Day: July 21, 2004

Categories
Weblogging

Tweaks and talk

If this had been MT I would have been hammered with comment spam tonight. I added a little watcher on my logfile, and when it receives so many POST commands in a period of time, it sends me an email so I can monitor what’s going on.

It looks like I had about 500 POSTs, but nothing came through in a comment, because the POST is going to the wrong file. It was interesting watching though. Scattered amidst the spam POST attempts were referrer spams. The comment spammer is using a variety of proxies; the referrer spammer is using an open proxy from a Texas school district.

I’m also getting a lot of hits from Google for the phrase, “Google Email”.

Between all of these are hits from Googlebot, MSNBC bot, Yahoo bot, and various RSS aggregators. The Web never sleeps.

I re-implemented my Backtrack feature at the end of any posts that trackback to other weblogs. The only problem is, as I found in the last post, that WordPress doesn’t implement the “?__mode=rss” aspect of trackback. So now I have to decide the direction to take the tech. Should I add in the rss mode, and submit it as a change to WordPress? Or do something different with Backtrack? Regardless, I think I’m about due for another documentation update of my changes.

Speaking of changes, Marius Coomans wrote a note in Jonathon Delacour’s most recent post (which wiki fans will enjoy reading) about his dislike of the small comment boxes. He gave me an idea that I’m now in the middle of implementing. I was glad of this little inspiration, too, because I was beginning to think I didn’t have anything left to tweak with my weblog.

Since I brought up Backtracks and trackbacks, earlier, I wanted to mention that John Dvorak liked my ping from the last post. No seriously! He wrote me a note with Ha Ha. He deleted the ping, of course, but I did get the Ha Ha.

Which all you old time gardeners will recognize as a garden structure, usually consisting of a border or boundary that doesn’t block the view, but still keeps out the sheep.

Categories
Weblogging

Kind people, neat pictures, and Kookaburra

It wasn’t hard to tell that I was in a pretty bad mood last night, was it? Not just yesterday, my mood has been down for a few weeks. Stuff.

But I thought I would start practicing some of that discipline I wrote about earlier, and rather than wax maudlin here in the weblog, pull my droopy jaw up. After all, a frown is just a smile upside down, so turn it up!

I dusted off my old version of Visual Studio 6.0 today and I’m wrapping Dave Beckett’s RDF tools, Redland and Raptor into PHP extensions. Doing this, those who want to work with RDF in PHP can do so with a to-the-metal library. What’s rather astonishing about the whole thing is that I’m actually enjoying working with the C code, and my old version of VS. It’s like eating liver – it’s okay every ten years.

I had a kind note from Robb Beal today, so I thought I would embarrass him by saying hi here. Hi Robb. I really like the design of your weblog.

I braved the miserable heat and went to the store and it was full – full! – of local produce. I came home loaded down with bi-color corn on the cob, huge tomatoes, tree ripened nectarines, and sweet, huge dark red cherries. Nectarines and cherries for dinner tonight.

Not only that, but the store finally had my favorite candy in today – Kookaburra licorice. Both strawberry and traditional licorice flavors. They don’t get it in very often–there’s been some problems with bringing foods in from other countries because of increased security–and it’s not cheap, but I love the stuff.

I’m sitting here eating my nectarines and cherries and licorice, and looking at photos in other weblogs. Loren Webster has a great shot of a water fall from a hike this weekend. And Jeff Ward has the funniest photo of a truck that miscalculated the height of power lines it drove under. Dave Rogers has cute photos of his cat and little girl online. Notice that I mentioned the cat first.

John Dvorak has a new new weblog and he posted what he had for lunch today. He should like being pinged by this post.

I also get to go on my first airplace trip since 9/11 sometime in the next few weeks. I don’t know what day for sure, but I am curious what it will be like flying with all the new security.

Ah well. Good licorice.

Categories
Connecting

If only we didn’t have to live with decisions

’ve upset, disappointed, or angered people recently, through action and decision. However, lest you think this is a po’me writing, with me crying on your shoulders, think again–these folks are right to be mad at me. To them, what I’ve done is wrong, and I’m not going to disagree with them.

I didn’t act as I did because I felt morally superior, or justified. I didn’t trip about lightly because the act was easy, and had no costs. I am aware, daily, in the silences, of what was lost. I knew all the consequences of my actions before making a move. And I still moved, not because I felt my way was the only right way, and others were wrong; but because my way was the only right way for me.

And I have no regrets. Well, no regrets at the decisions.

See you next week.

Categories
RDF

Creating a PHP Extension out of Redland and Raptor

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Since I’ve worked with compiles of Redland before (though long ago), and have Visual Studio 6.0 and am experienced with its use, I’m going to take a shot at creating the PHP extension of Raptor and possibly Redland for Windows. These won’t be a general purpose binary of the libraries. They will be built specifically as extensions for PHP. If anyone has done this before, with VS 6.0, warnings of any odd quirks would be welcome.

C is a powerful language, and I have a lot of respect for it. But I like cross-platform solutions. I like not having to deal with binaries from OS to OS. That’s why I bought into Java long ago, and Perl, PHP, and environments like Mono/C#. However, with each of these languages, you hear folks talk about how they’re ‘too slow’. You ask for specifics, and you’re told they’re ‘too slow’. You ask for requirements, and all you get is ‘too slow’.

Well, sometimes all it takes is a little extra effort, or a fresh perspective, and you might be able to get a cross-platform solution that could work. But you’ll never know because all you get when you ask for details is, “it’s too slow”. Well, chances are the native libraries will also be ‘too slow’, too. How will we know? Without a formal requirement of what’s needed, and specific performance test cases, there’s no way to judge if the native library will even make a difference.

However, I haven’t previously tried creating a PHP extension; this will be a chance to learn something new. These will be external extensions, though, hopefully dropped into PECL, which should be good enough. I wouldn’t try to get PHP to bundle these with the PHP distribution. Too much weight for too little return.

Update:

Unfortunately, I haven’t had success with this porting effort. I’ve put the call out to others to see if I can get some help, but at this time, looks like Redland is staying a Unix-based solution.

And I’ve also been reminded how much I really dislike working with C; about as much I like working with PHP, Perl, Python, and Java. Oh, and now C#.

Sorry to disappoint.