Linux

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.

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:

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.

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.

About a month ago I've written a simple domain checker, which is using whois.net to get the domains availiable. The main goal was to find free 3-symbols domains.



The thing is very simple and the results can be kept on. Additionally it sends mail messages about each found domain. Lets see, what it brought for the .de domains ( about 9000 free domains was found )

The first pre-alpha is released and can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpurple/. The common documentation I've started to make was placed to http://phpurple.rubay.de/.

The main features implemented are:

- send and recieve IMs
- fully implemented account dsn like string
- ability to make account specific settings
- basic work with buddy, buddy group and buddy list

The license was changed to the BSD like proprietary license.

An interesting question I had to answer a couple months ago was - how could I compile an executable statically, so then it works on various linux distributions without the need to install some additional libs. Of course, such the executables are bigger as that, which was compiled in order to use the dynamic libs. But if one wanna to have an independent production executable, this is what one could need.

So, I will explain the thing with the help of an example program, which uses ncurses. First I'm creating the project dir, for example:

Yesterday I was configuring the mail server on my hosting. Because I'm mostly doing programming, not administration, I'm writing this notes which are serving as a simple how to, if I must do it once more in a couple of years.

In spite of the fact I've done all on Debian, all the described things schould work on some other Linux distribution as well. First install Postfix and Dovecot

The configuration will fulfill the following points:

• IMAP over SSL


• SMTP over SSL (Postfix using Dovecot SASL)


• Multiple domains with virtual users


• Mailing possibility for the local users


• Mailboxes in the Maildir format

and so it will be in the future ...

Namely, i had the excellent oo design suggestion from the Alexey on the pecl mailing list (and it is better, than I could invent), and it works fully for php 5.3 and unfortunately partly for php 5.2. So lets take a look on it ... just get the latest version ...

Some time ago i've started to write the binding for the libpurple, the im lib. About 3-4 weeks ago i had a simple functional implementation, which i've presented on php pecl and libpurple mailing lists. Subsequently i've completely revised the whole thing to be OO and would present it again. There is the same minimal functionality implemented, but all is OO. So, lets begin. First install the php development package and get the code:

If you have a hosting, you usually have limited disk capacity on it. Some times there are file managers in the hosting control panel, some times not. Here I will explain how to get disk space used, if your hosting control panel has no file manager. | So, each GNU system always has two built-in commands to determine the disk and file space usage. They are 'du' and 'df'. Because most hostings working with GNU based operating systems like BSD or Linux, we have a right to suppose, that we have ssh login and aforementioned commands available on it. If it's so on your hosting, read further

I'm a midi fan, but since I have a soundcard without the ability to load soundfonts in the memory, I looked constantly for a solution, which will make possible to listen midi. And I found timidity.
| So, the ability to listen midi files means at the same time the ability to edit midi files, and that's exactly what I'm pressing for. I've tried to play midi with timidity, and the result exceeded all my expectations. But the first difficulty for me was - not all sounds was on the right place or was missing at all. So first what I needed was a good midi map and soundfonts. First I've searched SuSE root tree and found some things under /usr/share/sounds/sf2, but their quality was not sufficiently even for purposes of listening and they was incomplete. Than I've found some really good soundfonts there (ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/awe32), they have much fewer "gaps" and can be already used, but I don't know if they are completely GPL friendly. Finally, when I found two solutions - the timidity rpm from Arklinux and freepats (SuSE recommended), that containing all complete midi maps and all the soundfonts needed, I've understood how great fits the timidity for midi playing. And now I'll tell you, how to make a software midi synthesizer with timidity.

aMuleis a very comfortable p2p client. For Linux it has even the daemon aMuled and the text style interface aMuleCMD, which means a great solution for the remote control. | First install amule (with yast apt or whatever you use) or download aMule here http://www.amule.org/ and compile it. Don't forget to create or edit /home/username/.aMule/amule.conf.