I’ve set up an admittedly primitive spam prevention technique to the “Make a contribution” page on the linux.ie website – if you don’t know that ILUG is short for “Irish Linux Users’ Group” you won’t get far.
Archive for April, 2006
spam prevention technique for sending contributions for linux.ie
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006ILUG Map – Where exactly are we all?
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006Set up a map on frappr last night for the Irish Linux Users’ Group – we can use this to get a handle on where everyone is 
I’ve also set up a more easily remembered URL for the map – http://linux.ie/map/ instead of the lengthy http://www.frappr.com/irishlinuxusersgroup/map
Federico Heinz on Education and the Public Administration
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006Federico Heinz, president of FSF Latin America, will be in Dublin to give two talks in the ICS Building on April 29th. He will be speaking about free software in government /public administration and also about free software in education; starting at 14:00 sharp. There are more details available here.
Feed Validator
Monday, April 24th, 2006If you use PHP (or any other language) to develop Atom or RSS feeds, you really should use feedvalidator.org periodically to ensure no problems pop up.
Jack L concert Live CDs
Friday, April 21st, 2006went to the Jack L concert at the Olymia last night. Very enjoyable.
Bought a ‘Live CD’ of the gig immediately afterwards, which really is a very good thing – blast the bootleggers out of the market
I wonder, how long will it be before we can download MP3s and OGGs from kiosks at venues immediately afterwards? Now that would be cool.
Action this day: Help WWF protect our forests
Friday, April 21st, 2006Have you added your photo to the WWF photo mosaic that they are creating as a photo-petition against the on-going destruction of natural forests and to promote the sustainable use of forests instead?
It seems that every year over 13 million hectares of natural forest are lost forever – approximitely 25 hectares a minute – or 36 football fields if that help you picture how much is being destroyed.
It’s time we did something about it.
Notes from Zaheda Bhorat talk at FOSS-Means-Business Conference
Thursday, April 20th, 2006These are my notes from the Zaheda Bhorat talk at the FOSS Means Business Conference on Thursday 16th March 2006 in Belfast.
Zaheda Bhorat
International Manager, Open Source Programmes, Google.
Zaheda Bhorat has been an Open Source advocate since managing the OpenOffice.org project and community while working for Sun Microsystems Inc. [taken from the FOSS Means Business website]
Why are google using FOSS?
- It gives them control – they can maintain independence from software companies.
Special/secret tweaks to the software stack remain with themselves. - It also gives Google a great degree of adaptability – they can drill down many
layers into the software stack to enhance services [reliability, speed,
etc.] - great flexibility – they can do something outside of the ordinary without
having to disclose this to the software companies.
Google contribute code to:
- The Linux kernel
- The Apache webserver
- The gcc compiler
- OpenOffice.org
- Python and others
Google participate with:
- OSDL
- LSB (Linux Standards Base)
- The Mozilla Foundation
- The Python Software Foundation
Why do they do this?
- To make software better [They don't have to keep re-applying their private patches of code and others can collaborate].
- To encourage development.
- To avoid reinventing the wheel.
Donations and Grants given by Google
Usability for older users
Thursday, April 13th, 2006Tim Fidgeon raises some good points in his article on usability for older users, though I’m not inclined to agree with all of them. For example he states instructions should be phrased imperatively; I disagree there’s nothing wrong with tight copy so long as it isn’t cryptic.
Bruce Perens: The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006Those of use that heard Bruce Perens talk at FOSS-Means-Business in Belfast on the 16th of March should recognise
some, if not all, of his paper on the The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source which he touched on in his speech.
There is a conference report, by Paul Barry, available on the Linux Journal website.
AJAX Security
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006Navaho Gunleg raises some points about securing your AJAX enabled web application in his blog at darknet.
Fun with parsing retrieved XML.
Tuesday, April 4th, 2006The search engine for the website that I administer and develop is provided by a third party: query is made against their cluster, XML formatted data comes back, is parsed and displayed.
It stopped working this morning.
I traced the problem down to a PHP Sablotron/XML parsing error (“xml declaration not at start of external entity”). Seems the server that’s connected to now sends response headers back to the client and these headers were getting in the way of Sablotron doing it’s job.
A simple one-liner fix got things working again, as shown in the middle of this sample code:
$fp = fsockopen($queryhost, 80);
if($fp) {
fputs($fp, $header);
while(!feof($fp)) {
$xml .= fgets($fp, 128);
}
}
fclose($fp);
//ensure string starts with the XML declaration.
$xml = substr($xml, strpos($xml, "<?xml") );
$xsltproc = xslt_create();
$result = xslt_process($xsltproc,'arg:/_xml',$xsltfile,NULL,array('/_xml' => $xml));
JavaScript Gotcha – Oneliners and hiding code.
Monday, April 3rd, 2006Quick JavaScript gotcha, the following one-liner won’t work:
Password: <script language='JavaScript'> <!-- document.writeln(generatepwd()) ; --> </script>
This will, because the code itself is no longer on the same line as the ‘<!–’ or ‘–>’ tags/comment delimiters.
Password: <script language='JavaScript'>
<!--
document.writeln(generatepwd()) ;
--> </script>
Oh, happy day!
Monday, April 3rd, 2006Last Wednesday, I asked Aisling to marry me…and she said yes!
I couldn’t be happier if I tried. Thanks sweetheart!
