by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 17, 2005 | Code
I’ve realized for a while now that simply announcing new versions of code that I put out listing what’s changed does not really work, as a new user it would be nearly impossible to find all the posts I’ve made related to a specific bit of code.
I’ve therefore installed a copy of MoinMoin Wiki that I will use to write documentation for projects with.
The first project to get the Wiki treatment is my PHP Library for Google Maps EZ, you can find the full documentation here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 6, 2005 | Code
The author of GMapEZ broke backwards compatibility with a recent change, this release will work around that. If you’re maps just wouldn’t display give this one a try.
There is also a new feature that lets you provide multiple extends, if you are upgrading from a previous version your config file needs to change, a new section [extends] has been added, you should also look at the sample index.php to see how to pass multiple extends to the backend.
Using this new ceature you can create one set of map data and one config file but provide different views, see my visited map showing default view and the same map with a view of just South England.
Some changes made to GMapEZ has some positive effects on my library, for one load time on maps with many points are much much faster now and there are also lots more colours to pick from.
I will be helping the GMapEZ author to produce a downloadable package containing all that is needed to self host the GMapEZ library rather than rely on his hosted version, that way I can also certify my code to work with a given version of GMapEZ.
The new version can be found here: http://www.devco.net/code/gmapsphp-current.tgz full documentation for this application can be found here
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 5, 2005 | Usefull Things
With FreeBSD 6.0 now officially released I thought I’ll go through the Release Notes and post a few of the things I found useful from it.
The release notes list a LOT of changes and I’ve already noted a few that isn’t mentioned. This might be a easy upgrade but it’s a significant mile stone.
- 80386 processors are not supported anymore.
- A new sysctl called security.jail.enforce_statfs that controls what mounts are visible in a jail, I recommend setting this to 1 if you are using nullfs to share directories that way jail users can see for themselves that certain directories are mounted read only for example.
- The IPDIVERT kernel option now causes a module to be built that is loadable at run time! Also libalias now supports being built as a kernel module.
- ipfw have a option to only match packets for a given jailid, this is now support with mpsafenet=1
- ipfw can now tag altq packets
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bsdiff(1) and bsdpatch(1) has been added for binary diffs and patching
- libarchive and therefore bsd tar now supports ISO files and ZIP files, try tar -tvzf blah.zip and tar -tvf blah.iso to see this in action, fantastic!
- Two utilities – pgrep(1) and pkill(1) has some new options, these utilities makes it easy to find and kill processes by name
- The fantastic portsnap(8) utility is now installed by default. This replaces the old cvsup method of keeping your ports tree in sync and is well worth investigating. It’s been the first thing I installed on any new box for a long time, great to see it included by default.
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tcpdrop(8) has been added that enables you to reset any TCP session, very handy indeed.
- rc.d scripts can now rename network interfaces at boot time using ifconfig_fxp0_name=”net0″ syntax.
So that’s just some of the highlights, there are loads more, and lots of work has gone in under the hood to improve threading and SMP from the 5.x branch, this should help with some concerns that were raised on the performance of 5.x series of FreeBSD.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 4, 2005 | Usefull Things
A day or so ago RELENG_6_0_0_RELEASE got tagged, I also noticed that if you retrieve RELENG_6 you’ll get FreeBSD 6.0 STABLE. I upgraded a few machines to STABLE and have been quite happy so far. Right now the ISO images for 6.0-RELEASE is on the Main FreeBSD FTP Server ready for the taking.
As have been announced all over FreeBSD has decided to move the friendly daemon logo to the side to get something a bit more corporate. A few days ago they announced the new logo and said they’d update the site soon.
So far the first real knock on of this change in Logo and direction is obvious the moment the install CD boots, you’re greeted with this:
Any long term BSD users will immediately spot the absence of the old ASCII Art BSD Daemon. I like the new logo, but it’s a sad day either way.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 3, 2005 | Uncategorized
Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while know that I’ve got no time for Feedster and don’t mind saying so. My previous posts on this sad sad service:
So why do I rehash all this again now? Because if you look at those entries you’ll always see someone from Feedster post about how they’re improving, how I shouldn’t give up on them etc, but really it’s all just talk.
Tonight while trying to figure out why BSDUpdates is down I tried a Google blogs search but found little recent info, so I figured I’ll give Feedster another try, big mistake.
It also had very little useful content so I’m inclined to think people just don’t blog about BSDUpdates – fair enough. The problem is though Feedster is still broken!
First I do a search for ‘bsdupdates’ using the main feedster page, that went well and I found some stuff, then I tried the blog search button which will restrict the search to just blog posts. First there is the fact that the user experience is crap, if you do a Google search for whatever and click on one of the other search modes – like Images – it will know you searched for whatever and show you results immediately. Not feedster, no way, you have to just type your query in again.
So I type it in again, and get a page full of result, it looks like the screenshot below, all good so far.
See, next page, more results, all good there is hope for finding something useful, so I press on the next button.
Wtf? Maintenance? Seems more like their default internal server error page is claiming every problem is Maintenance related because this is not the first time I’ve seen it, and I don’t use this service often. It’s a bit like when the Underground in London says something is ‘Signal Failure’ it’s just something they say. The real problem seems to be database related.
So back a page, reload, do the search again which gives me (immediately, right in the middle of their ‘maintenance’ no less) a page similar to the first one. Try the next button again to get the promised more results:
And there it is, nothing, empty page, no results. Complete. Waste. Of. Time.
If you are still using Feedster you really should be doing yourself a favor and jump ship. There are a number of competitors, I can’t even list them all but here are some: Clusty, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, Daypop, Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! and many more. Natural selection on the internet is a great thing, Feedster had a chance to do it right but they didn’t. The big boys will run over them, rejoice.
