Gadgetopia

Eight Years Of Apache: Apache rules. The Apache Software Foundation today announced that its HTTP Server platform has reached a milestone of eight consecutive years of World Wide Web technology leadership. Since its first release in April of 1995, the Apache HTTP Server has become as pervasive as the Web ...

Apache group aims at J2EE applications: No more handing off stuff to JBoss or Tomcat Apache's doing Java natively. "Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, announced in an open letter this week the formation of the Geronimo project, which will work to create Apache-compatible software for delivering ...

2003: Year of Apache: Apache kicked butt last year. 2003 was the Year of Apache. If Time magazine had a server-of-the-year award the cover would be featuring a feather. Since October 2002 market share has grown from 53% to 64%, a 20% gain while Microsoft IIS, its nearest competitor has ...

HTACCESS Wrappers with PHP: Really interesting technique of using Apache directives to have Apache send Web requests to PHP scripts. You can do this already via auto_prepend and auto_append files, but it's interesting to see someone do this via Apache directive rather than php.ini configuration. To start off, make a ...

Sokkit - Install Apache and PHP on Windows: A while back, we mentioned FoxServ as a great way to get Apache, MySQL, and PHP (AMP) running on Windows. It was really nothing more than an installer that got all those pieces working together for you, but this was still a ...

juicy .htaccess information.: This is a really good, entry-level tutorial to Apache's .htaccess files and (in part two) the awesome-ness of mod_rewrite. If you ever wanted to know why Apache rules, this is one of the reasons.

Red Hat Signs Agreement to Acquire JBoss: This is interesting, but we all knew it was coming. Red Hat will acquire JBoss for approximately $350 million in initial consideration, plus approximately $70 million subject to the achievement of certain future performance metrics. The transaction consideration is composed of approximately 40 ...

Apache URL Rewriting Guide: Here's an excellent set of mini-tutorials on mod_rewrite and the RewriteRule directive for Apache. mod_rewrite is so powerful and so flexible, that sometimes it's hard to even comprehend the full scope of what you can do with this. This site is a start.

Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There's a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language we'll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. ...

When it comes to AMP (Apache; MySQL; Perl, Python, or PHP) installers, we at Gadgetopia started with FoxServ. That project kind of died, so a few weeks ago, we touted the benefits of Sokkit. That product, while very good, wasn't free, which was a drag (though, at $24.95, it's still ...

Web 2.0 Service Mark Controversy (Tim responding this time): Tim O'Reilly responds to the "Web 2.0" trademark controversy which has apparently been pretty hateful over the last week. O'Reilly also values its trademarks -- as do other companies and individuals aligned with the values of openness and sharing. (I'll note ...

Do you think there would ever be a market for home intranet software? There's so much to keep track of within my own family people we know, appointments, lists for every such thing, etc. If intranets handle business management, why couldn't they be adapted to a family? I have ...

Army ends 20-year helicopter program: Well, that's kind of a bummer. With about $8 billion already invested in the program, and the production line not yet started, the cancellation is one of the largest in the history of the Army. It follows the Pentagon's decision in 2002 to cancel the ...

IBM is planning to announce that they'll be donating the Java-based Cloudscape database to the Apache foundation, to be released as open source. Most business applications require some database functions like storing and looking up price or customer information, whether in a Web page or a laptop program. Cloudscape is ...

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention: Here's a great antidote for hotlinkers people who embed images from YOUR Web site in their page (so they get the image at your bandwidth expense). This system will prevent images from loading in pages not on your site. These fixes aren't uncommon, but this ...

A few weeks ago, I posted about how to use some Apache directives to protect your content editors from themselves. In that post, I said: ...there is a way to configure mod_rewrite to check two roots for a file. If it doesn't find a file in the actual Web root, ...

PHP Apps on Mobile using PAMP: This looks really cool. If you’d like to work on your favorite PHP apps on your S60 phones, here’s PAMP - Personal Apache, MySQL and PHP. This is implemented on the Symbian OS using Open C, which is a set of industry-standard POSIX and ...

Product News > Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant > November 6, 2003">Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant: I guess I dispute that PHP is "little-known," but this is still good news. "PHP, a little-known open-source scripting language, is becoming dominant on Web sites, according to Netcraft.com, the U.K. surveyor of ...

OpenGroupware.org Complements OpenOffice: A group of open-source folks are looking to torpedo Exchange: "'Just to be perfectly clear, this is an MS Exchange take-out,' said Gary Frederick, leader of the OpenOffice.org Groupware Project, in a statement. 'OGo is important because it's the missing link in the open source software stack. ...

Alex King just released Photos 4.0 (formerly known as Gallery). It's a web-based photo database for storing, cataloging, and retrieving photos, but NOT for publishing web galleries. It can import photos by the folder or one at a time, and stores a thumbnail of each image. It's designed for "Anyone ...

A link I may come to regret showing Deane: DevX has an article on PHP-GTK, which provides PHP bindings to the GIMP Tool Kit, the foundation of the GNOME desktop environment. Now, PHP has begun to carve a space for itself in the standalone application arena as well with PHP-GTK. ...

So I'm in New Orleans at this convention with a little Toshiba laptop running XP Home. To my horror, I have no development platform (XP Home won't run IIS). That hasn't stopped me from coding as I have EditPlus and I can upload from dial-up the hotel, but still. This ...

Homeland Security Survey Takes First Pass at LAMP: Some good news, though I think the bug density would skyrocket once they moved passed the top 1% of projects and into the second and third-tier of open source stuff. First results are in for the Department of Homeland Security's vulnerability survey ...

Roll Your Own Search Engine with ZendSearchLucene: The Zend Framework includes integration with Lucene, which is nice. Too many frameworks look right past full-text search. Zend_Search_Lucene is a php port of the Apache Lucene project, a full-text search engine framework. ZendSearchLucene promises a simple way to add search functionality to ...

FoxServ Project: I'm surprised we haven't talked about FoxServ here before. FoxServ is an Apache / mySQL / PHP installer package for Windows. Unlike NuShpere or PHPTriad, FoxServ features the latest version of all included pacakges, user defined configuration during installation, PHP as a module, PEAR, and the Zend Optimizer. ...

10 Best Intranets of 2005: I actually purchased this full report back in 2001. The price has gone way up it was $44 then; $128 now. However, if you're in the middle of an intranet rebuild like I was at the time, it's worth it for the screenshots alone. ...

It's L-i-n-u-x, that is an Operating System: The city of Tuttle, Oklahoma had a Web server crash and the OS (CentOS) had to be reinstalled. Apparently someone forgot to put the Web site back up, because the default Apache page started appearing where the Web site should have been (you ...

PHP Certification for Hosts?: All Web hosts are not created equal. On a couple of occasions, I've agreed to a hosting account only to find out the hard way that one piece or another of a full PHP install wasn't available. How many web hosts provide any more detail than ...

At the Rational User Conference in Vegas, a guy from IBM got all condescending about LAMP. Businesses that run on the Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) model will have to grow up to avoid reliability issues in future, an IBM executive said. According to Daniel Sabbah, general manager of IBM s ...

Persistent URL Home Page: I stumbled across this today. I'm not sure if this is a relic of the Web's past, or if this is still an active project. "A PURL is a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. Functionally, a PURL is a URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the ...

40 Tips for optimizing your php Code: This is a seemingly great list of PHP optimization tips. However, there s no context here or no discussion of why some of these techniques are supposedly faster. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of ...

I don't mean to go on another rant about comment spam, but I'm suffering under another deluge on my personal site. While the Texas Holdem spammer was a blitzkreig, another spammer has deanebarker.net under slow siege. Someone out there is posting a spam comment to my site twice per hour, ...

A pro-PHP Rant: Harry Fuecks gives us a wonderful, glorious rant on why PHP is good, no matter how many beat-downs it takes -- and it's been beat down a lot lately. He starts with the simplicity and reliability... There are smallish sites I own / run, built on PHP, ...

An InfoWorld article by Chad Dickerson tells of his accidental conversion from Windows and Linux to Mac OS X. "On a recent Friday, weary from shopping for a new PC, I grabbed the 3-year-old G4 at my desk and took it home to see what all the Mac and OS ...

I started working with Swish-E again recently. This is an open source search engine that, for my money, is one of the best deals in the open source world. A few years ago, I spent some time working with Inktomi Enterprise Search (now Verity Ultraseek) , but after a few ...

ImageMagick - Convert, Edit, and Compose Images: I just want to give a little recognition to ImageMagick, which is a free image manipulation library that's been around for years. I downloaded a new version the other day, and I'm so impressed at what it can do. ImageMagickTM 6.0.2 is a ...

Announcing FogBugz On Demand: Fog Creek moves into the world of hosted software. I’m happy to announce that FogBugz On Demand is now available. This is a professionally-hosted version of FogBugz 5.0, previously only available as a download. In the end, $21 per user per month is not a phenomenal ...

I've always been a big believer in legible URLs. There's nothing more annoying than a URL that stretches into hundreds of characters ever tried to email one of those to a mail client that wraps at 76 characters? Additionally, I've written before about the need to support URL hacking. ...

I have a serious Web development neurosis: I hate querystring arguments. You know the garbage after the page name in a URL? Like this: page.php?thisArgument=thisValue&andThisArgument=thisValue I hate them. I think they're ugly, unweidly, and expose too much of your application to the world. This is an utterly irrational thing, I ...

Essentials : Mark Pilgrim has listed his "essential" software tools for doing his job. I always like to see these the absolute, "can't live without" tools of people who do the same work as me. As the risk of being self-indulgent, here's mine: Email: Thunderbird or Mozilla Mail via ...

Making A Better Open Source CMS, by Jeffrey Veen: This is a great article -- a rant, really -- about how much the author thinks the open-source CMS offerings just plain suck. He laments about a lot of things I agree with. The real goldmine, however, are the comments. There ...

I've been completely frustrated with the level of political discourse this year here in the US. With only two months left in the election, neither candidate has come forward and provided a detailed plan for what they'd like to see happen for the future. "I'll put more money in the ...