Archive: October 28, 2002
Scott's back from PHPCon 2002 and has lots of stuff to report. He gave two presentations at the conference, so make sure you check out his site for links to his slideshows.
When I went to the PHPCon website before, I noticed a presentation called Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo!, which I was very interested in. I didn't know they used PHP in Yahoo, and I'm really interested in how extensively they're using it now or are planning to. Thankfully, Scott has a link to the presentation.
Jeremy Zawodny also has a buttload of stuff. Unfortunately, MT doesn't allow you to link to a whole day's worth of posts, so I'll just link to the first post from today and you can click "next" to read each one  Or, you could just check out his October archive and read on the 28th. Also check out his talk on Scaling MySQL and PHP. Also, he mentions that Rasmus Lerdorf is now working at Yahoo. Wow, Yahoo really is jumping into PHP, that's awesome. I should try to get a job there I gotta read that presentation.
Neat link from within the "using PHP at Yahoo!" presentation about a product called Clearsilver comparing different templating styles.
Via Matt Croydon, check out the Tiki wiki. Looks neat. Must dig deeper. While I've been writing my own CMS, I've been looking a lot at wiki/weblog systems, especially SnipSnap which I think is super-neat.
Ha, just noticed Tiki's tagline: "The wiki with lot of features!"
Here's the description on Tiki's Freshmeat page:
Tiki is software written in PHP4 to develop Web sites and applications. It includes a Wiki, Weblogs, a CMS system, a banner system, and a lot of other features. A permission system and admin panel allows any configuration for the application. It is template-based using Smarty and supports multiple languages and themes (CSS). There is complete documentation for users and developers.
Oh my gosh, and it actually has tons of actual documentation in both Word and PDF formats (the screenshots are a little funky in the PDF version, but seem ok in the Word version).
Wow, via Dane Carlson, Acts of Volition: Hiding in the FedEx logo. Lots of good comments too.
I'm sure that most of those of you that will care will already have noticed this, but for the few, like me, who hadn't: the FedEx logo contains an arrow in the negative space created by the E and the x. Beautiful.
I never noticed that. I'll never be able to look at the FedEx logo the same way again either.
To whomever just e-mailed me, I never said Roman Catholics are evil. I said parts of Roman Catholicism are evil. I've mentioned this a bunch of times before on my weblog. If you'd like to have a rational discussion I'd be happy to, rather just telling me how good I must feel about myself insulting Roman Catholics.
Dave Winer: Weblogs.Com for RSS.
Weblogs.Com is a service that tells you, both in HTML and XML, which weblogs have changed in the last three hours. Now, for the first time, that service has been extended to RSS news feeds. You can easily find out which feeds have changed in the last three hours. This could be the key to improving the efficiency of news aggregators, as the market grows.
Here's a one-line script that runs in Radio that notifies weblogs.com that InfoWorld's RSS feed has updated.
["xmlrpc://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2"].rssUpdate ("InfoWorld", "http://www.infoworld.com/rss/news.rdf")
Here's a one line PHP script that uses my library 
XMLRPC_request("rpc.weblogs.com", "/RPC2", "rssUpdate", array($name, $address))
Via Sender Traumawind, Spaces looks pretty interesting. I'd like to give it a try when it's released. Anything that would help me move from a Microsoft e-mail program I'd like. Although, come to think of it, being written in Java I don't know what it'll use to support HTML in e-mail. That's why I've been looking forward to the Minotaur/Thunderbird project from the Mozilla people.
Hey cool! I'm not trying to be disparaging, but how's it handle e-mails from places like Amazon.com? In any case, I'm looking forward to trying it out.
Via Sender Traumawind, wxLua!
wxLua is an library for extending your own applications and also has a sample executable program. wxLua links Lua and wxWindows to form a Lua extension library. It contains a set of Lua bindings generated by a script written in Lua from a definition file into a C++ binding to mirror some of the wxWindows classes.
Via Dr. Dobb's Python-URL, Twisted 1.0 has been released. Very very cool.
The brainchild of Matthew Lefkowitz, who goes by the moniker of Glyph, Twisted was originally developed for building distributed Internet-based gaming environments. "Massively multiplayer games are among the most complex systems deployed on the Internet today," says Glyph. "While purpose-built business application software at most integrate two or three simultaneous processes -- e.g., managing inventory while processing payments -- games need to integrate ten or more distributed processes running in parallel: combat, crafting, a virtual economy, housing, and vehicles, among others." From the beginning, Glyph released Twisted as an open-source development project. It soon became obvious that by solving the hard problems of Internet gaming, Glyph had come up with a bleeding-edge solution for tough IT development in the Internet environment. Itamar Shtull-Trauring, Zoteca's Chief Technical Architect, came across Twisted when he was looking for a back-end for Zoteca's secure data-sharing platform. "I investigated all the alternatives," says Itamar. "It was immediately apparent that by using Twisted I could develop our distributed back-end in a quarter of the time with many-more features out of the box." Itamar soon joined Glyph as one of the lead programmers in the Twisted open-source project, and added Twisted to Zoteca's base offerings.
Twisted is a sophisticated event-driven network framework that provides extremely powerful, scalable and flexible enterprise application integration capabilities. At the core of Twisted is its network layer which can be used to rapidly integrate any existing protocol as well as model new ones. Whenever the need arises to develop a new protocol, the asynchronous, multiplexed and two-way remote object protocol (ROP) can be used to quickly implement it. Because the ROP is used with object-level abstractions, changes can be made easily, and new features added, without having to deal with the design restrictions and application development complexities of a custom protocol.
Out of the box, Twisted supports a large number of service protocols: HTTP, FTP, SMTP, LDAP, DNS, SOCKSv4, SSH, IRC, telnet, POP3, AOL's instant messaging and more. This allows developers to use these protocols immediately, without having to spend time re-implementing them. In addition, Twisted can talk to multiple, industry standard DBMS. It also can be used to communicate with COM servers and to control and integrate with standard Windows applications (Word, Excel, etc.).
Also check out this short Ruby and Python comparison.
Via The Daily Python-URL, IBM developerWorks: Open source in the lab. "Python, Perl, and open source toolkits bring multiple benefits to science"
Science and engineering laboratories have long depended on proprietary products for daily data analysis chores. Now, many labs are turning to open source products and development languages for specific technical benefits the conventional products don't give them.
Also via the Daily Python-URL and also from IBM, you may want to check out The Camel and the Snake, or "Cheat the Prophet" Open Source Development with Perl, Python and DB2.
Perl, PHP, and Python, three programming languages without anything more than enthusiastic grassroots support, are used in many software projects today.
Why? There are many possible reasons, foremost of which are their flexibility and simplicity. Still other reasons are their portability and extensibility.
To help you gain a better understanding of their popularity with Open Source developers, we will take you through a tour of the important features and functions of Perl and Python. We have singled out these two because they share many common traits, such as an interpreted scripting environment, rich programming interfaces, and many different extensions.
Using these language extensions in combination with IBM's DB2 database and with Web services provided through the Google APIs, we will build both a client and server-side application in both Perl and Python.
Here's the full article (PDF).
Via LWN, (glad that site's still in business), Linux Journal: Realfeel Test of the Preemptible Kernel Patch.
Linux was originally written as a general-purpose operating system without any consideration for real-time applications. Recently Linux has become attractive to the real-time community due to its low cost and open standards. In order to make it more practical for the real-time community, patches have been written to affect such things as interrupt latency and context switch. These patches are public domain and are becoming part of the main Linux tree.
This article talks about one of these patches, the preemptible kernel patch, and its effect on the interrupt latency of a Linux system. The patch reduces the measured interrupt latency of the system, making it more appropriate for real-time applications.
I've always wondered this: How does an experienced developer dive into the code of a project he's never looked at before? I mean, do you look at the makefile, see where the main is, and try to follow the execution of the program? Or do you first look at the file layout to try to get an idea of how the app is structured? Do you just open a file that looks interesting and start reading, following the chain of included files around until you get an idea of what some important files are? How do you start building a mental model of the structure of an application while you still have incomplete information as you're reading the source, when you didn't have any documentation in the first place?
You get the idea. I bet people who are accustomed to reading other people's source on a regular basis have a definite process they go through, and the experience they have helps them grasp the structure of a program quicker than others would be able to. Are there any secrets?
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Monday, October 28, 2002
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