Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

I like Xing. I actually like some of the social networks, although I think there are far to many of them. However, Xing is useful to me for keeping my address book updated by my business contacts themselves and to be up2date about who is doing what. Nice! I'm also a "premium" (in the sense of paying) user in Xing. On the one hand because that gives me some nice additional features and safes me from advertisement. On the other one because I think paying for a good online service is a good idea.

What I really wonder is: What happens to the feature requests and support questions I address to Xing? I don't really have the impression anyone takes care in anyway. Therefore I'd like to tell you the story of 2 tiny feature requests I addressed to Xing some months ago and several times since then. I think, I did not request features that are too difficult to realize. Now, I don't have any clue about web applications, so I might be wrong in this impression. ;) I'm also quite sure that many more people out there would love to see the same stuff realized, so it's not even that they consider my questions too useless for a qualified response.

However, whenever I send them a message via their contact form, I receive an autogenerated message ala "Thanks for your request, we take our users requests serious" a few hours later. Good to hear, that their system at least received my message. Another one, probably also auto-generated, that says "We forwarded your message to the development department." flies to my inbox usually a few days or weeks. Good to see, you take care over there at Xing! Although this is the final message I received about every such request.

No, to stay seriously and keep sarcasm away, is anyone taking care? I can't believe. I requested one and the same feature 3 times now and another one 2 times already. Without any response that seemed to be written by anything else than a computer. I'm not even sure that any human being ever read my mails. Maybe they have some fancy text recognition tool that generates standard replies automatically? Is it so hard to send a reply like "Sorry, we are not able to realize this, because..." or "Sorry, we don't think that feature Foo Bar is useful to our users, because..."? Is it so hard to give a use the feeling that anyone really takes care? Possibly I just asked the wrong question. If it is that way, please let me know.

To let you finally know what I want: Xing offers an RSS feeds for a lot of stuff. From the latest visitors of my profile to any pointlessimportant status messages, I can see everything right away in my feed reader. Why the hell not the next birthdays of my contacts? Why can I see "Foo Bar likes Xing status messages" in my Torii, but not who has his birthday today? The second tinyhuge feature I requested could even be more difficult to realize: Xing let's you link additional information about you from your profile. Beside your website you can share links to other social networks there, like Flickr or LastFM and a whole load of others I did not even hear of. Why is Ohloh still missing? Guys, I'm paying for your stuff, did you realize?

Would be interessting to know if anyone ever had success with a feature request at Xing, or if they just implement what the think is useful for their users?

I've been to the Dortmund post office quite often lately, mostly because I'm never at home when the postman wants to deliver my packages. The largest German post service provider "Deutsche Post AG" also owns a bank, the "Postbank". While they did not bother me with any of that stuff earlier, their advertisement for non-postal and postal products starts getting more and more annoying. But let me start at the beginning...

While queuing inside the office to get to a counter, you need to stand between shelves that contain other stuff they sell at the post office: Stationery, cellphones, home phones and much more. Since you usually queue between 10 and 30 minutes you get enough time to read all those nice advertisement slogans. Right before you get to a counter, there is a large LCD screen that constantly shows a mixture of recent news and more and more advertisement: Banking stuff, cellphones, postal services and so on. When you finally make it to the counter, the staffer is usually unfriendly and not the fastest one. However, we are used to this for ages now and it's not the point of this article. When you are finally done hand happy to hold the latest DVD from Amazon in your hands, the staffer suddenly gets friendly: "Do you already have an account at Postbank?". A friendly "No thanks" does not work: "A just wanted to make sure you noticed...". "No, thank you!". "But it's about your future! Do you know you can save...". "I am sorry, but I already have a bank account and I do not want to change!".

After I had this situation for the 3rd time within a week now, I tend to simply lie to those people: I now tell them I'd still work for my old employer which also was a bank. This seems to work perfectly fine and they even reply with "Oh, sorry for disturbing you" and let you go. However, I wonder if there isn't any legal remedy I have against such spam? It is illegal to send me emails about drugs I'm not interessted in, but to spam me personally about banking services I don't want?

I seized the boring time in the past days (I've had a really bad cold) and migrated my photo gallery to Flickr. So far I hosted the photos on my own, using Gallery. While Gallery is a great tool that allowed me to comfortablly manage and present my images, it has one great flaw: I host it by myself. That means a) that serving images from my server costs quite a bit of performance, if you involve PHP and even a database, and b) that I need to take care for updates myself. The first issue is a minor one, since my server is powerful enough to serve the job and not that many people are interessted. The second topic is much more disturbing, since I need to keep track about security updates all the time and need to bring an update in place ASAP, if one occurs.

Long story short, I played with the idea of migrating to Flickr for a longer time now and the only point that was keeping me back was the migration effort. Luckily a little Gallery module, called Gallery2Flickr, exists, which eases the job quite a bit. Therefore I seized the chance and performed the migration of all existing albums by now and you can find my image collection on Flickr, now. Sorry for destroying all the external photo links this way, anyway you can still reach my gallery on http://photos.schlitt.info and through the long way http://schlitt.info/applications/gallery.

After my server was close to wasting all its CPU time for checking email messages for potential spam using Spamassassin I decided that it was time to investigate. My friend Arne, who helped me a lot with Qmail problems earlier, recommended to install spamdyk, an SMTP spam filter that is placed in front of Qmail and does not require specially patches for the MTA itself. Spamdyk can filter mail by blacklisting, whitelisting, greylisting and using several other options.

Thanks to Arne for this great tip! Spamdyk is up and running now on my maschine and my load is now constantly below 0.40, while spam receival seems to be reduced drastically. Since I did not find much information about Spamdyk on Gentoo, I wrote down my experiences as a little howto in the Gentoo wiki. Maybe someone finds it helpfull. Any feedback welcome!

I really like OpenOffice.org. Until now, it satisfied any of my needs quite fine. But since I am writing a book using OpenOffice.org, I found some really annoying stuff. Most annoying by now, is the problem of cross references. It happens almost in every text section, that I need to add a reference to another section of the book. For example, while writing about securing user data I want to point to the section of a database chapter, where prevention of SQL injection is explained. I basically want to add a reference like 'See section X.Y.Z, "SQL injection"'.

Just adding a simple reference, which points to another headline of the same document and automatically gets updated if the headline text or number changes, is already a pain in OpenOffice.org. Headlines are not referenceable by default, which means, that you manually need to add a reference target to each of the headlines you want to reference. If you did so, you can make openoffice insert a reference to this target.

At this point the next issue comes into place: OpenOffice.org only allows to use a very limited set of formatings for the reference to be displayed. While you can use the chapter number as a reference, it seems not to be possible to use the headline text in addition or to create your own format, like I need it. Therefore, the basic reference handling of OpenOffice.org is kinda useless for me.

Searching the web left me with 2 solutions: a) Wait for OpenOffice.org 3.0, where enhanced reference handling planned as part of the bibliographic enhancements. Sure, I just need to postpone my project for some years... b) Make use of a custom macro. The latter solution sounds much more practical to me. While I first thought this problem must be very common for authors, Google tought me the opposite. So far I only found 1 macro (see OutlineCrossRef3.sxw), which was written in 2003 and last updated in 2004. The macro at least solves parts of my problems: It provides a list of all headings in a document and, on demand, creates a reference target to one of them and inserts a reference at the current cursor position. Still remaining here: The formatting functionality does not satisfy my needs. You can specify some characters to be placed between different parts of the reference (like between the headline number and text), but still no real custom format.

I'm quite shocked that this feature, for me absolutly essentiell for writing larger documents, is almost not realized in OpenOffice.org. Or did I miss something? Is there anyone out there, who solved the issues? Or do I really have to dig into a macro language of OpenOffice.org and implement the feature on my own? Any hint welcome! Thanks in advance!

Today I needed to start up my VMWare to test some PHP stuff on a Windows XP installation. I was quite curious, how I would perform after more than 4 years completly without Windows. Here are my experiences...

The first thing I wanted to do was setting up PHP. After a glance of "emerge dev-lang/php" I decided to download XAMPP and install the all in one package. So far so good, PHP seemed to be running after not much hassle, although I first needed to figure out the website of XAMPP (it is here, if you are ever searching), then downlod the installer and run it manually. Anyway, it gave me a lot of extra stuff and in fact installed a complete web develompment environment for me.

Good, so I wanted to checkout eZ Components from SVN. I remebered how to open a (what they call) "console" using "Start" -> "Run" -> "cmd.exe" and typed "cd De<tab>". Wow, that even worked! I'm amazed. But that only for a few milliseconds, because "svn co http://svn.ez.no/svn/ezcomponents/trunk" produced a nice error message. So - after downloading SVN manually from the web, installing it and adding its binary to the PATH variable (thank god, someone in the office knew how to do this) - this worked, too. Setting up the eZ Components environment was as easy as on Linux, since we provide a script called "setup-env.bat", which handles that job for you.

I tried out running some of our test suites, which also worked fine and turned to debug the things I neede to debug... "vim ConsoleT<tab>/s<tab>" *gnarf*, the auto completion "feature" of the "console" only works with backslashes. Again... "vim ConsoleT<tab>\s<tab>"... gives "vim ConsoleTools\.svn"... *argh*. Whatever, when I finally had the correct path to the file I wanted to edit, I realized: There is no VI on Windows... Ok, so I downloaded GVIM for Windows and started editing and fixing.

Great, after some messing around with newlines on Windows, stuff worked as expected. "svn diff" produced a nice patch, which I could finally copy from VMWare to Linux again. Over there I noticed that I broke something and fixed that again. Another patch, copy to Windows "patch -p0 < patch.txt"... runs into an error... *grrr* So, I downloaded the patch binary, installed it and... ran into some weird error. Thank god I only changed 1 file and so decided to copy this one manually.

That's only a short abstract of my day with MS Windows XP and my personal result from this is: My finger hurts from all those mouse moving and clicking, my eyes hurt a bit from all those jumping windows and popup stuff, my blood presure is on about 180 because of the piece of shit what they call a console, I lost about 1 hour to search for software on the web and I was 3 times close to throwing my notebook out of the window...

My conclusion (again): Windows? No thanks!

^{Note: Some of the mentioned stuff definitly results from me not being used to that $%&!?§ anymore, anyway, I think it sucks...}

Back from vacation I found an interessting article via Kore, which deals with the problem of content aggregation, based on German law. The main sense is basically: "Someone who provides forgein content on the net without asking for a permission violates copyright. This results in entitlement for omission and damages. If the aggregated content is additonally provided with ads, the provider possibly incurs a penalty." Hopefully I translated all the law terms correctly. To avoid misunderstandings, I quote the original words in German:

Denn, noch einmal: Wer fremde Inhalte im Netz veröffentlicht, ohne vorher zu fragen, verletzt das Urheberrecht. Das löst Unterlassungs- und Schadensersatzansprüche aus. Wer das Ganze noch mit Google-Anzeigen garniert, macht sich möglicherweise sogar strafbar.

In fact, the author states, that you violate copyright in Germany by aggregating content from foreign websites without asking explicitly for permission.

Again I have to emphasize, that I do not have a problem with having my content aggregated anywhere, as long as the style and number of ads is moderate and the purpose of aggregation not only to make pure money with my words.

^{Read the previous story about phpfreaks.com}

As I posted a few days ago, I was (and still am) very upset, that phpfreaks.com still aggregated my content through the feed of phpdeveloper.org. While I appreciate that phpdeveloper.org aggregates my content, I dislike the way phofreaks.com does it (with adding ads to my literal words).

Anyway, Chris (alias Enygma) from phpdeveloper.org asked me, if he is still allowed to aggregate my content and I naturally agreed with it. He offered my, to try blocking phpfreaks.com to aggregate my parts of his re-contribution of my content. I fully agreed with that and it seems to work, so far. The recent posts of my content on phpdeveloper.org did not get aggregated.

Thanks to Chris for that!!

Anyway, some of my old posts (either from my blog itself or from phdevelopers.org) are still shown on phpfreaks.com. I still disagree with that and I am in contact with 2 of the local lawyers (one for national, one for international law) to clarify the situation. It looks like there are good chances, that I really can forbid them by law to display my content on their site. I will probably post more on that issue later.

Beside of this, I added a CreativeCommons license to all of my blog entries, to ensure, that I clearly provided the license terms my content is provided on. If you are aggregating my content so far, do not hesitate: If I dislike it, I will clearly announce that to you, before starting to bother about that publicly or taking any legal actions. If you want to do it: Stick to the terms provided by the license or quickly ask me for an exception and I will permit it.

So long, let's see, what my lawyers state and how phpfreaks.com reacts. Maybe I will come around having some real legal issues with them, if they remove all of my content from their website or stop their "in text"-ads. Else I will see, how I can get rid of this in a legal way.

In a lack of a contact email address on phpfreaks.com (intentionally without any link, see here, why), I send this as an open letter:

phpfreaks.com administrators,

with this, I remove the permission to aggregate any kind of content,
published on my domain schlitt.info or written by me (Tobias Schlitt) in
general. From now on, you are not allowed to publish any kind of content
written by me on your side. This also includes content, which is already
aggregated through 3rd party resources.

Note, that you might breach against effective law, if you still keep
publishing my content without given permission and probably could get fined
for copyright issues in some states.

With kind regards,
Tobias Schlitt

I also tried sending this to webmaster@phpfreaks.com and hostmaster@phpfreaks.com.

If you wonder for a reason, it is that I still found my blog articles aggregated on that website, through the phpdevelper.org. While I in general appreciate that people aggregate my content (I think this is made clear by offering XML
feeds), I now explicitly disallow the phpfreaks.com website to do so. I do not write my content so that they can make money out of it with placing sneaky ads inside it.

Hope that's understandable.

Update -2- (Jan 20th 2005, 13:45):

I still recieve lot's of comments on this issue, which all have basically the same content, affirming my opinion. The most common sense is, that abusing the content created by somebody else to put ads into it (in the way it is done, by modifying the content) is a real shame and has to be considered equal with spam. Today an anonymouse reader pointed out, that they actually violate the OPL, under which the PHP manual is provided. The OPL says "The modified version must be labeled as such." and "The person making the modifications must be identified and the modifications dated.". Both points seem not being fulfilled on that site.

Other commentors pointed out to me, that the freaks also link the word "Perl" to their hosting service. Maybe this is interessting to peoplei of the Perl community?

Anyway, thanks for everyone who added an affirmation and showed to this strange freaks, that their ad practices are despicable. If you want to raise your opinion, please don't hesitate to add a comment here!

Update (Jan 17th 2005, 13:45):

Many people replied to my article, so I feel I should post an update. Thanks for everyone who stated his opinion so far.

Today I saw that phpfreaks.com actually changed the links on the word PHP to point to their start page and now link the word hosting to their webspace provider. At least, this does not harm my PHP evangelism feelings that much anymore. Anyway, the difference between ad and content is still not clear at all. Pretty many people (compared to the usual comment traffic on my blog) already claimed their support against this kind of ads here.

Most funnily phpfreaks.com even aggregated this article through an indirection of phpdeveloper.org. While I like getting aggregated on sites like phpdeveloper.org, planet-php.net and so on quite much, I strongly discourage that my content is reused by this phpfreaks page. Sorry guys, I do not permit you any longer to use my words for your advertisements.

Do you have an opinion on this? Please leave a comment here!

Original (Jan 12th 2005, 19:06):

As Vidyut pointed out, phpfreaks.com seems to automatically create a link everywhere on their website, where the word "PHP" appears. They do this even in user comments. Apparently this seems to be a nice service, if the link would direct you to php.net (or maybe some explaination page or something). But instead they link to some hosting provider which supports PHP (what also well known as a "sponsored link").

I have to admit that this is one of the largest brazennesses I every saw. Beside that, it's absolutely frowned upon in journalism circles (even the famous German "Bild-Zeitung" does not do advertisment in such a abject way, also they are wellknown for borderlining adverts) and in many states even completly illegal.

You should really feel ashame, you strange PHPFreaks!