Dev411 Blog

Bill Odom, President of The Perl Foundation, recently posted a blog entry called TPF RFC. My comment to that blog entry wasn't approved for some reason so I figured I'd post some easy-to-accomplish recommendations here.

There has been some confusion about the license that covers the themes submitted to the 2005 TypoGarden Theme Contest. Many themes do not mention a specific license and the contest page simply says:

Geoffrey Grosenbach, of TypoGarden, mentioned on the #typo IRC channel that all the themes submitted are under the MIT License. This makes sense since Typo itself is under the MIT License.

George Kirikos discusses ICANN's proposed tiered pricing which will allow registrars to charge whatever they want on a per-domain basis. This is also being discussed on Slashdot. This currently covers the biz, info and org domains. The com TLD was recently renewed but the speculation is that it may go this way when it comes up for renewal again. Differential, per-domain per-year pricing has been confirmed by Vint Cerf of ICANN. Theoretically, Google could be charged $1million or even $1billion per year for say google.biz.

I just ran across the Hadoop DFS which is an open source alternative to distributed file systems such as GoogleFS, OneFS and others. GoogleFS and OneFS are both proprietary so it's nice to finally have a FOSS solution. MySpace uses OneFS. From the Hadoop Wiki:

Until now, I had only been aware of MogileFS for FOSS solutions, however MogileFS is designed for smaller files such as images and the others are designed for very large files. It will be interesting to see how much traction Hadoop DFS gets since it could be very useful and a good FOSS compliment to MogileFS. Hadoop is part of the Lucene Apache project.

Lucene is a Java-based fulltext indexing and search solution run under the Apache Foundation. It is arguably the most popular of many fulltext solutions now but its use of Java makes it a secondary choice for many non-Java projects. To improve the speed of Lucene, there are several C/C++ ports including:

• Lucene4c: Apache Foundation project
• Lucy: Apache Foundation project
• CLucene: Sourceforge project

Today, Google announced the next version of Blogger, Blogger Beta. As part of this upgrade, Blogger will finally get categorization. Like Gmail, Blogger will only give you 'labels' which other blog engines such as Typo and MovableType give you both categories and tags. When both categories and tags are available, there's often a question as how to use them, either together or one or the other. This can be seen in some blogs where there doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason to what is a category and what is a tag. For Typo, this is somewhat complicated by that fact that tags came along after categories, so some blogs used them for the same thing but never got rid of the old categories after switching to tags so there appears to be some overlap.

Let's face it, testing a website with OS-X's Safari browser can be difficult if a Mac doesn't happen to be available. Many developers only have non-Apple Intel-based hardware and run both Linux and Windows which allows for testing of Firefox and IE. Unfortunately this doesn't work for Safari because:

Now that this site runs both MediaWiki and Typo, I need to decide what to post where. Unfortunately I want to continue running both because they each have their advantages but ideally I could just run one, at least externally facing. These are some of the features I like of both MediaWiki and Typo which makes it hard to choose one over the other for all my posts. As a disclaimer, this is a personal wiki so I won't be discussing multiple users. The below lists the pros for each, If it's listed it means the other one doesn't have it ;)

I just posted my Installing SVK on Dreamhost notes on the wiki. I wasn't able to find any information on installing SVK, or Subversion with its Perl bindings for that matter, on Dreamhost so I took the time to work through it and document it (mostly because I believe SVK is essential to running a modded Typo). The end result looks pretty straight-forward but it was a reasonably time consuming process to backtrack all the errors, nail them down and find out if they are worth worrying about. In the end, the test failures weren't important but I wasn't willing to trust the SVK/SVN install without knowing for sure.

I was eager to get SVK up and running because it seems to be the popular way to keep one's private changes up to sync with a public repo. This is especially important for my Typo install as I have numerous Typo mods that I want automatically merged with new versions of Typo. Just recently we've had Typo 4.0.0, 4.0.1 and 4.0.2. I've been reluctant to make so many changes due to the manual merging I do now. Edge Typo and SVK, here I come!

Apparently Site5 doesn't come with SVK either so you can try to use this there. TextDrive, however, does come with SVK pre-installed.

A couple of people have blogged about their use of the "elite hacking tool diff -r" to identify the problem solved by the Rails 1.1.5 Mandatory Mystery Patch. The problem is that Rails accepted LOAD_PATH as a HTTP request header with any file upload so a hacker could upload ruby controllers and then execute them by accessing the newly exposed URIs. This is discussed by Kristian Köhntopp and Evan Weaver.