Quick Links - 2004 06 07

Last update: 07/06/04; 10:16:54 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Scott S. Lawton: Frontier as Open Source The beginning of a new era?: I'd love to hear from others -- fogeys or not. I don't have a simple way to allow comments here, so please chime in on one of the threads below.
• Hamish Sanderson: appscript: Appscript allows MacPython users on OS X to manipulate scriptable applications from ordinary Python scripts. [via Karl Dubost]

Politics

• Robert Parry [In the 1980s, as a correspondent for the Associated Press and Newsweek, Robert Parry broke many of the stories now known as the Iran-Contra Affair. His latest book is Lost History. ]: Not Vietnam but Central America: Though U.S.-backed armies and paramilitary forces eventually quelled the leftist peasant rebellions, the cost in blood was staggering. The death toll in El Salvador was estimated at about 70,000 people. In Guatemala, the number of dead reached about 200,000, including what a truth commission concluded was a genocide against the Mayan populations in Guatemala's highlands. The muted press coverage that the U.S. news media has given these atrocities as they have come to light over the years also showed the residual strength of the "perception management" employed by the Reagan administration. For instance, even when the atrocities of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt are mentioned, as they were in the context of his defeat in Guatemala's Nov. 9 presidential elections, the history of Reagan's warm support for Rios Montt is rarely, if ever, noted by the U.S. press. While the slaughter of the Mayans was underway in the 1980s, Reagan portrayed Gen. Rios Montt and the Guatemalan army as victims of disinformation spread by human rights groups and journalists. Reagan huffily discounted reports that Rios Montt's army was eradicating hundreds of Mayan villages. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as "totally dedicated to democracy" and declared that Rios Montt's government had been "getting a bum rap." Reagan also reversed President Jimmy Carter's policy of embargoing military equipment to Guatemala over its human rights abuses. Carter's human rights embargoes represented one of the few times during the Cold War when Washington objected to the repression that pervaded Central American society. -> For more from Parry, see consortiumnews.com.

10:21AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 05 28

Last update: 28/05/04; 09:33:23 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• amfphp.org: AMFPHP An Open-Source Alternative for Flash Remoting : Flash remoting for PHP enables objects in PHP to become objects in actionscript, almost magically! AMFPHP takes care of all the data-type conversions, serialization, and other client-server details. This provides a great way of connecting rich media clients with data and logic living on the server. While at the same time allowing designers to design and programmers to program.
• David Sklar: HTML_QuickForm -> Slides; excellent intro to HTML_QuickForm (PHP).
• Sam Ruby: Détente: So, if you are a tool vendor and would like a little more structure, rigor, and reproducibility, Atom might be a good choice. But if you chose to hold back until Atom is done, that's OK too. However, if you want to do something quick and dirty in RSS 2.0, go for it. Guilt free. It will get you up and running quickly. The key takeaway here is to beware of anybody who preaches one true format or one size fits all. Each format has its strengths. And none of them are going away any time soon. Meanwhile, you can help by spreading the word. The word is détente. RSS 1.0 has a reason to exist. RSS 2.0 has a reason to exist. And Atom has a reason to exist.

9:40AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 05 20

Last update: 20/05/04; 09:44:03 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Brent Simmons: RSS Advisory Board, not on: The situation of supporting multiple syndication formats is not new with Atom: Atom is the third major format. The other two are RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.9x/2.0. (I'm speaking in broad terms: I'm well aware of the differences between various versions of RSS.) My point is just that newsreaders have been dealing with multiple formats for a long time.
• Christopher Allen: Simple Yet Sophisticated Group Page Editing: At the fundamental level, EditThisPagePHP basically just let you remotely edit a single page. There are many situations where existing Wiki or Blog software is too complicated, or imposes too much structure. EditThisPagePHP lets you have total control over the HTML -- you can use sophisticated CSS layouts, or very simple HTML -- the software does not get in the way. Yet in spite of this simplicity, EditThisPagePHP also uses ideas drawn from various Wiki, Blog, and CMS (content management system) technologies. Like Wikis, it supports an edit-this-page button, page history, page diffs, and can email users when pages change. Like Blogs, it supports optional user comments, trackbacks (both send and receive), and delivers two RSS feeds -- one for the current version of the page, and one with diffs. Like a CMS, it supports multiple roles, by default a reader, an editor, and a super-editor -- each with different privileges.
• Kendall Grant Clark: The Courtship of Atom: All that having been said, I think, as between any lover and its beloved, wooing is better than pressuring. If, as a result of moving into the W3C, Atom's developers find benefits to adopting the RDF model, than that's all to the good. If not, that's fine, too. I will point out that many people's main objection to RDF, that the canonical XML serialization is painful, is less and less trenchant these days. (See, for example, Mark Pilgrim's "Should Atom Use RDF?".) Why? Because, first, there are at least six good alternatives to RDF-XML for serializing RDF models: Notation 3 (aka, N3), NTriples, Turtle, TriG (which is, roughly, Turtle++), TriX, and RXR ("Regular XML RDF"); and, second, because at least two of them are "ordinary" XML vocabularies (TriX and RXR) -- amenable to XSLT transformations, for example. That means that you can do lots of RDF, all the RDF you might ever need or want to do, and never produce or consume the canonical RDF-XML serialization. Yay for alternatives! I suspect that, if there was to be an Atom WG, and were it to adopt the RDF data model and any of these alternative XML syntaxes, that would not only be a good thing for the W3C, but it would benefit RDF and Atom, too. But I know that if an Atom WG were to take a hard look at RDF and its data model, and then to pass politely, it will still be a win for all concerned for Atom to have found a home in the W3C.

9:50AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 05 17

Last update: 19/05/04; 20:48:05 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Dave Winer: FAQs about Frontier open source release: What will be released under an open source license? All the source code you need to build the Frontier application on Windows and Macintosh, the core object database, Frontier.root, and the ancillary databases, but not manila.root or radio.root. Several base technologies in Radio may also be released under an open source license, such as upstreaming and the outline-based preferences manager. Basically what's being released is technology, but not applications.
• Dave Winer comment on Brian Sullivan's Random Musings: The separation, at a legal level, has already taken place. UserLand has a license to use the kernel, but it does not own the kernel. I know it's confusing, but over time it will make more sense, I think.
• Seth Dillingham: UserLand Planning to Release Frontier's Kernel : I'd need to believe two things. First, that fixing bugs and adding features in the kernel would be a better use of Macrobyte's time than bringing my software to another platform. Second, that changes I make in the kernel source could somehow be put to immediate use in my software, rather than having to wait for a point release from UserLand. What won't work at all is a situation where you still have to buy licenses to Frontier in order to do anything meaningful with the 'open source.' For example, if Frontier is updated so that replacement kernels can be dropped in easily, but you still have to buy the application, it's useless to me. I don't mind contributing improvements to the code, but I won't pay for that "privelege." Whatever the outcome, this is the most interesting news to come out of UserLand in many years, and it gives me an option for the future of some of Macrobyte's software that I hadn't considered before today.
• Dave Winer: As Good A Time As Any: I am on the board of directors of the company, and I persuaded my fellow board members that it would be in the company's interest to let the kernel develop separately from the products that build on it. And that's what I want to announce today. At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel.

7:14AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 05 14

Last update: 20/05/04; 09:48:00 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Atom Project (Atom Wiki): Atom Project: W3C Working Group and Interest Group : The working group will use experience gained with RSS (variably used as a name by itself and as an acronym for "RDF Site Summary", "Rich Site Summary", or "Really Simple Syndication") as the basis for a standards-track document specifying the model, syntax, and feed format. The feed format and HTTP will be used as the basis of work on a standards-track document specifying the editing protocol. If other submissions are made to the working group under terms accepted by the W3C, the working group may consider them as alternatives, based upon their merits.
• Matt May: W3C wants Atom: Here are the answers to the FAQ: No, it doesn't have to be RDF. No, it won't have to take ten years to become a standard. No, you don't have to pony up $5,750 a year to become a Member to participate. Yes, it will be royalty-free. (All our new stuff is.) Yes, you can do everything in the public eye. No, some W3C Member company didn't put us up to this. Yes, we can make Atom feeds of our RSS feeds.
• Joe Gregorio: Google, Atom, SixApart, and Longhorn: It's been a spectacular day for news today, just way too much to break up into separate posts.

9:22AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 04 07

Last update: 20/05/04; 09:48:07 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Late Night Software Ltd: Property List Tools 1.0: The Property List Tools Scripting Addition allows AppleScript to load and store data Mac OS X Property Lists. The scripting addition allows you to export any AppleScript data structure to a property list.

9:32AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 03 18

Last update: 20/05/04; 09:48:11 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• developer.apple.com: Reference Library: A comprehensive collection of Apple technical resources, including Documentation, Technical Notes, Sample Code, Technical Q&As, and Release Notes. Each of the links below leads to the resources for a specific topic. Key resources also include Getting Started documents, API references, and cross-references for related topics.

8:00AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 03 16

Last update: 16/03/04; 08:47:55 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• CocoaMySQL: CocoaMySQL is an application used to manage MySQL databases (locally or over the internet). It lets you add and remove databases and tables, change fields and indexes, view and filter the content of tables, add, edit and remove rows, perform custom queries and dump tables or entire databases. -> Open Source.

comments: 0

8:19AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 03 14

Last update: 15/03/04; 08:03:30 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• John Lim: PHP5 evolutionary lies : Comrades, I'm sick of hearing that PHP5 is evolutionary. If you believe that PHP5 is evolutionary because it stresses backward compatibility, then try bending over backwards - you'll find that it feels very stressful. PHP5 is not going to go down easily. PHP5 is going to be painful and its going to be revolutionary. Here's why (...)

comments: 0

8:05AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 03 12

Last update: 12/03/04; 08:48:03 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Late Night Software Ltd: Affrus 1.0: Affrus 1.0 is an integrated Perl editing and debugging environment for Mac OS X. It wraps Perl in a standard, familiar, and intuitive user interface. Affrus is the perfect center for all your Perl development needs on Mac OS X. Whether you're just beginning to experiment with Perl and want an easy way to get your feet wet, or you're a Perl expert wishing to understand and hack into a vast body of existing code, Affrus is for you.

comments: 0

8:49AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 03 11

Last update: 11/03/04; 08:04:26 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• nyphp-talk: windows98 source code ...

comments: 0

8:05AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 03 10

Last update: 10/03/04; 09:16:51 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Andy Lester: The world's two worst variable names: Bad variables are all over the place. Usually it will be something like a short variable used for too long, like $n being used for the duration of an entire subroutine. The programmer might as well have been working in TRS-80 BASIC, where only the first two characters of variable names were significant, and we had to keep a handwritten lookup chart of names in a spiral notebook next to the keyboard. (O'Reilly Network)
• wxpython.org: Optimizing for Mac OS X: This page contains tips and tricks for making your wxPython application a good OS X citizen.[via "Robert Kaye"]

comments: 0

9:11AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 02 03

Last update: 03/02/04; 06:53:57 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• John Lim: Here's the comparison of Python and PHP I promised a few weeks ago. : Another look at PHP and Python
• Pexpect version 0.99 a Pure Python Expect-like module: Pexpect is a pure Python module for spawning child applications; controlling them; and responding to expected patterns in their output. Pexpect works like Don Libes' Expect. Pexpect allows your script to spawn a child application and control it as if a human were typing commands. Pexpect can be used for automating interactive applications such as ssh, ftp, passwd, telnet, etc. It can be used to a automate setup scripts for duplicating software package installations on different servers. It can be used for automated software testing. Pexpect is in the spirit of Don Libes' Expect, but Pexpect is pure Python. Unlike other Expect-like modules for Python, Pexpect does not require TCL or Expect nor does it require C extensions to be compiled. It should work on any platform that supports the standard Python pty module. The Pexpect interface was designed to be easy to use. [via cornerblog]

comments: 0

6:53AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 21

Last update: 21/01/04; 10:48:49 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Bruce Stewart : Why We Turned Off Anonymous Talkbacks: Until today, you could participate in the online discussions on any of our sites anonymously, with no requirements to register, log in anywhere, or otherwise identify yourself. We know many people appreciated the ease with which they could comment on our articles and weblogs, and in many cases anonymous posters had great things to contribute to these discussions. But in the face of dramatically increasing spam and growing abuse of our system, we've now disabled the ability to post comments anonymously. (O'Reilly Network)
• nyphp.org: PHundamentals: Functions for Storing Data Submitted From a Form and Displaying Data from a Database: In this article we present our best practice for preparing data submitted from a form for use in an SQL query and preparing that data for display in a browser.
• Jacob D. Cohen: Nopaste: What is a 'nopaste' site? A 'nopaste' site allows people to paste chunks of code for others to view. This is useful for situations such as asking for programming help on IRC, where it is frowned upon to paste chunks of code to the channel or to individual. With a nopaste site, the user pastes his or her code to the site and is given a url to provide to others so they can find the code. What's different about this one? Many nopaste sites have appeared lately, and many of them are quite similar. The nopaste site at RAFB, as far as I can tell, is the only such site that offers syntax highlighting in several languages including C, C++, C#, Java, PHP, and Visual Basic.

comments: 0

10:51AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 19

Last update: 19/01/04; 07:55:33 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Dave Hyatt: XML Error Handling in Web Browsers: The whole reason nearly all Web pages on the Internet are malformed is because browsers let Web page authors get away with it. As long as browsers are permissive in their error handling and recovery, Web authors will continue to produce invalid Web pages, because they won't even have any idea the pages they are authoring are invalid! People in the error recovery camp then suggest ideas like icons in the status bar, or error messages dumped to some obscure console, but the average Web designer isn't going to know or care about validation as long as WinIE displays the Web site adequately. The only way you can make the average Web designer care is to get in his face with the obvious errors. The browser has to make a face and refuse to eat the swill that is being force-fed to it, or the average designer is simply going to shrug and say, "Well, close enough." The crux of the problem with implementing true error recovery is that it must be unambiguous. Every Web browser has to recover from malformed content in precisely the same way. This means that in order for browsers to be tolerant of malformed content, there would have to be a specification regarding how to handle all possible malformations. This is virtually impossible to specify, so why waste time and energy on it when creating well-formed XML files is so ridiculously simple?
• developer.apple.com: Introduction to Mac OS X Frameworks : Mac OS X makes extensive use of frameworks to distribute shared code and resources, such as the interfaces to the system itself. You can create frameworks of your own to provide shared code and resources to one or more of your company's applications. You can also create frameworks containing class libraries or add-on modules with the intention of distributing them to other developers.

comments: 0

7:58AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 18

Last update: 18/01/04; 14:15:25 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Adam Trachtenberg: Using PHP 5's SimpleXML: SimpleXML is a new and unique feature of PHP 5 that solves these problems by turning an XML document into a data structure you can iterate through like a collection of arrays and objects. It excels when you're only interested in an element's attributes and text and you know the document's layout ahead of time. SimpleXML is easy to use because it handles only the most common XML tasks, leaving the rest for other extensions. [via PHPDeveloper.org] (O'Reilly Network)
• osdir.com: Interview with OSDir: Interview with Plone: Back from Comdex : OSDir: Why did you guys start Plone? What was your itch? Limi: Zope was lacking a good-looking, functional piece of UI software - the technology was very good, but no consistent, approachable products existed (IMHO, of course). People were struggling with very basic concepts when they started with Zope, something they shouldn't have to do. The itch was customer projects that required content management and we were tired of doing the same things over and over again. Classic tale, really.
• Sam Ruby: Validate on subscription?: I've thought about Brent's proposed compromise, and to borrow a phrase that is a favorite of Tim Bray, I think that there is a way that 80% of the value can be obtained with 20% of the effort.  Is there really a market requirement to be selectively pedantic on a feed by feed basis?

Politics

• Zvi Bar'el: Conditions for rejecting negotiations: It has been made clear to us for the past three years that the Arabs don't understand force. The number deaths, suicide bombings and alerts raise the serious suspicion that the Israeli military "educational system" imposed on the Palestinians has failed. Instead of a political process, the Palestinian partners are being offered work permits. The question of whether the Palestinian Authority is responsible for something has long since become irrelevant; Israel is the sole manager of the territories in every sphere. The words "without prior conditions" should be seen as a certain refinement of the phrase, "Please don't bother us now." Israel put forward 14 prior conditions with regard to the road map, and is presenting two prior conditions for a political process with Syria - dismantlement of weapons of mass destruction and an end to support for terrorism - as a prologue to two more prior conditions: no return to the point at which the talks were broken off and no return to the lines of June 4, 1967. (Haaretz)
• Michael Moore: I'll Be Voting For Wesley Clark/Good-Bye Mr. Bush: Many of you have written to me in the past months asking, "Who are you going to vote for this year?" I have decided to cast my vote in the primary for Wesley Clark. That's right, a peacenik is voting for a general. What a country! I believe that Wesley Clark will end this war. He will make the rich pay their fair share of taxes. He will stand up for the rights of women, African Americans, and the working people of this country. And he will cream George W. Bush.

comments: 0

2:09PM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 15

Last update: 15/01/04; 14:06:22 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• random.org: : Random.org offers true random numbers to anyone on the internet. If you want to know how the numbers are made and what it is that makes them true, read the introduction to randomness and random numbers. -> See the HTTP clients: Python, PHP, Perl, C, etc.

comments: 0

2:05PM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 14

Last update: 14/01/04; 12:38:13 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Georg Bauer: Who is the real bozo here?: Sorry, but this whole "Atom must be parsed strict" - "No, it must be parsed liberal or you are an asshole to your customers" - "No, you are an incompetent bozo" - "No, you are a conspirationist against Atom" helluva should stop right now. It went far enough, you all called each other names, so now go back, play with your toys and let the grownups take over, will you? Please? Hell, it's called social software, not unsocial software, so try to behave at least half way to the expected standard...

comments: 0

12:40PM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 13

Last update: 13/01/04; 09:39:11 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Nick Bradbury: FeedDemon and well-formed Atom feeds: NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons recently announced that NetNewsWire's future support for Atom will require Atom feeds to be well-formed. Some people aren't too happy about this, claiming that he's applying a double standard that will make Atom appear less useful than RSS. So, I'll add to the stink by stating that my plan is the same as Brent's. FeedDemon will also support Atom, but if an Atom feed isn't well-formed XML, FeedDemon will display an error rather than try to parse it. [via inessential.com]
• Greg Reinacker: Atom feeds and well-formed XML: NewsGator 2.0, and all of the NewsGator editions being shipped as part of NewsGator Online Services on January 19, will parse Atom feeds using a very similar parser to that used for RSS; that means that most "questionable" feeds (of which there are a LOT) will parse ok. The vast majority of our customers don't care about well-formed XML - they care about getting information. Our tools are designed to make that happen.

comments: 0

9:36AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 12

Last update: 12/01/04; 09:24:04 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Harry Fuecks: The Command Pattern: The Command Pattern is about wrapping a request in an object. It turns up frequently in web application frameworks, e.g. form processing where the Command Pattern is used to handle user "actions".

comments: 0

9:25AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 11

Last update: 11/01/04; 16:19:52 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Joe Gregorio: There are no exceptions to Postel's Law: Let me put it this way, do you want your payroll deposit consumed by an ultra-liberal parser that 'fixes' errors in the XML as it consumes it? I didn't think so. But would you even care if a browser presented you a web page that was missing a closing tag on a div? Again, I didn't think so. Context is important and that's why blanket statements like "There are no exceptions to Postel's Law" are wrong, aside from the mis-representation of Postel's Law, and the ignoring the other half of the Law bit.

Culture

• beatlebrunch.com: Before Shea Stadium, The Ed Sullivan Show, and the Cavern, Came the Casbah.: [Pete Best]: Well basically what we credited it as an untold story. It's a story which puts into perspective the role of the Casbah, the role of my mother Mona because she was very inspirational as regards to their success, a bit of an unsung hero in a way, in as much as she never took the acclaim, she never took the limelight for the help that she gave The Beatles, and she was always there to give them a lifeline. She was always there 100 percent. She was the first person who was inspirational in getting them a booking at the Cavern. It was Brian Epstein who came down and saw her to make sure she didn't want to manage the group. It was prior to him taking over as manager officially.

comments: 0

4:07PM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 09

Last update: 09/01/04; 11:11:06 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Marco Tabini: Why not leave MySQL alone?: What I really do not understand is why MySQL is burning itself so badly with the OSS people. In my opinion, they are doing a horrible job with their PR. I mean it. Horrible. Disgusting. Substandard. Simply put, they are throwing away money--small money when taken individually, to be sure, but substantial money nonetheless. Why? Complete, total lack of clarity. The licensing page on MySQL.com is about as clear as my heating bill--and I'm still trying to figure out why I pay 70% of my heating costs in taxes and levies. MySQL has been stumbling along promising a clear interpretation of their licensing policies for months. I have seen none. Let me explain what I mean by "clear interpretation" of their licensing terms. The average "small" developer--the one likely to be using PHP and MySQL, for example--does not have the means to afford a lawyer capable of explaining to him whether his particular case requires a commercial license. He needs examples. I built a PHP-based blogging tool (or, more generically, a commercial web tool) that supports MySQL (or that requires it). Do I need to pay a client license for the library? Does my client need a commercial license? Can I not distribute a free, but non GPL-ed, version of my software without paying a license?

comments: 0

10:55AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 08

Last update: 08/01/04; 09:26:28 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• kernelthread.com: What is Mac OS X? : This document does not aim to regurgitate Marketing KoolAid, "not that there's anything wrong with it[trademark]", but is intended primarily as an introduction to Mac OS X of those members of the technical community who are not familiar with it. You can think of it as a somewhat low-level taste of Apple's operating system. Consequently, some parts are fairly technical, and the implicit assumption is that you are familiar with fundamental concepts of one or more of BSD, Mach, UNIX, or operating systems in general. In many cases I have made no attempt to provide background details of the concepts referred to in the discussion. -> An incredible reference on the inwards of OS X. [via Simon Willison]

comments: 0

9:26AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 07

Last update: 07/01/04; 07:47:18 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Ron Hitchens: It Was Twenty Years Ago Today / Sgt Pepper Taught The Band To Play : My, how things have changed. A few months ago I bought a 15" Powerbook. Twenty years later I've returned to the Mac. I left the Mac behind many years ago because I didn't think it was a serious, professional grade system that I could use to earn my living. Today, I wouldn't want to use anything else. (O'Reilly Network)
• Marco Tabini: Is my language really better than yours? : Languages must evolve and be efficient and reliable, of course. PHP5 is an important step towards a better language, which, in turn, translates into opportunities for a better platform. Ultimately, however, it's the platform itself that makes all the difference when it comes to bringing a product to market.

comments: 0

7:47AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2004 01 06

Last update: 06/01/04; 10:20:23 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Chris Shiflett: The Truth about Sessions - Session Management Exposed : Simple and effective methods to increase the security and reliability of your stateful PHP applications.(php magazine)
• wordpress.org: WordPress : WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. More simply, Wordpress is what you use when you want to work with your software, not fight it. PHP/MySQL

comments: 0

10:18AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 12 08

Last update: 08/12/03; 11:01:10 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Ken MacLeod: The web is bigger than one application : The supposed benefit to "an RPC layer" is that it "marshals" your data for you (converting the web format in to and out of structures in your preferred language), thus making the application "simpler". The trade-off, then, is marshalling vs. all the possible tools and means and ways of interacting with web data that are out there. The error in this view is 1) it presumes marshalling can't be done with the web resource anyway, and 2) that everyone wants the same form of unmarshalled data. In other words, the trade-off is a short-term gain in one developer's toolkit vs. locking everyone else into similar toolkits. Specifically in the case of XML, "XML Object binding frameworks" are becoming quite common, and even built in to languages like MicroSoft's C# and ECMAScript (JavaScript's XScript); other XML tools, like XSLT, XPath, and CSS, are already "natively formatted".
• Rich Bowen: A Day in the Life of #Apache : Today's piece jump-starts this new series, "A Day in the Life of #Apache", here on ONLamp. The goal of these articles will be to condense some of those frequent IRC conversations into a format that can be used to help folks with these commonly occurring problems, while, at the same time, reducing the burn-out rate of IRC tech support. And, of course, other folks can benefit from these articles without having to put up with the strange and surreal world that is IRC. (O'Reilly Network)
• Sente SA: Concurrent Versions Librarian : CVL (Concurrent Versions Librarian) is a version and configuration management tool for MacOS X, Mac OS X Server (Rhapsody), Windows and OPENSTEP. It helps managing versions of various resources (source code, projects, documents). It allows parallel modifications as well as branches. CVL is useful for one and for many users. CVL is a graphical user interface to CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) most often used commands. Its work area viewer allows you to quickly check the status of your files and directories. -> This app works well with the integration of CVS in BBEdit.

comments: 0

11:19AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 11 12

Last update: 12/11/03; 10:20:53 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Joel Rennich: Bring on the Big Cat! : This one is a biggie. Apple thoroughly overhauled a large portion of its server operating system in this release. This is the most significant change to the Mac OS since Apple moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. This fact alone should be evidenced by the over 1,000 pages of documentation that Apple now ships with the system. All of these manuals are available online, so take a look in there for more information on any of things I cover here. Having said that, you'll be surprised at how much has stayed the same. The mail server, for example, was overhauled entirely; but yet the interface remains very similar to what it used to be. Also, as with other versions of Mac OS X it may be a few weeks, if not months, before you find all of the hidden gems that are contained in the operating system. So, without further ado, I'd like to walk through my initial impressions of having used both Mac OS X version 10.3 Server and client. [via MacSlash]
• Panther Internet Sharing: Panther Internet Sharing : With the release of Panther, you can use your FireWire port for Internet sharing using a technology known as IP over FireWire (previously available for download as preview release). IP over FireWire essentially allows IP protocols-based services (such as HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc.) to be used over the FireWire connection. This means that you can use your FireWire port much like your Ethernet port. (O'Reilly Network)
• Feyd: Comprehensive guide to.htaccess I am sure that most of you have heard of htaccess, if just vaguely, and that you may think you have a fair idea of what can be done with an htaccess file. You are more than likely mistaken about that, however. Regardless, even if you have never heard of htaccess and what it can do for you, the intention of this tutorial is to get you two moving along nicely together. If you have heard of htaccess, chances are that it has been in relation to implementing custom error pages or password protected directories. But there is much more available to you through the marvelously simple.htaccess file. (JavaScript Kit)

comments: 0

10:31AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 11 07

Last update: 07/11/03; 08:50:16 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• David Wilkinson: PHP Calendar : This is a PHP calendar class, suitable for use in both PHP 3 and PHP 4. It is very customisable and has the following features:
  • Month View
  • Year View
  • Specify start day of week
  • Specify start month of year for Year View
  • Highlight today's date
  • Forward and Backward navigation between months and years
  • Individual days within a month may be optionally linked to another page.
  • Appearance set by CSS style sheet.

comments: 0

9:03AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 11 06

Last update: 06/11/03; 09:03:11 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• David A. Wheeler: Best practices for accepting user data : In nearly all secure programs, your first line of defense is to check every piece of data you receive. If you can keep malicious data from entering your program, or at least keep it from being processed, your program becomes much harder to attack. This is very similar to how firewalls protect computer networks from attackers; it won't prevent all attacks, but it does make a program much more resistant. This process is called checking, validating, or filtering your data. One obvious question is, where should the checking be performed? When the data first enters the program, or later by a lower-level routine that actually uses the data? Often, it's best to check in both places; that way, if an attacker manages to slip around one defense, they'll still encounter the other. The most important rule is that all data must be checked before it's used. [via Linux Today]

comments: 0

9:16AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 11 04

Last update: 04/11/03; 08:45:40 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Outside Looking In: The BSD Operating Systems : A while back, someone asked me why the open-source BSD operating systems aren't as popular as Linux. It's a good question. Technically speaking, the BSDs are often every bit as good as Linux. Indeed, when it comes to security, OpenBSD is the best of breed. (eWeek)
• Jake Savin: Work in progress: FTP for Manila : I've been working on releasing a new feature for Manila -- FTP-based static rendering. It's a cool feature, because you'll be able to host your Manila site wherever you want, as long as you have FTP access to the server -- a pretty standard feature for most hosting providers and many ISPs.

comments: 0

8:58AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 11 03

Last update: 03/11/03; 08:18:24 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Jan Libbenga: Why Spamcop got yanked :   Anyone who tried reporting spam to the popular Spamcop service this weekend got a nasty surprise. The site had bizarrely disappeared. And no, it wasn't a server outage. Joker.com, the German service that registered the Spamcop.net domain name, decided to yank the Spamcop.net domain name from its database, citing false Whois information. (The Register)

comments: 0

8:31AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 11 02

Last update: 02/11/03; 11:44:33 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• developer.apple.com: UNIX GUI Toolkits: The UNIX community has developed a wide range of GUI toolkits over the years, primarily built on top of the X11 Windowing system . Virtually all of these have been ported to Mac OS X, and many can even run directly on Quartz without the need for an X11 server. This page provides a link to the most popular toolkits.

comments: 0

11:57AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 10 31

Last update: 31/10/03; 09:06:03 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Adam Trachtenberg: PHP Web Services Without SOAP : REST, unlike SOAP, doesn't require you to install a separate tool kit to send and receive data. Instead, the idea is that everything you need to use Web services is already available if you know where to look. HTTP lets you communicate your intentions through GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests. To access resources, you request URIs from Web servers. [via PHPDeveloper.org]

comments: 0

9:18AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 10 29

Last update: 29/10/03; 11:31:06 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Carla Schroder: System recovery with Knoppix : This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware and system configuration detection and for creating and managing partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent graphical utilities, or from the command line. [via Linux Today]

comments: 0

11:42AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 10 28

Last update: 28/10/03; 09:50:22 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Late Night Software: Script Debugger 3.0.7 Update : Script Debugger 3.0.7 is a maintenance release that addresses a series of issues that came to light following the release of Script Debugger 3.0. If you are using Mac OS X 10.3 or later, you need Script Debugger 3.0.7.
• John Lim: The Shape of Pharrots to Come : John Coggeshall mentions that the PHP on Parrot project has been named "Pharrot" by the php-con conference attendees. Here's my take on things. Now I don't have any inside info, so the following is entirely guesswork, and any resemblence to reality is entirely your imagination (...)
• Harish Kamath: Doing More With phpMyAdmin (Part 1) : Over the course of this two-part article, I'm going to take you on a tour of one of the most popular Web-based tools for managing a MySQL database server. The first part of this article lays the foundation, explaining how to obtain the software, install and configure it for secure access, and use it for tasks such as managing multiple servers, manipulating user privileges, viewing reports on server activity, and exporting MySQL records into different formats. The second part explains the more advanced aspects of the application, including using it for transformations, maintaining a history of all the SQL queries executed in the phpMyAdmin session, defining relations between tables to create JOINs automatically, creating E-R diagrams in PDF format, and bookmarking important queries for future reference. (Developer Shed)
• Fredrik Lundh: PythonDoc : The PythonDoc tool generates API documentation in HTML and other formats, based on descriptions in Python source files. PythonDoc is a Python implementation of the JavaDoc (tm) tool. PythonDoc 2.0 parses Python source code, looking for special documentation comments and the variables, functions, classes, and methods they're describing. By default, PythonDoc generates a set of HTML pages describing all documented components in the source files. PythonDoc can also generate XML files, which you can process in various ways using your favourite XML toolbox. [via Karl Dubost]

comments: 0

9:59AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 10 26

Last update: 26/10/03; 11:08:52 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• developer.apple.com: Networking : Mac OS X offers a rich set of programming interfaces for networking. These APIs provide advanced features as well as compatibility with existing software. This page highlights the programming interfaces that we recommend for new development on Mac OS X.
• Dinu C. Gherman: RegexPlor : RegexPlor is a tool for interactively exploring regular expressions. It provides a graphic frontend for experimenting with such regular expressions in a intuitive way. You can edit an input text as well as a regular expression as well as colors for matched text, etc. and study various effects at every keystroke. This is a much more convenient way of hunting down the one expression you're after, without typing any code at all in the usual trial-and-error method.
• PTH Consulting: PTHiTunesNotifier : PTHiTunesNotifier is an application that displays the currently playing iTunes track in an overlay window and allows you to control iTunes from the menu bar and via Hot Keys. The information is shown in an overlay window whenever the current track changes and disappears after a few seconds (think of the the text at the beginning of music videos).

comments: 0

11:20AM EST [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 10 23

Last update: 23/10/03; 09:52:28 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• inter@ctivate consulting group: CVS Version Control for Web Site Projects : What Is CVS? cvs (concurrent versions system) is a freely available tool designed to help programmers implement version control and configuration management of software projects. we've found that cvs can be helpful in the design, development, care and feeding of our clients' web sites as well. -> See here for more on CVS.
• Jonathan Oxer: Techniques for learning where the bottlenecks are in your PHP-based Web application. : APD is a debugger written in C by George Schlossnagle and Daniel Cowgill that loads as an extension to the Zend Engine. It works by hooking into the Zend internals and intercepting PHP function calls, allowing it to do things like measure function execution time, count function calls, perform stack backtraces and other funky things. (Linux Journal)
• plone.org: Archive of Talks and Tutorials: 1st Plone Conference in New Orleans [via have browser, will travel]

comments: 0

10:00AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 10 22

Last update: 22/10/03; 14:32:13 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Georg Bauer: XML.com: The Atom API [Oct. 15, 2003] : Sorry, Mark, you won't gain good marks from me for this one. Drop out the XMLRPC bashing and the (historical wrong) hype, and the rest makes quite a good introduction into Atoms functionality and power. But with the first part attached, it makes bad feelings with people that like to follow different paths to implementations.
• Andrew Anderson: Start Me Up: Writing and Understanding OS X StartupItems : In this article I will give an overview of how StartupItems fit into the OS X startup process, what you need to do to create a Startup Item, and provide an example of a StartupItem that will run the Apache project's Tomcat Java servlet engine. (O'Reilly Mac DevCenter)
• Harry Fuecks: User Mode Linux - the third way for hosting? : But how about this as a price - 32Mb Ram, 750Mb HD Space, 5Gb transfer/month and root access for 10 Euro / month? This is what VD Server, a German hosting company, are offering for entry level accounts. What makes this possible is User Mode Linux, a version of Linux which other instances of the Linux operating system to be run in a completely isolated (including IP stack) virtual machine. That means a hosting provider can safely give you root access to a virtual server without having to worry about what you do with it. VD Server, for example, provide you with a Debian installation over which you have comlpete control.
• inknoise.com: Layout-o-matic : Select a layout type, width, and other options to the left, and then click Download or View and pick up your multi-column CSS layout starter kit (turning it into something unique and beautiful not included). You're welcome to use the resulting generated layouts for any purpose, personal or commercial. [via Karl Dubost]

comments: 0

11:15AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 10 03

Last update: 03/10/03; 09:14:10 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Cameron Barret: On the Campaign Trail : Today, I was offered a formal position as the "blog strategy guy" (official title pending) for the Clark campaign. I haven't accepted it yet but I'm pretty sure that I will. Working on the Clark campaign is a chance of a lifetime and I'd be pretty crazy to turn the offer down. How many times in your life to have a chance to change the way political campaigns work? How often do you have a chance to change the world?
• Gregory Trubetskoy: Introducing mod_python: This release [version 3.1] introduces native handling of cookies, including support for cryptographic signing of cookie data (using HMAC), as well as the ability to marshal (serialize) simple objects into cookie values. There is support for session management with fairly thorough random session id generation logic and the ability to take advantage of signed cookies. Sessions can be stored in either a dbm file or directly in memory depending on whether Apache runs in multi-process or threaded mode. Sessions support session locks using Apache's internal global mutex interface to provide mutual exclusion across all processes and threads. The Session class is extensible, so that it is easy to implement custom session objects which use alternative persistent storage, such as a relational database. Last, but not the least, version 3.1 introduces mod_python's own implementation of PSP (Python Server Pages). This is a framework that allows embedding Python code within HTML similar to the way it is done in PHP, JSP, or ASP. The core parser implementation for mod_python PSP was initially written and graciously contributed to mod_python by Sterling Hughes, a core PHP developer. The PSP parser is generated using flex, one of the fastest scanning and parsing tools in existence. It also integrates nicely with other tools provided by mod_python such as session handling, altogether resulting in one of the fastest Server Page implementations available.[via Simon Willison]
• Alex Harper: MenuMeters : MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for MacOS X. Although there are numerous other programs which do the same thing, none had quite the feature set I was looking for. Most were windows that sat in a corner or on the desktop, which are inevitably obscured by document windows on a PowerBook's small screen. Those monitors which used the menubar mostly used the NSStatusItem API, which has the annoying tendency to totally reorder my menubar on every login. The MenuMeters monitors are true SystemUIServer plugins (also known as Menu Extras). This means they can be reordered using command-drag and remember their positions in the menubar across logins and restarts.
• ranchero.com: How NetNewsWire Identifies Itself to Servers : NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite identify themselves to servers via the User-Agent header.

comments: 0

9:15AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 10 02

Last update: 02/10/03; 10:27:29 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• nyphp.org: PHundamentals : As an active and diverse user community, the members of New York PHP possess unique insights into common questions and concerns for developing AMP Technology solutions. So, we thought it'd be valuable to the community if these best practices were compiled and put online. On a regular basis, specific topics are posted to NYPHP-Talk for discussion. After list gurus and new users alike share their techniques and practices, this valuable knowledge is captured as an informative online article for all to use. -> See Virtual Hosting Setup - Windows 98/XP & Linux with Apache and Various ways of evaluating a variable.
• developer.apple.com: Customization Techniques: The Mac OS X boot process includes several entry points that developers can use to customize the process. Developers can create new system daemons and services to be launched at boot time. Developers and system administrators can also create initialization scripts to be run when a user logs in to the system. This section covers:
  • Creating Custom Startup Items
  • Starting and Stopping Startup Items
  • Customizing Login and Logout Procedures
  • Using Environment Variables
  • Replacing the Finder
  [via chaotic intransient prose bursts]

comments: 0

10:32AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 09 30

Last update: 30/09/03; 08:58:51 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• activestate.com: Sophos Acquires Anti-Spam Specialist ActiveState: Sophos, a world leader in anti-virus protection for businesses, today announced that it has acquired ActiveState, a North American software company that develops anti-spam software for enterprises and professional tools for open source language programmers. -> More information on the deal from ActiveState here.
• kses - PHP HTML/XHTML filter: kses 0.2.1 README [kses strips evil scripts!]: Welcome to kses - an HTML/XHTML filter written in PHP. It removes all unwanted HTML elements and attributes, no matter how malformed HTML input you give it. It also does several checks on attribute values. kses can be used to avoid Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Buffer Overflows and Denial of Service attacks, among other things.

comments: 0

9:05AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 08 30

Last update: 30/08/03; 11:05:18 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Mark Paschal: rsswriter Roundup detector : rsswriter is a Roundup reactor for producing RSS 2.0 feed versions of your Roundup issue trackers.
• dreamflow.nl: About SSHKeychain : SSHKeychain is a graphical front-end for ssh-agent and ssh-add on Mac OS X.
• isolani: Desparate spammers resort to viruses : So what has this to do with spammers? Well, interestingly enough one of the features of SoBig.F is to set itself as an open mail relay. With millions of open relays open on millions of broadband connections, spammers now have more open relays than they know what to do with. This action of creating open relay on user's computers is certainly a desperate measure for spammers. That can be taken as a sign that open-relay blocking is actually working and causing serious problems for spammers. Serious problems enough for them to break the law by breaking into users computers.
• Simon Willison: Learning mod_rewrite : I think I've finally cracked mod_rewrite, thanks mainly to SitePoint.
• O'Reilly: Book Review Guidelines: O'Reilly provides copies of our books for your members to review in your newsletter, website, and other book review sites
• Kevin O'Malley: Version Control on Mac OS X, Part 3 : Welcome back. In the first article of this series, you were introduced to version control and learned some of its concepts. The second article gave you a chance to apply this knowledge by using CVS from the command line, as well as under Project Builder, on a simple Cocoa program -- MyPing. In this final article of this series, we will look at creating software releases using the CVS tag and branch commands, as well as some Mac OS X GUIs for interacting with a CVS repository. (O'Reilly Network)
• Matt Neuburg: AppleScript: The Definitive Guide : AppleScript: The Definitive Guide explores and teaches the language from the ground up. If you're a beginner and want to learn how to write your first script or just understand what the excitement is all about, you'll be able to do so after reading this book. You'll also learn how to interpret dictionary files, use coercions to streamline scripts, debug and troubleshoot scripts, and more. Experienced AppleScripters will love having the most definitive, up-to-date AppleScript language reference available. -> November 2003 (est.) (O'Reilly)

comments: 0

10:54AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 08 29

Last update: 29/08/03; 20:38:21 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• news.oreillynet.com: Welcome to O'Reilly's Developer News site, where we will be featuring what we feel are the most interesting and important news stories of the day. Feel free to submit stories for consideration. We want your feedback, so please let us know if you find this site helpful, or what else you'd like to see here.
• regular-expressions.info: Welcome to Regular-Expressions.info The Premier Web Site about Regular Expressions
• pudge: "Perl" Added to Oxford English Dictionary (use Perl)
• phpxmlclasses.sourceforge.net: PHP XML Classes : A collection of classes and resources to process XML using PHP [via PHP Everywhere]
• BlueShoes.org: PHP Cheat Sheet -> Trueness of falseness with empty () and comparison operators ('==' and '===')
• php.net: PHP type comparison tables : The following tables demonstrate behaviors for PHP types and comparison operators, for both loose and strict comparisons. This supplemental is also related to the manual section on type juggling. Inspiration was provided by various user comments and by the work over at BlueShoes.
• LittleThinkTank: RSS Lurking : Since installing the new version 1.0.4 of Ranchero's excellent RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire , I've gotten myself a new hobby. For lack of a more appropriate descriptive, I've decided to call it RSS Lurking - spying on weblog writers as they edit their work. One of the new features (read, ways of losing more of your valuable time to your information fetish ) incorporated into this version is the ability to see changes to an RSS post. Switch it on (you have to tick "Highlight changes" in Preferences), and refresh your newsfeeds.
• Werner Vogels: Web Services are not Distributed Objects: Common Misconceptions about Service Oriented Architectures: Web services are frequently described as the new incarnation of distributed object technology. This is a serious misconception, made by people from industry and academia alike, and this misconception seriously limits a broader acceptance of the true web services architecture. Even though the architects of distributed systems and internet systems alike have been vocal about the fact that these technologies hardly have any relationship, it appears to be difficult to dispel the myth that they are tied together. In this article I revisit the differences between web services and distributed objects in an attempt to make it clear that web services are an internet-style distributed systems technology that does not rely on, or require, any form of distributed object technology. Unfortunately, the mix-up about web services and distributed object systems is not the only misconception that is commonly heard. There are at least a dozen other popular statements about web services that are partially incorrect or just plain wrong. This article also contains clarifications of a number of these common misconceptions about web services.
• Sean B. Palmer: Python RDF Parser (& Improvemen : rdfxml.py is an RDF/XML parser written mostly in one night and in under 10KB of code. It's been released under GPL 2 and the W3C's software license. [via Karl Dubost]
• Sean B. Palmer: WyPy: A Minimal Python Wiki : WyPy is a wiki implemented in just 23 lines of Python code, including shebang. It was written as a contender for the ShortestWikiContest , and implements all of the basic Wiki principles. It is released under GPL 2. [via Karl Dubost]
• RubLog: RubLog - flexible blogging in Ruby: RubLog is a simple weblog server with a couple of interesting features: 1. It supports multiple, pluggable input formats. Currently supported are Ruby's RDoc, HTML, and plain text. 2. It can operate from either standard hierarchies of flatfiles...

comments: 0

8:53AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 08 27

Last update: 27/08/03; 08:27:43 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• TheCodingMonkeys: In honor of one of the greatest visionaries of computer supported collaborative writing, Douglas Adams, TAFKAH is now known as SubEthaEdit. -> This is the new name of the collaborative text editor formely known as Hydra. [via celcius1414]
• Frederick Noronha: Open Asia: Open source in Afghanistan and Bangladesh : This week we begin a country-by-country survey of the availability of open source software across individual Asian countries at the top of the alphabet, with Afghanistan and Bangladesh. (NewsForge.com) [via Linux Today]
• Andy Lester: ESR doesn't speak for me, either : ESR's latest rant, An Open Letter To Darl McBride, is chock full of ad hominem attacks that do nothing to forward his arguments. It seems ESR is more concerned with being clever and showing off than actually acheiving any real results. (O'Reilly Network)

comments: 0

8:26AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 08 26

Last update: 26/08/03; 10:53:19 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Eric Raymond: An Open Letter to Darl McBride: Linus Torvalds is backing me on this, and our other chieftains and philosopher-princes will as well. Show us the overlaps. If your code has been inserted in our work, we'll remove it -- not because you've threatened us but because that's the right thing to do, whether the patches came from IBM or anywhere else. Then you can call off your lawyers and everyone will get to go home happy. Take that offer while you still can, Mr. McBride. So far your so-called 'evidence' is crap ; you'd better climb down off your high horse before we shoot that sucker entirely out from under you. How you finish the contract fight you picked with IBM is your problem. As the president of OSI, defending the community of open-source hackers against predators and carpetbaggers is mine -- and if you don't stop trying to destroy Linux and everything else we've worked for I guarantee you won't like what our alliance is cooking up next. [via Slashdot]
• Conversation: IRC for the rest of us : Conversation allows you to chat in channels and with your friends, in a simple elegant, and mac like interface without the use of any text command. Yet, it has a comprehensive set of features, some unique to Conversation. -> Freeware
• Jon Udell: Dynamic languages and virtual machines: What about robustness? In a world where computation lived within a single VM, strong type-checking and bytecode verification may have been reasons to prefer languages such as C# and Java. But we don't live in that world any more. Computation is distributed; interfaces are language neutral and document oriented; cross-domain trust is a work in progress. In these circumstances, dynamic languages -- which neither the Java nor .Net VMs yet fully embrace -- may be the best way to tame the services network we are now constructing. (infoWorld)
• Dave Winer: MetaWeblog API : It is now safe to deploy applications based on this spec.
• Glenn Graham: Postfix: A Secure and Easy-to-Use MTA : Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and secure, while at the same time being compatible enough with Sendmail so as not to upset existing users. Thus, the outside has a Sendmailish flavor, but the inside is completely different. (O'Reilly Network)
• Ranchero Software: What's New in NetNewsWire 1.0.4: NetNewsWire now uses Web Kit, Safari's HTML renderer--so descriptions render much better than in earlier versions of NetNewsWire. There are a number of new HTML preferences: you can set the standard and fixed-width fonts. You can enable and disable plug-ins, Java, and JavaScript. You can even specify a custom style sheet if you want to customize how NetNewsWire displays HTML.

Politics

• Brian Whitaker: Get real : There is another danger to stability in Iraq that is less often mentioned. It is Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. The CPA is the temporary civilian power, but it is not just paving the way for a new Iraqi government. It is trying to reshape the country by implementing the neo-conservatives' "clean break" philosophy. "Clean break" is a truly revolutionary approach. There are no quick fixes. If something doesn't work, you knock it down and start again. One example of this is the extreme lengths that de-Baathification has gone to. Ghassan Salamé, a UN political advisor in Iraq reported that 1,832 university professors and 14,000 secondary school heads had been sacked, even though most of them had only joined the Baath party in order to get a job. According to the French magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, it's much the same with dentists. But if you've got toothache, you don't really care whether the man with the drill is a Baathist or not. Politics apart, there is certainly a lot that ought to change in Iraq: rooting out corruption, making government accountable and transparent, etc, etc, etc. But as a maximalist approach, "clean break" also maximises the risk of failure. The neo-conservatives are wedded to it because of their wider agenda - to create a western-orientated democracy in Iraq that can be exported to Iran, Syria and other "problem" countries in the region. But turning Iraq into a neo-conservative paradise - a process euphemistically and patronisingly described as "nation-building" - cannot be done in a hurry, and that is the heart of the CPA's problem. Bremer keeps urging patience, but time is not on his side. (Guardian Unlimited)

comments: 0

8:47AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 08 25

Last update: 25/08/03; 08:03:46 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Mark Nottingham: Atomic Draft : Somehow, I've been drafted into editing the Atom syntax specification, and have just thrown up a first draft .
• Mark Pilgrim: Atom API revised : Joe Gregorio :New Atom API Implementation Release. Thanks to all the people who gave feedback on the first release, especially Ken Coar and Simon Willison. In response to their feedback, Joe and I have revised our prototype of the Atom API to more gracefully integrate with existing HTTP authentication infrastructure. Only the authentication scheme has changed; the rest of the Atom API remains the same for now. See Joe's post for the (small) list of changes to the authentication scheme, and the rationale behind them.
• Joe Gregorio: New AtomAPI Implementation Release : We came, we saw, we did, we got spanked, we did it right. Last week Mark Pilgrim and I released an implementation of the AtomAPI, both a client and a server. That implementation included a new authorization scheme that we came up with. Now we would have liked to used HTTP Digest authentication, and the AtomAPI should support Digest authentication, but for many users setting up Digest just isn't possible. Many users, like myself, are using a server that does not have Digest authentication turned on. Similarly not everyone has the ability to use .htaccess files, which you need to be able to modify to setup Digest autentication, that or modify your servers httpd.conf which is even rarer still. However we heard from CMS vendors that they want at least the level of password security that HTTP Digest offers. So we needed to come up with a scheme that:
  1. Is a challenge-response Digest authentication scheme.
  2. Is able to be handled by a CGI program with no .htaccess ,httpd.conf tricks or requirements to be running as an Apache module, ala mod_perl or mod_python.
  3. Gracefully extends current authentication schemes.
  4. Is the simplest thing that could possibly work.
  So what we did was a simple transposition of Digest authentication into custom HTTP headers (...)
• The Well-Formed Web: The HTTP verb PUT under Apache: Safe or Dangerous? : "Is the HTTP verb PUT under Apache safe or dangerous?" This is a question I come across often, and have now run into it twice in the work on Atom. So is it safe? The answer is maybe.
• Russell E Owen: Install MySQLdb module on mac os x : Here's how I installed mySQL running with Python
• Brent Simmons: New NetNewsWire feature: Keyboard Shortcuts page : Then I thought of Web Kit, and I had an a-ha moment: I could use a very basic window that just displays an HTML page. All it took then was to create the window and write the HTML page itself. Piece of cake.
• Tony Stubblebine: Regular Expression Pocket Reference: Ideal as an introduction for beginners and a quick reference for advanced programmers, Regular Expression Pocket Reference is a comprehensive guide to regular expression APIs for C, Perl, PHP, Java, .NET, Python, vi, and the POSIX regular expression libraries. -> Sample Excerpt: Introduction to Regexes and Pattern Matching (PDF) | Sample Excerpt: PHP (PDF)
• XMLNUKE.COM: XMLNUKE : XMLNuke is a site content management. No database is needed and it has a minimum setup. Only just uses XML and XSLT files. The main engine is working and supports internationalization, multiple sites, page caching for improve performance, classes for custom modules, and much more. [via More Like This WebLog]
• php|architect weblog: Using the filesystem as a simple database: My take on a quick solution was the use of the filesystem to actually do the indexing. With a bit of ingenuity, it's easy enough to work with a structure that causes no more than ten files and ten subdirectories to be stored in any given directory, thus making for extremely fast retrieval.
• another useless website.co.uk: This site is basically about nothing. You can't buy anything or play games or look at dirty pictures or read a dull blog. There is no interactive element or fancy animation or 'community' element to keep you coming back to see if someone has responded to your controversial statement about Britney. However, there is a plan. That plan is to generate 1 million hits in just one year. For a site with no content that might seem a mean feat but then looking around the web these days, popularity is pretty unpredictable.

Politics

• Nicholas Blanford and Dan Murphy: For Al Qaeda, Iraq may be the next battlefield: "Iraq is developing as Al Qaeda's new battlefield," says Rohan Gunaratna, an author and terrorism expert. "Without a theater of jihad, they cannot produce terrorists for operations anywhere else. They lost Afghanistan, so they needed a new combat theater in which to train and inspire. And the US invasion gave it to them." Thousands of Muslim volunteers flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight Soviet occupation forces which had invaded the country in 1979. The cumbersome Soviet military was unable to subdue the lightly armed, resourceful Afghan and Arab mujahideen (holy fighters) and withdrew from the country in 1988. Now analysts say that calls for young men to fight in Iraq are popping up on jihad websites across the world. If Gunaratna is right, the US is in for a long and bloody occupation. In the thinking of Al Qaeda, the mere sustaining of a presence, and the ability to carry out intermittent attacks, is a form of victory, a sign that the world's great superpower is incapable of stamping them out. (csmonitor.com)
• Howard LaFranchi: World balks at growing Iraq perils : Although before the war countries balked at what they believed would be opening the door to a muscle-flexing America, now concerns are growing that the postwar stage is turning into the beginning of a guerrilla war with global terrorists. Signs are multiplying that anyone associated with the occupation will be targeted, as last week's bombing of the UN building in Baghdad and Saturday's deadly attack on British forces in Basra suggest. With this in mind, countries are reluctant to sign on to something that is still seen too much as America's war and not enough of a campaign to help Iraqis. (csmonitor.com)

comments: 0

8:00AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 08 22

Last update: 22/08/03; 09:14:38 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Seth Dillingham: Email Virus: Why Don't People Switch Clients? : This afternoon I was sitting in a waiting room while the dealer changed my truck's oil. CNN was on the television. They reported on the virus... but they referred to it only as an "email virus." They didn't mention that this is "email virus" is really an "Outlook virus," because it only affects Outlook users. They didn't mention that it only infects Outlook on Windows. They didn't mention that there are alternatives to Outlook.
• Brent Simmons: NetNewsWire 1.0.4b3 : Some highlights: it uses Web Kit now to display HTML, it's faster, you can highlight differences in updated items, gzip compression is supported, and there's a new Delete Read Items command. -> More details on these features: Gzip compression and RSS and HTML differences
• Keith Devens: RSS auto-discovery with PHP : I'm in the process of writing my own RSS aggregator. Naturally, I wanted to be able to use the new RSS auto-discovery method which has evolved over the past few days . Mark Pilgrim made some Javascript bookmarklets and a Python implementation to do this, but I needed a PHP implementation, so I wrote one. [via Roland Tanglao]
• Mark Pilgrim: Should Atom Use RDF? : The problem with discussing RDF (where that means, "I think this data format should be RDF") is that you can support any four of these RDF issues (model, syntax, tools, vision), in any combination, while vigorously arguing against the others. People who believe that the RDF conceptual model is a good thing may think that the RDF/XML serialization is wretched, or that there are no good RDF tools for their favorite language, or that the Semantic Web is an unattainable pipe dream, or any combination of these things. People who are familiar with robust RDF tools (such as RDFLib for Python) -- and, thus, never have to look at the RDF/XML serialization because their tools hide it from them completely -- may nonetheless think that RDF/XML is wretched. People who defend the RDF/XML syntax may have nothing polite to say about the vision of the Semantic Web. And around and around it goes... (XML.com)

comments: 0

9:13AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 08 21

Last update: 21/08/03; 07:48:18 EDT

Politics

• Howard LaFranchi: US options: more troops or more help: Coupled with that sentiment is growing bewilderment among Iraqis about why the US is not more quickly returning the country to normal life. "They remember that as terrible as Saddam was, he got the country back on track with amazing speed after [the first Gulf War in] '91," says Murphy. That experience tells Iraqis that rebuilding their country is possible. But putting them more in charge of their future - getting the police and elements of a new military up and running, for example - has to move faster, experts say. "We don't have enough people in there, and we're finding that other countries have more of the kind of people we need," says Mr. Gvosdev. Indeed, for some analysts, it is not more soldiers that are needed, no matter where they are from, but experts in a variety of fields who can help give the country a sense of order and progress, and prepare Iraqis to take over for themselves. "A hundred more trainers for all the services the Iraqis need to take on themselves are much more important at this stage than 1,000 more young men to guard locations," says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "We've been slow at that, but sending in any more combat troops is not going to address that central issue." (csmonitor.com)

comments: 0

7:47AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 08 20

Last update: 20/08/03; 08:07:42 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Robert Daely: PHPosxom's New Home : Hello, gang! PHPosxom's new home on SourceForge is getting fleshed out nicely.
• Brent Simmon: How to deal with broken feeds : Tim Bray writes about how to deal with broken PEAW feeds : "I would absolutely require basic XML well-formedness." Me, I would absolutely love it if I, as an aggregator developer, could require well-formedness. In other words, if a feed isn't well-formed, then NetNewsWire would not parse it and display it. The thing is, that doesn't work now for RSS--but not because of anything special to RSS, it's because feed generators don't always produce well-formed XML. There's no reason to expect PEAW feed generators would be any different. (Both RSS and PEAW require well-formedness. No difference there.) ("Inessential")
• Russell Owen: How to define environment variables so that MacOS X applications can see them. : MacOS X native applications do not see unix environment variables defined in ~/.cshrc or any other of the standard unix configuration files. Normally this doesn't matter, but certain MacOS X applications can make good use of environment variables. These include the framework build of Python (which is used to write wxPython or aqua Tk appliations) and BBEdit (which can directly run unix scripts, but without your environment variables unless you define them in this fashion). The trick is to define your environment variables in the file ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist . You will almost certainly have to create the directory and the file yourself.
• John Gruber: On Newsstands Now : For your paper-and-ink enjoyment, the September 2003 issue of Macworld contains an article by yours truly, pp 74-76, entitled "BBEdit Version Control". It's about using BBEdit 7.0's new built-in CVS integration on Mac OS X (Daring Fireball)
• More Like This WebLog: Postel's Law doesn't mean you're entitled to be messy : Aaron Swartz observes that enforcing well-formed and valid RSS won't work . It's a prisoners' dilemma . Anyone making tools which consume RSS have an incentive to defect, and write something forgiving . Of course, you know where that leads: an aggregator war.

comments: 0

8:12AM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Looking for a Newbie Python Mailing List

I decided after all these years to learn Python. I'm mostly interested in Zope, Plone and the CMF framework.

Since I want to learn Python, I'm looking for a low volume friendly Python newbie list. I know my fair share of scripting languages (UserTalk, Perl, PHP, Javascript, AppleScript), and I work as a programmer (mostly developing specialized frameworks in PHP).

If you have any recommendations for such a beast, please comment here. Thanks.

comments: 0

6:00PM EDT [ /Internet/Blogging/QuickLinks | # ]

Quick Links - 2003 08 19

Last update: 19/08/03; 05:47:42 EDT

Scripting, Blogging, Softwares...

• Brent Simmons: Dave Winer writes today about how there are mail-reader-type aggregators and weblog-type aggregators, and that weblog-type aggregators are better. It's a false dichotomy. Dave writes: "Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you're done." The thing is, the mail reader aggregators are not very much like mail readers. They are smart about what they're displaying. On the surface they look like email apps, but it's not a simple substitution, news items for email. I'll use NetNewsWire as an example, not because it's unique in this regard but because I know it well. (...) Dave writes: "People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something." Actually, no, they're not. -> At last some corrections to misinformation. As Dave says in the referred post: "get the real story, not the easy one".
• Simon Willison: Atom API : The authentication mechanism is particularly interesting: since Apache's support for digest authentication requires an additional module that many hosts may not provide, the Atom guys have created their own based around new Atom-Authenticate HTTP headers. This is the only part of the current specification that I, as a PHP developer, have a problem with. To my knowledge, there is no way of directly accessing non-standard HTTP headers from within a PHP script. As such, it would be impossible for a PHP Atom API application to support Atom authentication. This is a serious barrier to adoption of the standard, especially as PHP is by far the most popular open source web scripting technology. -> Check the comments for this post for a possible solution, and see this post on the Atom-Syntax list. The whole thread is quite interesting too.
• Daniel Berlinger: Atom API implementation: This line was particularly fascinating: "Vendors may add their own custom fields, in a namespace, that do not duplicate the functionality of core Atom elements." I guess funkified Atom feeds are not recommended by Mark... somewhat ironic, Neh? -> At least, Mark Pilgrim is quite clear about it.
• Aaron Swartz: Postel's Law Has No Exceptions : As Mark Pilgrim is fond of saying, "There are no exceptions to Postel's Law." (Postel's Law is generally quoted as "be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you put out" or something to that effect.) The message of the law is that interoperability is the primary concern, and that programs should accept things, even things that are against the spec, if necessary to achieve interoperability.
• Kirk McElhearn: A Mac User's Guide to the Unix Command Line, Part 3: Lesson 3: Moving, Copying, and Deleting Files and Directories (TidBITS)
• Knoppix.net: This website is about Knoppix, a Free and Open Source Live Linux CD. Knoppix is a GNU/Linux distribution that boots runs completely from cd. It inclu