A Day in Paradise

I played with Joost way back in January when it was still called “The Venice Project” and beta testers had to sign NDAs (although that didn’t stop a lot of them). Back then while the technology was great, due to the number of users the quality was mediocre.

I got into Joost again at Stella’s request, when she met someone at the library who wanted an invitation.

I installed joost this evening on my 2.4ghz/1gig Vista Home Basic which is connected to my 32″ LG LCD TV and acts as our “Media Center” and not only is the quality great but the selection has grown to include some real shows (currently watching LEXX).

For those of you who haven’t heard about Joost, it is created by the same people who brought us Skype and works using a peer-to-peer model. Peer-to-pear media streaming is drastically different from the server-based media streaming which we are seeing from various news sites, as well as sites like youtube.com. Before YouTube’s acquisition by Google, they announced that they were spending $1 million on bandwidth alone.

Through using Peer-to-peer technology Joost allows the its software to communicate with other copies of Joost software and distribute the media between themselves. Using traditional file serving each additional user viewing a file creates a larger burden on the server, using P2P each additional user becomes another server in the “swam” and shares that file with other peers the initial seed server load is lightened.

I had an interesting discussion with Stella about how the technology behind Joost would handle streaming live content. Because of the P2P nature of Joost, it would be fairly difficult to distribute truly live content without reverting back to the original server based media serving. That is assuming that Joost is only sending data to my computer which I request and am watching.

If my Joost client can receive data that I am not watching, it would allow the main Joost servers to ensure that all the shows that they are streaming can be delivered in real-time and equal quality and if Joost wants to deliver live events this would probably be the only way that this would be possible.

Anyway… I am VERY happy with the progress that Joost has made, and am looking forward to see how it will move forward.

Oh yeah, and the DRM issue isn’t an issue.

I am finally back online on ALL my IM protocols, thanks to the newly branded pidgin client.

GAIM has always been a fantastic project, and I look forward to Pidgin following in its footsteps.

UPGRADE NOW!

CD Player region free hack.

The ultimate video conversion tool.

These two items have no connection, I’m just in the market for a good region-free dvd player that I can buy in the US so I won’t have a problem bringing the hundreds of region 2 dvds over. Any suggestions?

I don’t usually post on security issues, but this frightening enough to warrent as much attention as it can get.

Details on Stefan Esser’s blog.

What this means is that ANY site which hosts a PDF is vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack. So, follow Stefan’s instructions and disable the pdf plugin.

Now I can’t tell you what Project X is, because the NDA that you have to sign before being part of the initial wave of Project X beta testers includes a clause that says that you can’t disclose that the beta testing program exists.

However, it is awesome! Incredibly disruptive… blows huge holes in my youTube dvr conspiracy theory. Actually, I should say that if Google was planning to create a DVR for youTube they will certainly be up shit creek when this thing launches. And coming from guys who have consistently pissed off traditional media, I’m sure they aren’t too happy about this either.

A flurry of PHP updates this week… on the heels of PHP5.2 we have ezPublish 3.9 and Zend Framework 0.60 and ezcomponents. While I have updated the PHP version on the server, I’m holding out on ezPublish and ZF till the holiday weekends.

I released the 5th article on my Zend Framework Hidden Gems series, this week focusing on Zend_Db. The upcoming article will be on Zend_Feed and because of the good response to the initial Zend_Db article, I’ve pushed the article on Zend_Db_Select into the queue after Zend_Feed. Expect to see both those articles in the usual place in the next 2 weeks.

In work related news, I’ve just launched my second ezPublish site (working on my third as soon as I get finished with this entry) I’m putting all our site release information on our HedgeCo Hedge Fund Websites corporate blog, so as soon as I get around to writing a release announcement you can see it on the Hedge Fund website launch section.

Oh, and I’m talking at PHP|Tek (more information here), looking forward to that. Now that we’re talking about traveling, I’ll be working out of West Palm Beach from the 7th of Jan to the 2nd of Feb so if anyone in the area wants to meet up, it would be awesome.

… because they dive into it like this.

Image courtesy of an International PHP Magazine.

Maybe I’ll “upgrade” now… can’t stand the way FF2 works with tabs

<awormus> anyone know a way to put the tabs in ff2 back to how they worked in ff1.5?
<Akrabat> yes
<awormus> TELL ME
<Akrabat> I suppose I’d better look it up now
<awormus> I have FF2 on my laptop, but there is NO way I could work with those silly scrolling tabls
<Akrabat> user.js in your profile directory
<awormus> what’s the use of a tab if it’s not visible on your screen
<Akrabat> user_pref(”browser.tabs.closeButtons”, 0);
<awormus> Akrabat: thanks
<Akrabat> where the number is one of:
<Akrabat> 0 = close button on active tab only
<Akrabat> 1 = close button on all tabs
<Akrabat> 2 = no close button
<Akrabat> 3 = close button at end of bar
<awormus> nice
<awormus> what about the scrolling tabs
<ramsey> Akrabat, that’s for the close buttons
<Akrabat> then you need
<Akrabat> user_pref(”browser.tabs.tabMinWidth”, 70);
<Akrabat> to make the tabs a more sane min size
<Akrabat> looking for the last one
<Akrabat> ah yeah
<Akrabat> user_pref(”browser.tabs.tabMinWidth”, 0);
<Akrabat> I upped it again to 70 when I worked out that I didn’t mind the scrolling as long as it didn’t happen often
<awormus> Akrabat: thanks
<awormus> I guess once I have 20 tabs open I can handle scrollign
<Akrabat> with tabMinWidth of 70, I get 183 tabs on average before scrolling
<Akrabat> 18, rather
<Akrabat> another useful setting: user_pref(”network.cookie.cookieBehavior”, 1); /*1 = Only cookies from the originating server are allowed.*/

“We’re sorry the telephone that you are calling from is not in service at this time”

What does that mean? I’m using it aren’t I?

A nice tutorial on GIT explains the development of the program, and Linux’s history.

Torvalds began working on Git as an interim solution to replace BitKeeper, which had previously been the primary source code tool in use by Linux kernel developers worldwide. Some members of the open source community felt that the BitKeeper license was not the best fit for the open source world, and thus Torvalds decided to investigate revision control systems with more permissive licenses.

Has to make you wonder what this guy was smoking, as I remember it went down quite a bit differently.

Over the next three months, BitMover intends to phase out the free BitKeeper product. Some money has been set aside to provide commercial licenses for certain kernel developers, however Linus Torvalds is not one of them. Larry suggested, “if Linus and Andrew and the others moved elsewhere, we’d glady comp them licenses”, referring to their current employment with OSDL.

But it’s good to hear that GIT is gaining momentum.

I put together a couple scripts to test out chorizo scanner during our PHP UG meeting tonight.

Now I’m not saying that I always write 100% secure scripts, but intentionally writing vulnerable scripts which demonstrate vulnerabilties which aren’t entirely stupidly obvious is REALLY difficult.

Anyway, we’re having a security talk by Tom Klingenberg followed by some examples by me. Hopefully I’ll be able to hack together some move vulnerable scripts during his talk

Somehow, between all the anti pasta and PHP revelry in Italy, OSS Blog managed to get an interview with Tobias Schlitt. The interview covers PHP, Open Source, Ajax and surrounding technologies.

I don’t think I need to say this, but I LOVE Free Software. Companies like eZsystems, MySQL, RedHat and many more, show there is business model which can be both profitable and open.

In the interview with OSSBlog Toby states:

I think, that all software should be open nowadays. That sounds a bit radical at a first glance, but I have some valid reasons: Most software today does not invent any really new technique or concept. Software development mostly consists of taking parts from other software, putting those together and code a little bit around it. This concept aligns very well with the concept of open source. Another reason is, that the software market is changing (maybe because of open source or maybe the other way around). It is not the software itself, where the money comes from, but the services provided for it. The last reason is my personal geekness. I love to learn from other peoples code and I love to just change the code, when I need a different feature or fix a bug.

While I agree with the general concept, I disagree that totally free software is right for every business model.

Case in Point: As part of my code portfolio, I have a quantitative statistics engine which I developed for a client. This is a fairly specific peice of software designed for fund managers most of whom have around $100 million of assets under their management. The software package is written in PHP and is being used in over 30 client sites. It is also the core of a service which will be launching in the near future.

The entire package is written by me (although if I would have discovered PEAR::Math_Finance) I would have certainly used and contributed to that package. After the basic financial calculation class, I implement several hundred algorithms to create the core of the package. Some of the algorithms are freely available online, others needed a lot of offline (often maddening) research. Needless to say the implementation was a fair amount of work, and the intellectual property value of the final product is substantial.

My question is, why should I push for opening up the source? What financial gains would the company that invested in the development get? What benefit would it be to the open source community?

I can understand that if this were a conventional software application distributed using the GPL. I would then have legal means to ensure that the GPL is maintained, or I could use a dual licensing model to license the technology for commercial application. But none of these benefits come through in this case?

Should I just blindly push for the open sourcing of this library? Or is the non-distributed nature of web services where the GPL breaks down?

We are in the development stage of a site at domain.com. To host this site we created an account in Cpanel for domain.com and started our testing. After a couple of days we get a report that email that is being sent from domain1.com is not reaching the recipients at domain.com.

After poking around for a couple minutes, it’s obvious that since both domain1.com and the (non-active) domain.com are on the same box the mail is being delivered locally.

After a quick chat with the nice people at #cpanel, I got the following solution.

1. create a A record for external.domain.com and point that to the IP address of the live MX server for domain.com
2. create an MX record on the local domain.com Zone and point that to external.domain.com

And people say I waste time when I’m on IRC.

The other option I had was to add the domain to /etc/remotedomains and remove it from /etc/localdomains but since this is a managed server I’m working on, I don’t have that option.

The last couple weeks I’ve had to work on a managed server which only has Cpanel access and the associated WebHost Manager. The people in #cpanel on efnet have been VERY helpful in getting me around some sticky configuration issues.

Putting 2 sites on one control panel

A client had a domain name which was registered and hosted using Yahoo! Small Business Services. Due to the fact that he was using all the YSB services, he could not transfer the domain to our servers, best thing we could do is point www.domain.com to our server and let YSB take care of all the services which were attached to *.domain.com.

This client already had a Cpanel account on this server (we’ll call it domain1.com), so I figured we could just create an addon “parked” domain which would catch that domain. For some reason (which I can’t remember now) that didn’t work.

What finally worked was to create a subdomain of domain1.com, and then create an CNAME record from www.domain.com which pointed at domain.domain1.com.

Obviously this is a bit screwy, but it works.

I remember the WTF moment I had a couple years ago when Frozen Bubble was released. The game was nice but the awesome bit was the it was based on PERL, which was my programming language of choice at the time.

I had that moment again this morning when an email arrived in my mail box from Rubem Pechansky (The WinBinder Guy) where he announced his Worldcup 2006 card game which is based entirely on PHP5 and Winbinder.

The graphics are great, and on my machine there is no noticable speed hit, in my opinion it is right up there with any other desktop game around.

It’s been a while since I was playing with winbinder, but looking at this application and the possibilites for simple client side deployment makes me want to take another look at it. That is if I can find time now that I’m trying to beat the (exceptionally smart) computer. Check it out yourself.