Do you have a php-enabled website? Would you like to add some RSS feeds to it? CafeRSS makes it pretty darn simple:
include(‘cafeRSS.php’);
$rss = new cafeRSS();
$rss->display(‘http://example.com/rssfeed.xml’);
That’s it. If you want to cache stuff, it gets slightly more complex, but all in all it looks like a slick and easy to implement. [Via Freshmeat]
J. Scott Johnson: VI. It’s like crack. A little taste and then you’re jonesing for more.
Two O’Reilly goodies showed up from Amazon this evening:
I’m looking forward to reading both of these. Using Samba and Programming Web Services with SOAP are in the queue (or more accurately, the linked list).
I was browsing around the computer book section of my local Barnes & Noble this evening. I picked up an O’Reilly book off the shelf called C# Essentials. It was written by a guy named Peter Drayton, among others (Ben Albahari and Brad Merrill). What struck me at that moment was, “Oh, this was written by Peter.”
That’s it. With weblogs we can associate with people on a first name basis that we would never run into otherwise. We think of people who live on the other side of the country or the other side of the world as our friends. We wait to hear what the top people in many fields have to say about their work, their projects, their observations; not as the top people in their fields but as the people that we know and trust.
And then there’s Dave. He’s the reason I started blogging with radio. He kept me up to date with the latest happenings in scripting, the weblog world, programming, news, privacy, and everything else. Then his webpage didn’t update. Then I heard from Rael via Meerkat that he had suffered from a heart attack. What followed felt like eternity, but eventually he picked up a laptop and began blogging again, about what happened, about his recovery, and his smoking withdrawal. All of this from a man that I had never met, CEO of a software company.
When I first started frequenting BBSes I was in elementary school. Through my 1200 baud modem, I could be anybody that I wanted to be. Other users did not have to know that I was a kid; as long as I acted like an adult, I was treated that way. Then the internet came. I could be whomever I wanted to be, wherever I wanted to be it. I could talk to people all over the world on just about any subject I wanted to over IRC, usenet, and mailing lists. The same rules applied: act like an adult and be treated as such.
And now with weblogs, I can sit at the dinner table with some of the biggest people in the tech world. I can hear what they say. I can comment on their weblog or send them an email. I can find out what conferences they’ll be attending. I can read their books but refer to them by their first name. And maybe, someday, I can be one of them.
I upgraded a 2000 box to SP3. About the only thing I can notice is a “Set Program Access and Defaults” icon on my start menu.
.Net Server update: I burned a CD from the ISO last night before I crashed. If I can fit enough components together, I’ll try to bring it up this evening.
FreeVSD: IBM’s introduction to the virtual server daemon. Yet another thing to keep an eye on.
Up to the minute information about the transatlatic RC plane project I wrote about yesterday is available. Slashdot also picked it up and ran with it.
I just got back from seeing My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Windex cures all. It’s really an amazing movie that will make you laugh till you hurt. The theatre was almost packed for a 9:40 showing on a wednesday night. No wonder it was #9 in the box office last weekend and it has been out since before Spider Man.
I’m currently downloading my beta copy of .Net server, we’ll see how it goes. Right now it’s at about 150k/s, so I won’t complain. Now all I have to do is throw together a box for it.
I see that blogtree has exceeded its bandwidth allowance. Just show me where the paypal button is and I’ll donate, baby!
Via Tenorman via Radio Free Blogistan via David Watson via David Copeland, a reporter in Texas has been told to shut down his personal weblog by his employer, the Houston Chronicle.
I actually read about it earlier, but decided to post it now to show the weblog reporting chain. It’s not telephone if you copy and paste.
Intel will have to fight the Megahertz myth: Banias, their new ultra-low power ultra-mobile processor will debut with a top speed of 1.6MHz. It will be designed for notebooks and other low power or high density devices, but:
Like Advanced Micro Devices’ Athlon and other competing chips, Banias’ performance will actually be better than its numbers might indicate because it will complete more work per clock cycle than the Pentium 4, according to Intel and other sources.
The fuzzy Scott Johnson: A collection of his PHP articles all linked in one place. There are some nice tutorials, howtos, and articles in there, good reading if you’re a php-head.
PXES: A tiny thin cleint Linux distribution, or what to do with those extra pentiums.
The Washington Post: A team of Maryland-based scientists and hobbyists are preparing a transatlantic model airplane flight. It’s a great little article that I read over Cheerioes this morning. It will take off from Newfoundland and land in Ireland if everything goes well. Takeoff and landing will be done remotely, but most of the journey will be done via on-board navigation. It’s a cool, recordbreaking idea, and it would be great to see these guys succeed.
Michael Lucas: “Hurried Sysadmin” install encounter with OpenBSD, a favorable review noting a few quirks that every fresh install seems to have.
OpenBSD has always been on my “must toy with” list, so the recent release of version 3.1 made it seem like a good time to check it out. The OpenBSD Web site shows that OpenBSD includes all of the usual BSD goodies; heaps of programs, an extensive ports tree, good documentation, and so on. Their security claims are intriguing, and some of the features (such as authpf) seem quite interesting. But marketing claims made on a Web site can be quite distant from reality, so I decided to install the OS on both a desktop and a laptop and see what I could do.
Significant *nix release of the morning: NMap 3.00 stable. NMap is an excellent tool that you can run on your local network to see what ports are open, and which machines might be vulnerable to an attack. If you’ve got a linux box on your network, I’d suggest running it just for the learning experience. It’s nice and will even guess which OS each box on your network is running, with some degree of accuracy. The 3.00 gzipped tarball is here and the freshmeat page is here.
Office toy warfare round up: Oh yeah! Scroll down to the crossbow, that’s my favorite.
Also in todays freshmeat box is Simple Web Journal, with a little PHP and MySQL. A demo site is here.