opensource
“n2″ Message Board Software: Update
This is a cross-posting with the nextBBS support board.
Some of you already know about this but keep reading…
Development of nextBBS v2 was steered in a new direction about two months ago and this is for the better.
“n2″ is the software’s new code name. And the change is more than skin-deep because it is actually the result of the merger of three different pieces of software:
+ wtcBB
+ nextBBS v2 “current”
+ My own PHP framework called “Lenses”
The result is a very fast, very user and admin-friendly board with easy install and localization across the board.
This new direction is very exciting for at least two reasons:
1. It allows me to work without being hindered by “youthful” mistakes I had made when developing nBBS v1 such as SEO being an afterthought and an Admin Control Panel that was too intimidating
2. wtcBB and nextBBS share a common philosophy on many levels and integrating both programs allows me to pick the best implementation. A few examples are BBCode editor, sub-sub forums, micro-caching, high logging granularity, editing look and feel in the admin cp…
You can follow progress through my submits and the issues tracker.
Go to my original post to see a few screenshots. I should bring a demo online soon.
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Wordpress FLV Player Plugin v2.0
Close to two years ago, after quickly putting together my own FLV Player plugin for Wordpress (original post) I added it to Wordpress.org’s already impressive list of plugins. Who knows? Someone else might find it useful (it’s been downloaded more than 4,500 times since then so I guess that means someone did)
Yesterday a few people commented on that original post, thus reminding me of that plugin. It shamed me when I revisited its packaging to find out that it required from its users to download more pieces left and right. So, here it is, brand new v2.0, with everything included, and this means brand new SWF wrapper and brand new Flash file. Hope you forgive the fact that it took me all this time to provide a real self-contained archive.
Go to the Plugin PageOh, and there is something I would like to address about this plugin. It’s actually a reply to one of the comments I received recently:
What do you mean by “a flash stream”? Does it stream an flv or use progressive download? To stream flash, you need a streaming media server. You should be clear and say what you mean - stop contributing to peoples’ ignorance.
Well, I hope it helps you feel a little less ignorant to know that the answer is “both.” This plugin can stream both types, depending on your use of a http-type or a rtmp-type URI. It can also play live streams. More information can be found here.
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Twitterified Client now fully Open-Source
Well, this title says it all!
Find the announcement here.
And, of course, find the source code at GitHub: here.
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Bespin in Titanium: From The Jaws Of Victory…
bespin is really an intriguing project. Since I’ve grown frustrated with the inconsistencies between the various code editors that I have been using — I work on Leopard at home and Ubuntu at work — I thought that creating my own editor would be the answer to that. Nothing fancy, mind you. Just something consistent.
My first impulse was to use Flex. And it almost worked! Using mx:html I was able to wrap a nice web page in an otherwise very ActionScript-y application.
And then, catastrophe! Flex Webkit’s canvas implementation is subpar and I could only get a very mamed version of bespin. Nothing usable, anyway.
Thus, I turned to Titanium.
After some light trial and error, I got it to work!
Unfortunately, the result is less than awesome: Titanium’s Webkit gets easily overwhelmed and, worse, crashes reliably ( :g: ) as soon as I ask it to do some medium lifting.
This video shows the original victory followed by the vexing defeat:
Note that, to get it to work, I replaced embed.js with my own version that works around any dojo.request()/eval issue:
(function() { // -- Load Script var loadme = new Array(); var loadScript = function(src, onload) { var embedscript = document.createElement("script"); embedscript.type = "text/javascript"; embedscript.src = src; embedscript.onload = onload; document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(embedscript); } var onScriptLoaded = function() { var src = loadme.shift(); if(src) loadScript(src, onScriptLoaded); } var componentRequires = function() { dojo.require("bespin.bespin"); dojo.require("bespin.util.canvas"); dojo.require("bespin.util.keys"); dojo.require("bespin.util.navigate"); dojo.require("bespin.util.path"); dojo.require("bespin.util.tokenobject"); dojo.require("bespin.util.util"); dojo.require("bespin.util.mousewheelevent"); dojo.require("bespin.util.urlbar"); dojo.require("bespin.client.filesystem"); dojo.require("bespin.client.settings"); dojo.require("bespin.client.status"); dojo.require("bespin.client.server"); dojo.require("bespin.client.session"); dojo.require("bespin.editor.actions"); dojo.require("bespin.editor.clipboard"); dojo.require("bespin.editor.cursor"); dojo.require("bespin.editor.editor"); dojo.require("bespin.editor.events"); dojo.require("bespin.editor.model"); dojo.require("bespin.editor.toolbar"); dojo.require("bespin.editor.themes"); dojo.require("bespin.editor.undo"); dojo.require("bespin.syntax.base"); dojo.require("bespin.syntax.simple._base"); dojo.require("bespin.cmd.commandline"); dojo.require("bespin.cmd.commands"); dojo.require("bespin.cmd.editorcommands"); dojo.require("th.helpers"); // -- Thunderhead... hooooo dojo.require("th.css"); dojo.require("th.th"); dojo.require("th.models"); dojo.require("th.borders"); dojo.require("th.components"); } loadScript("js/dojo/dojo.js.uncompressed.js", function() { dojo.require = function(src) { loadme.push('js/' + src.replace(/\./g, '/') + '.js'); } componentRequires(); dojo.require("bespin.editor.component"); loadScript(loadme.shift(), onScriptLoaded); }); })(); |
As you can see, I override dojo.request() with my own, stack up all the component names, then load them one by one, waiting for each to be fully loaded before moving on.
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A very geeky Holidays break
Was your break as geeky as mine? Come on, admit it: you’ve done at least one incredibly unsexy thing in the last couple weeks. I know I have. Well, in fact, I had to take a four weeks-long break and it shows in the number of silly things I’ve played with.
In no particular order:
- I improved this blog’s look — well, I like to think that I have:
- I finally created a personalized Twitter page:
- I also created a Twitter page for Twitterified:
- I created an icon set call “More Blaqua“:
- I added a drawer to the Twitterified client - you will see why sometime in January, hopefully!
(Oh, and I finally mastered transparency in Flex, too! Yay)
- I started separating nextBBS v2’s components so that the framework can be used on its own and the message board part is now a module.
It is the first MVC PHP framework that seamlessly support plug-ins.
- I added to nextBBS v2 a limited amount of compatibility with Wordpress plug-ins.
I re-read Getting Things Done by David Allen and made a new year resolution to stick with the program, this time.
So far my Inbox is empty and my tasks list still is a manageable size…
I have installed Medialink on my iMac and use it to stream Divx movies to my PS3. Works flawlessly.
I have also installed PlayOn! in Parallels to stream Netflix. I wish there was an equivalent program for OS X. Well, I “kind of” wish because Netflix’s streaming choice is not that exciting. Not to mention that Netflix innovates by being, to my knowledge, the first company to proudly blog about letting go 50 employees.
- I setup an old P4 with Nexentra. The project bills itself as “The land of free and open source distribution combining OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland.”
In fact I installed it because I wanted to create a ZFS array. Unfortunately the clunky old PC is way too noisy. Fortunately I realized that a read-write implementation of ZFS for Leopard is available at Mac OS Forge.
- I cancelled XM Radio. They had been annoying me for quite a while, inserting their stupid advertisements in talk radio channels, and now that they merged with Sirius they got rid of some channels I happened to like so, good riddance XM, welcome free radios on my iPhone! — and ironically but quite logically I have better reception in tunnels.
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How To Make The EFF ISP Throttling Tool Work On Leopard
I love the idea of Switzerland, the new EFF tool for checking ISP throttling; unfortunately as of release Zero.0.5, Leopard seems to still be a mere afterthought. Here is how I worked around the few things that were not working out of the box.
First, Switzerland is written in Python and will require Psyco. It’s a good thing since Psyco is all about performance. If you do not have it already installed:
svn co http://codespeak.net/svn/psyco/dist/ psyco-dist cd psyco-dist/ sudo python setup.py install cd .. |
Download Switzerland from https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=233013
Extract it and change to its directory; eg
tar zxvf switzerland-0.0.5.tgz cd switzerland-0.0.5 |
The FastCollector provided doesn’t work. So…
rm bin/FastCollector.darwin |
Now when we build FastCollector, it will be available in /usr/local/bin/FastCollector
Here comes the only moderately scary thing for non-developers. Use the patch command to modify switzerland/client/PacketListener.py. This is the input for patch:
diff --git a/switzerland/client/PacketListener.py b/switzerland/client/PacketListener.py index 211b68f..dc0bbcc 100755 --- a/switzerland/client/PacketListener.py +++ b/switzerland/client/PacketListener.py @@ -93,8 +93,7 @@ class PacketListener(threading.Thread): p = platform.system() # Implementing the recommendations from # http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/research/hppc/ - if p[-3:] == "BSD" or p == "Darwin": - print p + if p[-3:] == "BSD": cmd = ["sysctl","-w","net.bpf.bufsize=10485760"] try: # Recent FreeBSDs proc = Popen(cmd, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE) @@ -110,6 +109,14 @@ class PacketListener(threading.Thread): proc = Popen(cmd, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE) assert proc.wait() == 0 + elif p == "Darwin": + cmd = ["sysctl","-w","debug.bpf_bufsize=10485760"] + proc = Popen(cmd, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE) + assert proc.wait() == 0 + cmd[2] = "debug.bpf_maxbufsize=10485760" + proc = Popen(cmd, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE) + assert proc.wait() == 0 + elif p == "Linux": vars = [("/proc/sys/net/core/rmem_default", "33554432"), ("/proc/sys/net/core/rmem_max", "33554432"), |
Let’s build and install everything:
sudo python setup.py install |
Well, it was easy (if it worked!)
Let’s create a log directory for Switzerland:
sudo mkdir /var/log/switzerland-pcaps sudo chmod a+wx /var/log/switzerland-pcaps |
And finally let’s run it:
sudo switzerland-client |
or if you wish to run your own server (you need to advertise it too!)
sudo switzerland-client --server yourserveraddress |
Questions?
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Open Letter to The Blogging Microcosm: give me content, not school fights!
Funny, how everybody is gazing at everybody else’s navel in our little world - disclaimer: I do not consider myself a Web2.0 “celebrity”, simply because I’m not - but even so it’s hard to always keep in mind that we are only talking about a very minor percentage of the world population, so busy are we all trumpeting that we are “building the future.”
Are we?
Loren Feldman’s quite innocent puppet show is now over. He wrote an open letter to Shel Israel, who was the butt of this particular joke, and that letter is quite bitter.
We are, in effect, moving from a situation where Shel Israel would have done himself some good by taking the joke graciously and instead damaged his image by over reacting, to one where Loren Feldman is the one reacting quite poorly - see his comments to his own post.
It would seem that Dave Winer is next. I will not go into details on this one, just read the comments at 1938media.com if you are that curious.
Some background: Shel Israel claims that he only met Feldman once, at SXSW, thus when Feldman writes “You and your crew”, he may be referring to Robert Scobble. True, it would appear that Feldman was fired from PodTech after posting his retarded “TechNigga” video. No link, I do not want Google to find a link from my blog to that. True, Scobble may have helped with the firing business. Honestly, I do not think that Scobble needed to intervene for people to realize of how little value the piece was. OK, there is always the possibility that there was a double layer of sarcasm: Feldman mocking people who rely on such stereotypes.
Well, that’s too bad: Feldman should move on. Israel should move on. There is money and sponsorship for everybody -well, everybody interesting- in the blogging world and I, for one, am reclaiming some much needed free time by unsubscribing from the blogs of people who keep obsessing over their jobs, Arrington, Scobble, and other topics that, while somewhat topical, live at the bottom of my list of things I give a hoot about. Yay!
My favourite blog post was made by Chris Edward and is titled “Loren Feldman: fighting for old media one blogger at a time.” It deliciously underscores the multi-facetted irony of Feldman’s post in such a compact post that it is a treasure of “content vs ego” ratio in my opinion. Suitably entertained, I decided to read more of Edward’s blog posts and found them interesting.
As a result, Chris Edward wins a new reader, others lose an old reader. If more people followed suit, I am sure that the numbers would have a welcome sobering effect on them.
I’m glad I’m not famous.
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My dilemma: rewrite and lose features or keep building on old framework?
I just posted the text below at http://www.nextbbs.com/do_topic_title_nextBBS-direction–please-give-your-input_id_1288
I know that a lot of open-source projects have gone through the same dilemma:
- Now that we know what we know,
- Now that “these” components are available,
- Now that development on our old framework is slowing down because…it’s old
Well, what do we do now? Rip apart our existing software and restart with more up-to-date technologies, or keep building on the old workhorse, hoping that nothing will go wrong?
(more…)
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Ext Licensing: Oh, what a mess.
When things start smelling “funny” in the open-source community, they tend to go to the dogs with the haste of a drunk marching band.
Today’s drama is brought to you by your friendly ExtJS community. For those of you not familiar with ExtJS, it is a professionally made Javascript library that allows web application developers to create very elaborate desktop-like applications. Jack Slocum originally started this project as a YUI extension. That extension being open-source. He’s then regularly improved it by adding support for different building stones such as JQuery and finally a full-ExtJS solution, reaching ExtJS 2.0. For those of you who have managed not to fall asleep while reading my ramblings, you already know that I’ve used ExtJS myself, for instance when I created the ExtPHP wrapper.
Where this gets complicated is that Jack decided to license the assets under a different license, allowing him to retain all rights. I would like to make very clear that it’s his work and he can do whatever he wants with it. I am just narrating, here. He also added a clause that supposedly completely voids the LGPL license if someone attempted to use his work to create a derivative framework.
After a lot of moaning in the community - to the drum of “that’s a GNU license, man, the whole idea is that you cannot add restrictions!”, he decided to change the LGPL license to a pure GPL one, while retaining a pure commercial license on the side. I’ll bet he thought, at that point, “At least now things are clear.”
Well, that was only the beginning of a real sh*tstorm that threatens to cause a lot of damage to everyone involved, culminating -fleetingly, to be sure- with Sanjiv Jivan’s scathing blog post. Sanjiv, if I am correct, wrote a Ext “compiler” for the GWT library, called GWT-Ext - note that there is another project, apparently endorsed by Jack, that connects ExtJS and GWT. Sanjiv decided that he would fork the last LGPL release of ExtJS and start a new project. You may remember that Jack tried to prevent this by adding a provision in his license agreement.
The crux of Sanjiv’s beef with Jack Slocum is this: Jack created a great product, led people to believe that it was truly open-source when it wasn’t, and doesn’t understand open-source licenses. Jack is greedy. Now, the crux of Jack’s beef with Sanjiv is this: Sanjiv created a nice tool based on hits product, doesn’t understand open-source licenses and, oh, is greedy.
So, our protagonists are not talking to each other. This love story was consumed a long time ago. And potential “corporate” customers, like me, are revisiting the possibility of building their product on top of pure JQuery extensions and living happily ever after.
Now, in a move that would shame any seasoned soap opera writer, a new character enters left stage. And her name is OpenEXT. Contrary to what Dion Almar wrote, it is not a fork: the idea is to create patches that can be dropped on top of ExtJS. Now, I am curious: was Dion right when he posted his own piece on the topic? After all, things seem to change at a meteoric pace around here.
Anyway, stay tuned for even more implausible developments!
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Open source web apps *do not* suck.
Oh, no. Again, someone had something to say about open-source and again it seems that they only had a giant brush for the job.
OK, let’s go. Point by point. Note that I choose to also discuss frameworks despite Myle’s disclaimer, since their redeeming value seems to be that they comes as black boxes, therefore “you can still control your code.” Allow me to mention that you can do more than this. I would like, however, to apologize in advance for not coming up with more examples but I have to work on ClicDev…
“Unless your developers has[sic] spent A LOT of time working with the application, they aren’t going to know the code”
Well, true. There is always a learning curve involved. But this does not apply to open-source alone. Buy a commercial library and you will have to learn its ins and outs as well.
“Making core changes to a system is just asking for trouble”
Ok, so not about open-source either. Here is what I do not understand: if you pick a package for the task and end up modifying its core, are you sure that you picked wisely?
“Skinning pre-built applications sucks. Trying to modify some else’s CSS is worse than someone else PHP”
Obviously, I am not familiar with Myle’s past project experience, but this is where good practices usually save the day. Do not pick a package if their code is, indeed, “spaghetti”-style. Professionals - keep - their - stylesheets - clean.
Same goes for PHP, of course. Yes, the language is simple enough that it is very easy to make a mess of it. Just be picky when selecting a framework or an application. Price cannot be the only factor.
“Open source developers are very narrow minded [...] you end up with a application that has everything that opens and shuts, but that doesn’t really open or shut very well.”
Well, thanks 
What’s that about not doing the job very well? Are you referring to Linux, Apache, Drupal, Darwin or any other clunky loser that “doesn’t really work?”
“As soon as you modify software, forget about updating it.”
Well, I see two possible scenario here:
1. You download some open-source piece of software. You modify it and submit your modifications back to the open-source community and your code is integrated. No problem, right?
2. Either your submission is rejected or you prefer to keep your code closed. In that case, surely you will have started by preserving all the original code using a source control tool such as SVN, Perforce, GIT, etc. Any modification you make to that code is now part of a changelist. When you upgrade to a new version of the original open-source program, you easily reconcile your code with it using branch integration, right?
“I am yet to see a decent module system for anything but the most basic feature.”
And I do not know where to begin with this one. Maybe with some complex Wordpress modules that require no code modification, since you mention it?
Or the somewhat similar drop-ins system used by nextBBS?
“The documentation will never be up to date.”
I guess you were not impressed by Code Igniter, Drupal or Struts? (I pick whatever code I think of arbitrarily here… )
“Open source apps are hacked not engineered.”
Well, I will not even bother adding new links here. Just revisit some of the links I already posted. Where on earth do you get that kind of idea?
“If the project doesn’t have a clear leader who has a vision and is ruthless in implementing it, you are going to end up with a mess.”
Hey! I kind of agree with you - as one can find out reading some of my older posts. I do not know about “ruthless” but clear direction is key. However, why, again, misrepresent OSS this way? Do you have any statistics on the number of projects that one would seriously consider using for in-house development? Can you tell me, of those, which ones are purely “designed by committee” and which ones have clear leadership? I would wager that the latter are predominant - again, read my old posts, I already commented on failed “design by committee” projects.
“Support. You don’t get any.”
Again: What?
No support, as in “no support when using ExtJS?” Or “no support when deploying Drupal?”
If anyone wants to add something in the comments, I will gladly incorporate it in this post.
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