, and that mentally created bundle becames a sense of self in me. It is that mind made me a story, my story, my history, that most humans derive sense of self from. That self is in the seeking mode ("not enough"). "I am not fully myself yet". "If I could only be more then I could finally arrive at self completion".

The need for more becomes overriding in ones daily existence. More to add to who I think I am (to me). To a child (this mind-movement starting): claims possession of something (screaming "it's mine!"). It's not the toy. It's the word MY toy. I have invested the thought form of toy with the sense of self. We are all collectively conditioned to do that. It's the beginning of delusion. Fearing that something I regard as "me" will be removed from me. The child grows, the toy becomes the car, other possessions.

Suffering that is there whenever you have not really found yourself. That is built into the very structure of that mind-made identity because suffering is that sense of luck/not enough/fear that underlies that state of consciousness.

You've made it in the eyes of the world, yet, it doesn't seem to have worked. Then looking for explanations. If you make it: everybody tells you should be happy now. You still feel that pain. Some start drinking/take drugs. The illusion has been removed from them that the future will complete them.

Suddenly see the fiction of the self that the entire culture is emersed in and tells you this is how it is. Then you might be interested going beyond that. You realize that happiness on that level cannot be found. The illusion of happiness - yes. Many times.

That neediness expresses itself in many ways that create enormous amount of suffering--to others around you and to yourself. The need for more, to enhance me, the me that is never complete, the story of me, that hasn't quite worked the way it was supposed to work. Up till now. There are not many humans who feel that the story has gone very well indeed. The story of me. And if there are some, all you have to do is wait a little. And then the sense of incompleteness returns. People believe it to be a personal problem (everybody seems to be OK, except me).

Need for more = need for conflict in order to enhance ones seperate sense of existence. "this is the me and this is the other". The "need" for enemies: self-identification. A greedy entity is simply a magnification of that mind pattern.

Underneath the conceptualized me is deeper consciousness that is not conditioned in every human. Redemptive factor in human existence. Underneath there is a dimension of consciousness that we could describe as unconditioned, vast--but they don't know that. Most humans don't know it but more and more and waking up to it now.

Complaints in the head: every complaint is an attempt to be a little bit more of me. Seeing means you are no longer identified with the pattern.

The main ENEMY of the mind-made self is THIS MOMENT. Awake from self-identification of thought into now. A certain alertness comes with that. More aware of sense-perceptions. Moving out of the trap of compulsive conceptualized thinking. From being the thinker to being the awareness that is prior to thought.

Stillness. Unconscious? No. Consciousness, but not the labels, the thinking. Peace in the background.

"-I'm on my way. -Where to? -The future." You continually miss this moment.

The arising of spaciousness inside yourself is really what it is. Until you find some place in yourself. Without that space you can look for happiness for a hundred lifetimes, because you're only looking to objects in your consciousness believe that "when I've accumulated enough objects in my consciouness I'll be full and complete".

Discover in ones self that dimension of consciousness; realizing the fullness of being enough yourself that is already here. That's the end of seeking. Not the end of doing but the end of self-seeking through doing. Than doing becomes quite nice; it's a play; you participate in the game of universe; you cannot not do; so you might as well participate; you do; it's a dance. But self-seeking goes out of the doing because you've already found yourself. Not as a conceptual entity; as the depth, the still, spacious, field; within yourself. Future cannot help you to get there, it can only prevent you from finding it.

What is the quickest way to realizing the truth of this? Is there a shortcut? How can I know this without making it into a future state that I want to achieve? How? This is so simple. Secret of the universe (as far as humans are concerned in the present evolutionary stage).

The secret lies in simply no longer internally resisting, denying or running away from what IS at THIS moment. To find an inner alignment with the form that this moment takes. The conceptualized egoic entity can't do that. But you can do that.

The conceptualized egoic entity lives in the state of NO to what IS.

"But this current form of moment limits me so much!"--You can play around with different forms in your life and experiment and expand into other forms not expecting to find the limitless. It's in the nature of form to be limited.

Whatever may be happening in your life and be the greatest limitation, it is not only the limitation, it's also the opening, when it's not internally resisted. The opening into space. Space comes with the YES to WHAT IS. You are no longer bound to what is = the form. You know your self as the formless one life/one consciousness. That's the true happiness that lasts. Nothing needs to change for this transition to happen in your life.

Say yes to WHAT IS.

"Do you wake up every morning eager to start your day? Do you bound out of bed before sunrise so you can maximize your awake time?"

Great questions by Erin Pavlina in Steve's podcast #14.

Do you hate going to bed at night because it needs you to take a break from your life until morning? I really do. I'm really looking forward to meet people like this. Feel free to contact me in e-mail if you think these sentences describe you.

(Any girls with a similar mindset to Erin's in my age around? ;))

Being a GTD fan for over six months, I have to admit it works. Things doesn't always get done as fast as I wish but it does what the definition promises: "transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity". So now I really have an integrated system and I'm almost stress-free. (or at least I'm free of stress caused by the huuuuge amount of the tasks that need to be done).

I have built my own Hipster PDA for the purpose. Douglas Johnston over at DIY*Planner has created a Hipster PDA Edition of his DIY*Planner templates. I use the 4up version so I can use standard A4-sized papers.

What I have in my Hipster PDA is this:
- 2 weekly planning forms (for the next 14 days)
- notes of habits which I'd like to establish
- around 60 project sheets in 6 folders
- a calendar of 2006

I had much more earlier (next action cards, agendas, todo lists etc) but they didn't fit my current lifestyle.

The 6 project folders are the following:
1. Routine - Predefined tasks for the sleepy mornings
2. Lifehacks - Preview before starting the day
3. Waiting for - I prefer reviewing this daily
4. Survive - Covey Q1 tasks [explanation]
5. Grow - Covey Q2 tasks
6. Someday/Maybe - Review weekly

There are two bad smells/habits I often encounter:

1. forgetting about the Hipster habit
I often find myself forgetting about the Hipster completely; then some hours go by and I start feeling depressed because I know that I am not doing the things I should. Unluckily it takes some time to realize that I'm not using the Hipster where everything is organized. I am surprised because I have been using it every single day for 6 months. Hopefully I just need some more time, at least I'm getting better every day.

2. not using the Inbox habit
In every 5-15 minutes somebody/something interrupts me. Many times I found myself acting/replying immediately instead of putting the task to the inbox and processing it when the time arrives.

If I can successfully get rid of these bad habits, things will surely be great (but its okay now too).

Anyways, using the Hipster is so much fun. Reminds me of my early school years. In this digital age its truly a gift, I'd warmly recommend a Hipster to anybody.

Let me explain what I meant when writing Being Proactive IS Feeling Alive some weeks ago (I couldn't/didn't want to put it in words yet).

Most people are always in the unconscious unconsciousness state. They just hang around doing nothing and they even don't realize it. And they are boring.

Some of them will realize that this is actually painful and needs to be changed: if they want to feel good, they need to start doing something. They are usually doing it poorly and have no idea about it. But they are at least doing it sometimes.

The problem is with the sometimes. Most activities involve multiple persons. If you only deal with your thing sometimes, the other party won't see you as reliable. If you make promises, you will even become untrustworthy in their eyes.

Finally, some of these people will do it long enough to have the chance to look back and analyze what (and how) they did and where they need to improve. They will get conscious about their mistakes so that they can start working on preventing them in the future.

There are lots of things matching this.

Take learning for example. First you are unconsciously unconscious; that is, you have no idea what you don't know. Then you start experimenting with things and after some time you will be able to tell what you need to learn/where you need to improve. This is conscious unconsciousness. Finally, you will oversee everything and you get to the point of conscious consciousness, the state where you do things with reason. Thats where I am with programming right now and I can tell you its an awesome feeling when all your steps are backed with a reason. Jeff wrote about this in Expert and Novice Programmers.

Music is similar. When I started out with electronic music, I loved everything that had electronic elements in it. Today I am in love with the trance genre mostly because I know how complex and hard to produce it is. If you are one of the people being not really familiar or not really liking electronic music, you probably say its not music at all and anybody can produce such songs. And you are right. The skills needed to produce the shit that you are likely to have ever heard on the radio can probably be picked up in some weeks. If you are one of those people, you are totally unconscious about this yet. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know that there is an actually huge enough piece of electronic music that is art. But how many art do you get on the radio or the TV?

Most people are unconscious. Thats why we get on the TV what we do. I believe unconscious people do unconscious things. Watching TV without a reason equals being unconscious.

The problem with being unconscious is that its one of the most boring things on Earth. On the other hand, being totally conscious about something is one of the most exciting things that exist.

I believe the more things you do consciously than unconsciously, the better you feel and the more successful you are.

Turning to my previous post which was about integrity, I suspect that doing enough things consciuosly is integrity itself. I am still unsure because I haven't reached there yet, but I'll definitely report about it as soon as I'm experiencing it in the long run.

The current versions of FCKeditor (around 2.2) contain a bug that prevents the Quick File Uploader to work by default.

The solution is to search FCKconfig.js for "FCKeditor.QuickUploadLanguage" and replace it to "_QuickUploadLanguage".

If you ever need to debug FCKeditors file upload functionality, remove target="UploadWindow" from editor/dialog/fck_image.html to get some feedback with uploads.

I only enjoy partial integrity in my life and seem to loose motivation frequently these months. This is not unusual at this age I guess. At least I am aware of it, so I can consciously work on solutions. Even for Steve it took a decade and hundreds of personal development books to "get it".

It was sometime in 2005 that I finally "got it" at a deep enough level and recognized that consciousness gives me the freedom to create my own inner experience at all times, and my inner reality projects outward into the world and then feeds back into my perceptions.
(interview with Steve at Entrepreneurs Journey)

I'm sure it won't happen overnight. This is a process and not a single event.

Last week I have added Integrity by Dr Henry Cloud to my Personal Development Wish List. It was reviewed by John Richardson at Success Begins Today and I feel like it has many ideas/new aspects to offer.

This night I met Zig Ziglar's "Success for Dummies" audiotape. Despite its title it provides lots of information on motivation.

Here are my favourite quotes from it:

"In short, its not the absence of opportunity but the absence of motivation that is the problem for most people."
"Being motivated means being ready to take action."

"People with integrity do the right thing."
"Integrity. Character, consistency, persistency."

"Motivators:
1. The desire for gain.
2. The fear of loss (legitimate fear for realistic reasons is not only natural but also desirable).

Rewards: powerful tools for motivation."

The very next step is to identify what would bring more motivation to every single thing that I'm seriously doing and bring them into effect. The good news is that I'm very good in coming up with ideas so this shouldn't take too much effort ;) Heck, I already have some tips for the most important ones.

Here is a quote that I'd like to keep in mind, that's why I'm posting it.

"If you talk openly about your "big" plans for opening and succeeding in your own business you are telegraphing an important message to everyone you mention it to: You're looking for them to approve of your plans. You're LOOKING for approval without realizing it.

What else does it telegraph? You have no confidence in yourself.


The two biggest causes for not getting started has to do with:

1. TALKING too much about what you are going to do, instead of DOING it.

2. NOT taking responsibility for everything that happens in your life - it's always someone else's fault. It's NOT!"

This is from David Vallieres' newsletter. You can subscribe somewhere on that page.

Please remind me of this occassionally everybody.

(I am posting this in the PHP category because I needed it when developing a webapp, maybe others benefit from it as well)

Basically I wanted to store multiple values in a single field to avoid additional tables with table links and unnecessary complexity in my already-2-screen-long queries.

I needed to store the 5 possible values A B C D E in this field (and 20 values in another case) then compare the fields with each other in the WHERE clause of the queries. If you start thinking about this, it isn't common sense at all because neither LIKE or = works here.

To make it more clear, we are talking about values like ABC, BCDE, ADE, BE, CDE etc and we need to tell if any of the characters are identical in two strings. For example:
somefunc('AB', 'AB') = true
somefunc('AB', 'BCD') = true
somefunc('ABE', 'CD') = false
somefunc('ABCDE', 'E') = true

The first thing came to mind was to create this function but it wasn't possible in my case.

I was about to create those additional tables and add another couple of lines to my queries when I realized that the SET datatype can help. I was in heaven when I found the FIND_IN_SET() function. It isn't enough though. FIND_IN_SET() allows you to compare a single value to a list of values (e.g. 'A', 'ABC'). I need to compare list of values to list of values ('ABC', 'CDE').

Here comes the fact that values with the SET datatype are stored as binary and can be used as integers.

Finally the solution:
SELECT * FROM tt
WHERE field_a & field_b

This is the most elegant solution I can come up with. It also decreases the development time from 1 days to 1 hour.

There is a limitation though, from the MySQL manual: "A SET can have a maximum of 64 different members."

Hope this helps somebody. Happy coding!

Next Saturday I'm gonna talk about the great new features of PEAR 1.4 on the Hungarian Web Conference 2006 in Budapest. Everybody is warmly welcome to visit the event (entrance is free but registration is required - hurry up, not too much seats left).

The Hungarian Web Conference is the official continuation of the Hungarian PHP Conference event series, being more widely open to other languages, tools, specifications and recommendations used for web development.

Some of the keywords that the program will cover: PEAR 1.4 (PHP), ASP.Net, Web Forms 2/XForms, Macromedia Flex, Textarea++, Icecast+AJAX, Django, Ruby on Rails, Perl, W3C, Web Accessibility, Java, High-Availability System, Semantic Web etc.

I will talk about PEAR in overall, 1.4+ features, the CLI installer, creating packages, roles/tasks/post-install scripts, setting up a PEAR server and local PEAR installations.

My personal opinion is that the conference offers a very compelling program to everybody interested in web development.

A special part of the program is a round table discussion about the future of web development.

See you there!

P.S. Don't be surprised, the talks will be in Hungarian.

I became aware of this great singer by the new Thrillseekers single titled "By Your Side" (to be released on 6th March but promos are already available here). Here is the part which made me love this song. Gina Dootson became one of my favourite singers. She is very talented and has terrific voice. Listen to the songs on her website to find out why.

I must express my DISsatisfaction with my current bank, *********. (update: my new bank is Raiffeisen--I warmly recommend them to anybody.)

I can't count how many times I have been burned by them. Not in money terms but customer support.

I don't even eat my breakfast because I need to HURRY, they close at 3pm! Isn't it sick? Other banks are open until 5pm or 6pm on most weekdays, they close at 3pm at most weekdays! So I don't take my breakfast and rush to the bank, try to open the door and I see a huge CLOSED table hanging in the front of me. The website stated they are open until 4pm, I don't eat, I rush to catch a bus and they close at 3pm. Great.

Then I call them on my cell (no phone numbers anywhere, I need to contact them through the phone number printed on my credit card) and ask them about their closest office. That closes at 4pm. No chance to get there in time.

The second next office closes at 5pm. Neither there could I get in time.

So here is my MONEY in my hands that I'd like to GIVE TO THEM and there is no way I could do it. Don't you need it? Fine. I'll bring it to somewhere else. Now that I'm an average middle-class person (thinking as the riches do, according to Kiyosaki). And 20 years later too when I'll be an average RICH person. Forget about my billions.

I have lost LOTS OF TIME and I have lost LOTS OF MONEY as a result of this. There's no chance I'd think about you, thanks.

Oh! :) Almost forgot to say. I am paying around $90 per year for this GREAT service!

And your site currently timeouts. And anyways, you are using Java even on the main page. WTF?

Could anybody please suggest a bank in Hungary that actually wants me to put my money in and won't close before the end of the workday? Who the hell are your customers anyways? Most of the population has permanent daily jobs, who do you serve then?

Silly, isn't it?

You know what the funny thing is? There were 3 other banks "still" open on the way home.