schlitt.info - php, photography and private stuff ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ :Author: Tobias Schlitt :Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 08:35:38 +0200 :Copyright: CC by-nc-sa =========== Open Source =========== - Why towel day was in May 25th? As you might remember, I blogged a few days ago, that you shouldn't forget your towel for yesterday, Towelday. This tribute to Douglas Adams (one of the most skilled science fiction authors in my eyes) was quite a funny thing, since people looked quite strange, when I walked around with a nice blue (not really authentic, AFAIR the original one was white) towel. - My first interview Fullo made an interview with me, during phpDay in Bari, about Open Source, Web 2.0, PHP and eZ. Also it's on the Italian OSSBlog website, it is written in English. - Don't forget your towel! On Thursday, May 25th is the so called towel day. Towel day is a tribute to Douglas Adams, the author of fantastic science fiction literature like "A hitchhikers guide to the galaxy". Towel day means that you just take a towel with you through the day to present your respect to Douglas Adams. So, don't forget your towel on Thursday! :) - The Web 2.0 misery In the past months, the term "Web 2.0" has been pushed as if it was a cool new Internet. Sorry, guys and girls, but this is bullshit. "Web 2.0" is the mis-term of the current and the past year. The "Web", if it ever existed, is a medium of several markup languages (especially HTML), which allows to provide information in a hyper-linked way over the Internet. It does not matter, which way you choose to provide this information (XTML, SVG or plain text). Beside that, "Web 2.0" seems to talk about rich-client interfaces over the web. Hello? XUL is quite old, ActiveX is even older and if you look at Citrix, you can provide "real" applications over the web. - No Linuxtag for me this year :( I'm sad to say, that I won't be able to attend Linuxtag this year. :( I've been there for the past 2 years, maintaining the PEAR exhibition booth and giving several sessions. This year I'm much too packed with university to go there. Luckily Stefan Neufeind, a fellow PEAR developer, stepped in and took over my talk proposal "News from PEAR" for the Practical Linux forum, where Stefan will give a short introduction into the actual state of the PEAR project. Thanks, Stefan! - What AJAX is good for... I don't like AJAX really much. I think in most cases it's useless sweetness, that nobody needs in a web app (not to mention that all that Web2 ranting is completely ridiculous). Anyway, Tobias Struckmeier (a fellow eZ employee and user group mate) invited me to use Google Calendar a while ago. I did not try it out until now, but since I was searching for a good calendar application anyway, I just logged in (using my Gmail account) and played a bit with it. - Welcome to the team, Sebastian Sebastian finally signed his contract with eZ systems and will move to our headquarter in Skien - Norway - next month. He will write his diploma thesis there about the new work flow engine for eZ publish 4. I'm really happy to have Sebastian with us. Another member of the open source community in our middle. For that: Welcome on board, Sebastian! Have a lot of fun with the great guys in Skien! :) - Moving No, not myself, but my server. Until now I ow a 1und1 Root Server L, which I bought more than 2 years ago. Now that 1und1 offers a new generation of servers, I decided to switch to a 64-bit machine. My old server had a Celeron processor, 256 MB RAM and 20 GB HD, which could not really handle my spam protection anymore. The new one is an Athlon 64 3000+, has 1 GB RAM and 2 80 GB SATA discs, which I run as a soft raid. - A pitty in Gentoos PHP distribution Today I again was annoyed by Gentoos handling of PHP through its packaging system Portage. I love portage above everything else, believe me, but the PHP package sucks. Although it compiles really well and is very easy to configure (hey, thanks Sebastian and all the other maintainers!), Gentoo seems to have an issue with enabling certain compiling options by default. If you don't set any of the USE flags (configuration options for compiling packages through Portage) for PHP, it will simply compile with --disable-all and is completly unusable. - Thoughts on trackback spam It's been a long while since I worked on my PEAR package Services_Trackback, mainly because I was much too busy with work and university. Nevertheless I made up my mind about how to solve the problem of the so-called trackback spam. In email environments people search for a solution to spam since email was invented and by now, no satisfactory solution was found (AFAIK, please correct me, if I'm wrong, I would be thrilled). Approaches here include complicated techniques like heuristic algorithms and easy ones like grey-listing, as well as sender identification (which is useless by now, since no unique standard exists and almost no program supports it).