Clic!Dev, ‘Tate, and many more projects!

OK. Isn’t anyone going to put a bit of perspective on he whole Sarah Lacy thing?
Look, guys. Drop it. Seriously.

There isn’t a “Lacygate”. Stop postfixing everything you do not like with “-gate”. Now, Allen Stern wants Lacy to apologize.
I, too, was in the room, Allen - mind if I call you Allen?. And I did not walk out of the whole thing red in the face, looking for justice.
I merely felt that there was some joke between Lacy and Zuckerberg and I was not in on the joke. That’s OK, I thought. I’ll get some value from the interview as they move on. Granted, that never happened. Now, I will never be able to tell whether that didn’t happen because this was one of those “zero calories” interviews or because of the heckling.

I do not remember the exact timeline but I am fairly certain that she did not “run to Twitter” to tell us to screw off. I actually believe that writing this presupposes a cognizance of Twitter that she did not, at the time, master.
There is not doubt she reacted badly, but I find it a bit odd, to claim to have lived through this thing as a wronged customer. It was clearly announced that this was *not* going to be a groundbreaking event and, well, it wasn’t. I went to SXSW to learn things and network with other professionals - and party, but don’t tell my boss. Mission accomplished. Everything else should be treated like small potatoes. Because it is. Or it should be.

I uploaded a few photos to Flickr…click below to view my ‘SXSW 2008′ set.

Sometimes, you want to run PHP with Tomcat. Why? Well, you may have a legacy product, for instance, that will require servlets for many more years. Or you may be using this gigantic Java program and are only interested in adding a tiny PHP piece on the side.

There are many guides showing how to do this available, but they become outdated almost as soon as they are published. So, it’s my turn to write a short-lived guide, this time for PHP 5.2.5
Note thas this post relies greatly on information found here. Too bad even that guide got old so fast!

1. Go to http://www.php.net/downloads.php and download the current version. I am going to do the setup on a Windows machine here, so I can simply download the binaries. On *nix, you will need to compile PHP. I know I will have to, anyway…
2. You also need to download the corresponding PECL modules.
3. Let’s assume that your current Tomcat install can be found in c:\Tomcat5\. Create a c:\Tomcat5\php\ directory and unzip the PHP zip file in it.
4. Rename php.ini-dist, in c:\Tomcat5\php\, to php.ini
5. Extract php5servlet.dll from the PECL zip file to c:\Tomcat5\php\
6. Create a directory under c:\Tomcat5\webapps\; in our case: phptest
7. In c:\Tomcat5\webapps\phptest\, create a subdirectory: WEB-INF
8. In c:\Tomcat5\webapps\phptest\WEB-INF\, create web.xml with the following content:
   ini

   
   
   
           
                   php
                   net.php.servlet
           
           
                   php-formatter
                   net.php.formatter
           
           
                   php
                   *.php
           
           
                   php-formatter
                   *.phps
           
   
   

   ini

   1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
   2. <!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC
   3.   "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
   4.   "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">
   5. <web-app>
   6.         <servlet>
   7.                 <servlet-name>php</servlet-name>
   8.                 <servlet-class>net.php.servlet</servlet-class>
   9.         </servlet>
   10.         <servlet>
   11.                 <servlet-name>php-formatter</servlet-name>
   12.                 <servlet-class>net.php.formatter</servlet-class>
   13.         </servlet>
   14.         <servlet-mapping>
   15.                 <servlet-name>php</servlet-name>
   16.                 <url-pattern>*.php</url-pattern>
   17.         </servlet-mapping>
   18.         <servlet-mapping>
   19.                 <servlet-name>php-formatter</servlet-name>
   20.                 <url-pattern>*.phps</url-pattern>
   21.         </servlet-mapping>
   22. </web-app>
9. Extract/unjar (using jar xvf or WinZip) php5srvlt.jar under c:\Tomcat5\php\tmp\
10. Modify both c:\Tomcat5\php\tmp\net\reflect.properties and c:\Tomcat5\php\tmp\net\servlet.properties, replacing
    ini

    library=phpsrvlt

    ini

    1. library=phpsrvlt

    with

    ini

    library=php5servlet

    ini

    1. library=php5servlet

    and save.

11. Jar the content of c:\Tomcat5\php\tmp\ into a new version of php5srvlt.jar
12. Move php5srvlt.jar to c:\Tomcat5\common\lib\
13. Copy c:\Tomcat5\php\php5servlet.dll and c:\Tomcat5\php\php5ts.dll to c:\windows\system32\
14. Create a test page in c:\Tomcat5\webapps\phptest\test.php with this contents:
    PHP

    PHP

    1. <?php phpinfo(); ?>
15. Start Tomcat and go to http://localhost:8080/phptest/test.php

It should work. If it doesn’t, you can always post the stack trace here.

Oh, great.
Merry X-Mas and all that. Unless you’re ThinkSecret. Or Fake Steve Jobs. See here.
And here.

Of course, there is still the possibility that it’s another hoax created by our favourite Steve Jobs.

Here are two groups of people who are not about to get any more of my money if this is all true:

Apple:
Sorry, guys, but coolness is part of your products’ appeal. If you behave like a-holes, I will simply dedicate more of my time writing drivers for Linux.
I know, this isn’t the first time Apple enters ************ mode. But, obviously, after their ThinkSecret victory, there is enough blood in the water to keep the frenzy alive for a while.

The EFF:
Oh, come on guys. Again, I have no idea whether FSJ’ posts are pure hoax or the real thing. But when in doubt, I always get on my soap box. So, here goes: It is not the first time that I see a report of the EFF getting a less-than-positive result. And claiming victory over a site’s shuttering, I’m sure that FSJ is devastated, now that you made clear to him that freedom of speech is your thing, but only on your terms.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah and Kwanzaa, or whatever else helps you live with yourselves.
Chris out.

You can now anonymously sync. to the bleeding edge version of Kodachi’s source code at svn://nextbbs.com/kodachi

If you do not feel like installing svn/compiling Kodachi but are still curious about its source code, you can browse it at http://www.nextbbs.com/trac/kodachi/

Note: if you sync. to the first check-in, you will get the version of Kodachi that is currently downloadable. If you sync. to the next one, you will get a new version with a temporary default interface. Yes, I am working on adding customizable interfaces.

The FFII, a not-for-profit organization promoting a free market in information technology, published this press release.
The title is a bit over the top, but what’s the point of writing a press release if it isn’t compelling?

Basically, it’s about a great victory for Microsoft, in Europe: if you write a piece of software that interoperates with a Microsoft product, they have to pay royalties for each copy distributed.

This means that commercial entities such as IBM have to give Microsoft money when they write a competing product -who wants a word processor that cannot read Word documents?. It also means that many open-source projects are going to have to sit down and decide whether to shutter the whole project or stop distributing it in Europe.

One might argue that if royalties are a percentage, free projects shouldn’t have to worry about the whole deal. This would be true if Microsoft’s wording didn’t specify a percentage of their revenue. This is dangerous territory, now. What’s a non-profit to do?

Anyway, as if all of this wasn’t reason to worry enough, this quote from Commissioner Kroes takes the cake:

That percentage royalty has become a nominal, one-off payment of Euro 10,000. This is all that has to be paid by companies that dispute the validity or relevance of Microsoft’s patents.

Yes, you read right: Euro 10,000 (US$14,000). What open-source project is going to fork that kind of money?
And, wait, “this is all that has to be paid”…if you dispute Microsoft’s patents relevance?
Ouch! How much are you supposed to pay if you don’t dispute it?

Well, this was much more work than I had anticipated.
And now, of course, I find that my voice sounds weird, the rhythm seems off, etc. The way I’m supposed to feel about it, I guess.
Here is the quite undecipherable version. For a better, bigger, readable one: http://www.nextbbs.com/do_topic_id_1166

I will soon post on my newly acquired experience. If it saves you time *just once* -the first time you try creating your own screencast-, I will feel entitled to the warm feeling that comes from having helped somebody.

Yes, I am shocked.

I was (re)visiting Yichi’s design blog when I realized that his feedburner ticker shows only 235 subscribers. And I do not quite understand this: he doesn’t post too often, and when he does it usually is a small treasure of a post, so what are you waiting for? http://www.vikiworks.com/

A couple months ago, I made a post about my new toy: OpensIFRr, which lets you easily create awesome Flash files that you can use to render just about any font in your web pages.

I was pleased with the feedback it got but of course a lot of readers asked about the Windows version.
Well, it’s here now! In the process I’ve learned a thing or two about Nullsoft’s Scripting Engine

Hope you like it and, once again, a tip of the hat to Mike Davidson & al.
Get it now, courtesy of SourceForge

ps: It appears that the version of swfmill that is currently working under OpensIFRr’s hood does not always like spaces; therefore if the program seems stuck converting a font file, try again with less characters - which is good practice anyway!

Caution: boring tech porn blather ahead!

It recently became obvious to me that the lab I had setup for our development team was not aging very well. When I first configured it, I was under the impression that creating a boatload of VLANs and using routing everywhere was the way to go. Of course that belief held true for about 2 days, ’til I realized that what we really need is an agile network, of which subsets can be reconfigured in no time, to mimic particular real-life configurations.

Thus, my new setup is going to be as follows:

1. An edge switch, that will connect the lab to the outside world
2. A core of routers that will be immutable
3. Everything else will vary daily

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