Entries by Anatoliy Belsky

Blogging is my little hobbyhorse, however not big enough to excite me. Nevertheless sometimes you feel challenged when some social networks linking professionals in (yes, I'm pointing the finger ) give a syndication possibility for wordpress only. Just as the real thing is going on in the background is an RSS feed exchange, not more and not less.

Why would one do that obviously half baked thing limiting the RSS syndication to Wordpress only? I don't know, probably it's just politics and therefore the answer isn't really interesting. A more interesting approach would be a possibility to not to play by that rules. And here it is - after a couple of hours playing around I wrote a simple wordpress gateway for my blog.

There is always something to try out when writing c programs. Sometimes you just want to know if a small piece of code works as expected without having to recompile the whole project. I used to write small programs for this, just like



But the more you program c, the more pieces of code you possibly want to try out. And writing all that wrapping stuff around the snippet you actually want to check isn't really productive. Therefore I came to the idea of a small program which would straight forward compile and run a piece of c code.

I've been using Serendipity for a couple of years and really love it now. But sometimes I wish it could be faster. Different servers tell a difference, but an average generation time for example for one category listing with 15 entries takes about 5 seconds or more. So I couldn't wait any longer, since I've learned Varnish Cache, to toggle it between Serendipity and the end user. Of course, Varnish would limit some blogging features, but the benefits will be worth of that. Sounds interesting? So this article is for you.

A couple of years ago I've shared my expierience about how to setup virtual mail hosting with Postfix and Dovecot. Some time ago I needed to make that accessible via Web. So, a webmail.

After trying a couple of engines I've decided in favour of SquirrelMail. This worked like a charm with SSL, etc. so the full mailing functionality was available just out of the box. The one thing I was still missing was a possibility to change password. There are already several plugins to achieve the goal, for instance when logging in over LDAP, but nothing could really fit for me. That's because the maildir setup I'm using is non standard. Luckily, the SquirrelMail API is simple and just well documented, so I was able to write a custom change password plugin very fast.

There is a new PHP extension I've written to work with Varnish. The extension allows interaction from within a PHP script with a running Varnish instance. For now there is a basic useful functionality such as ban URLs or set/get Varnish configuration. There will be more with the time. For now I would give a couple of examples for the extension usage, as there is not really any docs for the extension here.

This time I needed some geographical data evaluation for one of my current projects. The data used to be opensource and as possible qualitative and complete. After spending some time in front of the famous search engine window there was a solution:

http://www.geonames.org/

That's the first sentence from the site:

The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.

Geonames is used by number of sites. Besides data it has also web services and code libraries in many programming languages to access them.

Anyone who did unit testing in PHP knows that private methods are untestable. One workaround for this could be to make no private but protected only members and to call methods using a proxy class. Another approach I'd like to present here is a small extension hack.

Hi again,

whole last week I was mad about hearing music. I've heared tons of mp3's and radio stations over the internet. After a couple of days hearing music at work and at home I was really bored with creating and syncronizing playlists/files. Based on this, I came to the idea to make an online playlist which I would must update only one time and in one place and it would be accessible from anywhere. The idea was easy brougth out with PHP. So just a light reading for you:

Hi there,

last week I wrote a PHP port for Joerg Michael's gender program. The program stands for gender recognition based on firstnames and has a base of >40000 firstnames from around the world. I hope the stuff is deserved to be accepted on PECL.

Hey you all (and me too) web developers. The huge important news today is - now we can send IMs from a script running within a web server - isn't it cool? Only one restriction conditioned by libpurple itself is there - use is definitely safe within CGI environment only. The second important news, as you see from the title - the project was renamed to Phurple. Furthermore there are a couple essential changes I was made as refactoring of the code was written so far.

Became interested? Lets look onto most important points in the changelog:

So, new PHPurple version was issued yesterday and is downloadable from sf.net. What's inside:

* PurpleAccount::isConnecting() added
* PurpleAccount::getUserName() added
* PurpleAccount::getPassword() added
* PurpleClient::deleteAccount() added
* PurpleClient::findAccount() added
* PurpleClient::addAccount returns now a PurpleAccount instance (but was null)
* PurpleClient::authorizeRequest() added

The most interesting thing there is of course the remote client authorization.

Recently I had a little discussion about our style guide with one of the co-workers. And the matter was concerning the line length. Most default is to limit the line length with 79-85 characters - because of terminals, printing etc. But an other question took my head in the middle of the conversation: limiting the line length would mean for example to encapsulate deep included blocks of the code into functions - sounds not bad, but ...

Today I've maked the second PHPurple release and changed it's status to alpha. The changes, came into it, are:

* fixed zts compatibility
* implemented the loopHeartBeat method
* the runLoop method was changed to set the heartbeat interval
* fixed memory leak on empty alias
* purple.debug_enabled is now boolean

The most interesting on this release is the PurpleClient::loopHeartBeat() story, which is of course implemented with g_timeout_add. Take a look at the new example script to see how it works.

Referencing my previous article about the mali server configuration, I'm continuing with spam and antivirus scanners setup. On my Debian box i'm installing the following:



With this groups spamd and clamav are automatically created. Before you start, keep in mind - if something goes wrong, allways check the /var/log/mail.* files.

Hi there.

The things I wanna to talk about today are - relational databases building. Particularly I would discuss such the attainments of relational sql as join and subselect. For my experiment I'll take PostgreSQL and Python.

So, lets start: