Class.Jabber.PHP is today’s Freshmeat Gem of the Day (fmGoTD):
Class.Jabber.PHP is a class which you can use to connect to the Jabber network. It allows you to easily connect to a server and interact with it. It supports all packet types (message, iq, and presence), is very flexible, and offers both high-level methods (registration, message sending, etc.) and low-level methods (packet sending, etc.).
I’m making available a near final draft of the Busy Developers Guide to WSDL, Part III: a.k.a. document literal. I may do some more tweaks and respond to suggestions and bug reports.
I’ll have to read it when I get off of work. Somewhere in here there is a joke about mustUnderstand, but I’m not sure where it is.
Matt mentioned it earlier, but the release is official:
The Tomcat Team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 4.1.17 Stable. Tomcat 4.1.17 includes many bugfixes and performance tweaks over Tomcat 4.1.12. Please see the release notes for a complete list of the changes. [Download]
Phil Windley muses on Leve 5 routing for web services:
Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I started to put together some thoughts I’d been having lately regarding web services and level 5 routing. Some might want to quibble and call it level 4, but since the transport for SOAP is HTTP (a level four protocol), I’ll call it level 5. The idea is pretty simple: the advent of standards for application integration has brought us to the point where applications can be put together by scripting calls to existing services.
LinuxDevices interviews Jon Anderson about the MeshBox, a Mini-ITX-based hardware/software solution using Linux or a freely downloadable software system that you can run on your own hardware. Here’s a blurb from the beginning of the article:
Originally released as a bootable CDROM called “MeshAP,” MeshBox is now implemented as an under-32MB system image which can fit within a small CompactFlash card. But despite its small size, MeshBox extends the basic access point and mesh routing functionality of the original MeshAP. MeshBox now provides the capabilities of a set-top box Internet Appliance, wireless mesh router, connection to remote windows terminal servers (or other PCs), web browsing, mp3 audio and mpeg video streaming, connection to multiple peer-to-peer networks, instant messaging network chat, and file exchange.
We’re talking top shelf stuff here. A minimal Linux install with an impressive list of software (scroll down the article) and available as an out-of-the-box system. Jon’s website, Locustworld has a listing of lots of subprojects, and the article also has some general info on mesh networking.
Rich Corbridge at NewsForge goes over what’s in his toolbox. What’s in yours? I remember when Minicom was my only option for dialing up to my ISP (CAIS before it sucked and the CapAccess freenet before that, in addition to BBSes) in Linux. I used ProComm on the dos/(and later win) side of course.
Ethereal is the hammer in my toolbox. If nothing else works I go for the hammer. It is a full-featured open source sniffer available for *nix and Win32.
PyCon 2003 is happening in the Washington, DC area March 26-28. The Call for Papers has been extended to January 15th, so let’s make sure we get some Python blogger representation at this conference. If only traveling around the world was non-trivial, we might convince Phil to write something up. What about the pyBloggers stateside such as Mark, Rael, Sam and others? Or the bloggers that dabble in Python enough to get themselves in trouble while producing really cool stuff?
I’m getting a really good vibe about this conference. I don’t remember planning to attend any other conferences with a wiki. There will also be development sprints a few days before the con, and it looks like they’re going to also include some lightning talks.
I’lm going to see if there is anything that I can do to help out the con, as I live just outside of DC. If anyone out there is involved with it, drop me a line.
Scott Johnson has some more reading related to my PHP CMS entry from last night:
I see from Keith that John talks about the PHP-Nuke forks. As someone who uses Drupal this is helping me understand the whole Nuke* thing. I had no idea there were so many forks. How many ways can you make a CMS with PHP anyway?
From watching the tomcat-dev mailing list, I’d expect a Tomcat 4.1.17 release either today or tomorrow. The website files have been updated in CVS to indicate this.
Most Web Forms applications need to load multiple pieces of data, usually to load up comboboxes or listboxes. Many times we end up querying the database again and again for different lookup table data, and this reduces scalability and adds more stress to the backend database.
Jeremy Zawodny is dabbling in Java for his new job. One must learn to love the Ant. Also, when you create your Java category, I’m sure that the java.blog community would love to hear from you.
Here’s a little pic of the SPARCclassic that I bought over the weekend. It runs at 50MHz with 48 megs of RAM and a 2 gig HD. It runs OpenBSD 3.2, which is a really good (light weight) OS to run on this particular Sparc processor. I have a couple of Sparc 5’s that run Solaris 8 (too lazy to upgrade to 9 so far), but 50MHz cries out for OpenBSD or NetBSD. It is resting on top of a stack of D-Link DES-3205’s, one of the nicest (but noisiest) 5 port managed 10/100 switches that you can find on Ebay for under $30 or so. The DES-3205 doesn’t have an uplink port, but you can just use a crossover cable to link them together.
RootPrompt.Org points to a LinuxWorld article about X-oops and E-Xoops, two PHP-based object-oriented portal packages. It looks like both of their websites try really hard to look like *Nukes, which is unfortunate, but varlinux uses E-Xoops to look a little more unique.
Back in June I installed both PHP-Nuke and PostNuke on my Westhost (I’m quite happy with them) account while trying to find my geekblog voice. I liked the administration interface and it was set up great for a community weblog/news site, but it was missing something. Perhaps it was because it looked like every other *Nuke site out there. I tried a few non-default themes, as I was too lazy to create my own from scratch, but it still looked stock *Nuke to me. I downloaded Radio Userland in early July and fell in love with Aggregation and the more personal approach that the software allowed me to take to geekblogging.
Just for the googlers in the house, Red Hat’s PPP DialupServer Quick Setup Tips got me up and running a PPP server on my Linux box so I could act as a free ISP to my friend who is in town on winter break. I used the directions to get everything up and running on a Red Hat 7.2 box, though I’m sure it would work on 7.3, 8.0, or (somewhat) earlier versions. We’re talking less than 10 minutes from figuring out which tty my modem was to having everything set up and ready to rock.
I love PHP. I really do. I swear. I just really get tired of seeing so many “articles” and “tutorials” and “code examples” that are complete and utter shit written by people who claim to be “experts”. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh.
Can I add that I strongly dislike looking for a tutorial on a particular php/perl/whatever topic and finding the SAME EFFING TUTORIAL on five different sites. Thanks for the tutorial, it’s great, really. But I’d really like to see something that isn’t that exact situation, I’m looking for the big picture, and it just ain’t in those same 15 lines of code.
In case you were ever wondering why anyone would bother to port C#: Tipic to Build Cross Platform Instant Messaging Applications Using Mono. via protocol7.
So there.
A Security Alert from O’Reilly and a similar piece from Infoworld note a potentially DoSable vulnerability in MySQL. The O’Reilly piece also notes some more obscure vulnerabilities recently discovered for other programs.
Speaking of Eclipse, CNet reports some news:
The Eclipse development tools consortium gained momentum Monday with the announcement of 13 members to its board of stewards and the introduction of three new open-source projects.
Thank goodness for my whiteboard, Ant, and Axis.
Yep. It all comes back to the basics. At least the free (beer/speech) tools keep getting better. Eclipse was so ugly the first time I tried it. Now it’s beautiful (especially under Red Hat 8.0) and functional.