Steve Smith over at Ordered List has hacked together a customized stylesheet for the WordPress administrative interface. Based on the screenshot thumbnails, it looks pretty nice. I plan to download it tomorrow and check it out more closely!
Cool, IBM and Zend have announced Zend Core for IBM. Basically, it’s an officially supported version of PHP with tight integration into IBM’s DB2 and Cloudscape database servers, and some web services stuff. This is probably going to grab some new eyeballs for PHP from some IBM-based businesses who have probably never heard of it before.
If I was still working at my previous employer back in Alabama, I would be all over this. They are a big IBM user who are currently migrating their web platform from Microsoft’s IIS to IBM’s WebSphere. If I were still there, I’d have a much easier time converting all the Perl ASP code that I wrote to PHP than if I tried to rewrite everything in JSP.
This is definitely cool news for tech geeks in Big Blue evironments that like the security blanket of support contracts.
via: Sam Ruby
John Dvorak seems to thrive on controversy (much like the rest of journalism). His latest claim is that while Apple’s switch to Intel processors could threaten Microsoft, it also “could actually be most dangerous to the emerging Linux OS environment.”
Linux has other problems too. It’s likely that developer interest will wane when Apple is fully engaged on the X86 platform. While Apple ran on the PowerPC chip the amount of developer effort in the Open Source camps was nil. But now that Apple is using the same processor as everyone else, targeting the Macs will now be an easy decision to make. This will be at the expense of Linux.
And then there are the numerous developers who simply do not subscribe to the notions of the Open Source Foundation and its rigid licensing requirements. They will quickly see profit opportunities for OS-X/86 development without having to worry about what has to be shared and what can be sold for profit.
Huh? Dvorak doesn’t seem to grok the Linux and Open Source community. First of all, one of the first things that’s going to happen is that developers will port Linux to the new Intel-based Macs. Just like they’ve ported Linux to the XBox, Playstation, Game Boy, and just about every cell phone and PDA out there. It might not be the most practical thing to do, but it’s a challenge, and therefore it will be done.
Secondly, I can’t really see many Open Source developers suddenly getting dollar signs in their eyes just because Macs have a new CPU. Why should they? How many open source projects are written in assembly language? Not many, I can assure you. Mostly, they’re written in Java, C/C++, Perl, and Python. Some are written to be cross-platform to begin with. Others are targetted at a particular operating system. But few of them give a hoot about what kind of CPU they run under. And then there are the web-based projects built around PHP, Ruby, and/or Javascript, among others. These tend to be even more platform agnostic. They don’t care if they’re running under Windows, OSX, Linux, or FreeBSD. In fact they don’t care if they’re running on a desktop, a mainframe, or a Commodore 64.
The way I see it, Linux and its cousins have a lot to gain. With only one CPU to target, work will become easier for those working on Mac emulators. I don’t imagine that it will be long before we see something like WINE. Maybe MINE is in our future?
I hadn’t been keeping too close an eye on this, because we’ve got higher priorities right now than buying new computers. But there have been rumors lately about some sort of deal between Apple and Intel. The speculations mainly fell into two camps: 1) Apple would release a new Pentium-based Macintosh computer, or 2) Intel would begin producing a new PowerPC compatible CPU.
Steve Jobs just dropped the bomb: Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006
Basically, it seems, Apple has been disappointed with IBM’s inability to deliver a G5 processor that could break the 3GHz barrier or with heat characteristics that would be usable for laptops. They’ve been developing an Intel-based Macintosh, along with the cross-platform tools needed to manage the transition, secretly over the past five years.
There are some more details from the keynote available over on Engadget and The Mac Observer. Of note: Jobs displayed the slides for his keynote using a Macintosh powered by a 3.6GHz Pentium 4. He showed demos of Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and Mathematica running on the new platform. Existing PowerPC binaries will be able to run on the new system thanks to a new real-time emulation layer called Rosetta. The Wolfram Research folks were able to get Mathematica, which has millions of lines of source code, modified and re-compiled for the new platform in just a couple of days.
via: kottke. Also, as Dave Winer points out (and tons of people are sure to overlook), this does not mean that you’ll be able to run future versions of OS-X on your Dell computer. Apple has always been able to ensure a certain level of stability in their systems because the hardware was locked down. This is unlikely to change anytime soon. But the possibility of a version of Windows that runs on the new Apple hardware is a different story.
I’m a redneck.
Not because I was born in Alabama and spent most of my life there. And not because I now live in Georgia. And definitely not in the sense of chawin’ tobaccy and watching NASCAR.
I’m a redneck because I spent most of hottest portion of Sunday out in the hot sun. I finally got around to starting a project of refinishing some old dressers for our kids — a project that Susan has been asking me to get done for quite some time now. We first had to clear a bunch of boxes out of our garage in order to get to said dressers. But the garage is packed to the gills with stuff, so the actual work had to take place in our driveway.
As a result, I now have a quite prominent farmer’s tan (hey, wow, no Wikipedia entry yet!). My forearms have a slight sunburn, and my face less so. But the back of my neck is very lobsterized. I quite literally have a red neck. Ouch.
Tantek Çelik has a whole gaggle of microformat links over on his site:
Basically, microformats are just organically grown rules to add application-specific semantics to existing XHTML documents. This is mostly accomplished by adding class attributes to your existing markup, and occassionally by adding additional markup (span & div) to indicate a hierarchical data structure. This description leaves a lot to be desired, but an example is worth a thousand explanations…
In the first restaurant review of the hReview example linked above, notice how some fairly normal HTML is enhanced by adding the hReview classes. By adhering to this standardized format, specialized web crawlers could take note of it, and aggregate the information into an uber review search engine.
That’s the incentive for people to use these types of microformats. Imagine if a Googlebot (or Technorati, or whoever) saw an hReview compliant review of a new movie on your site. It could correlate your review with reviews by other authors about the same movie. It could then present average scores, excerpts of reviews, links to the reviews, and other interesting statistics.
Maybe in my Copious Free Time, I can convert some of those hThingie Creators into WordPress plugins, and maybe even come up with some microformat proposals of my own.
WordPress is now the official host and sponsor of the BrowseHappy campaign, as noted in a WebStandards Project press release.
In an effort to refocus energy on advocating for standards from a perspective of universal access and vendor neutrality, WaSP is handing over the reigns of the BrowseHappy campaign to the good folks at WordPress.
What does this mean to the average user? Not a whole heck of a lot. But it probably means a bit of good press for WordPress, BrowseHappy, and WaSP. It will be interesting to see how the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 affects the web standards balance. The IE7 team seems to be making an honest effort to improve that browser’s compliance.
We were recently notified of a SQL injection bug in the WordPress code. Matt patched the code and updated the archive on the downloads page last night. All users are encouraged to upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1.2.
The patch is very simple (it just requires one new line of code in the get_category_by_ID() function), so if you don’t want to upgrade your whole installation, you can follow the instructions in the announcement. As a side note, the same fix applies to version 1.2, but at around line number 125 in the file.
From Tim Bray, we learn that Open Document 1.0 has been approved as an OASIS Standard. The new format will be the standard for the OpenOffice.org office suite. This paves the way for an unprecedented level of compatibility between applications and tools dealing with a wide variety of document types.
In the interest of fairness, I’ll point out that Microsoft did document the new XML formats for Microsoft Office 11, which opens up the same sorts of capabilities. Mostly.
I only had a couple of responses to my call for SpamValve testers. One of the testers has already begun using SpamValve on his FreeBSD server. The other is tied up at the moment, but is going to attempt to adapt it to work on a Linux server sometime next week.
In the meantime, I’ve started using it to filter spam hits to my mail service. This was accomplished with a one-liner:
tail -0f /var/log/maillog | \
perl -e 'while(<>){ m/Mail from (.*) rejected/; \
system("/usr/local/sbin/svupdate", $1) if $1;}'
The command above watches the end of my sendmail log for entries indicating messages rejected by RBL checks. When it matches one, it sends the IP number to svupdate, which updates the spam counter for that host. That’s how easy it can be to use SpamValve to monitor a network service.
That said, I’m going to go ahead and make the code generally available. Obviously, feedback is welcome.
Download SpamValve: .ZIP (15K) or .tar.gz (11K)
I’m dubbing this SpamValve Version 1.0-alpha-2 “Hyrax”.