Monday, September 04, 2006

Ever wondered why, for virtually the same reach:

blogger presents 10% of the pageviews?

A great question, partly answered by Mike Davidson, prompting an excelent review of the quality of page view metrics, by Evan Williams.

Posted by K at 01:06:21 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

GLSA-check

Gentoo keeps moving towards profissionalizing what was already an excellent personal distribution. I've just found out about the glsa-check command, and the effort to integrate Gentoo Linux Security Announcement checking right into portage:
 http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/portage/glsa-integration.xml
Beta code is a bit unfriendly, but perfectly functional. Go Gentoo!

You can get a list of GLSAs that may affect your system with this command:

glsa-check --list 2> /dev/null | egrep "^[0-9]*-[0-9]* .N. " | cut -f 1 --delimiter=" " | xargs -n 1 --replace glsa-check --test {} 2> /dev/null | grep --after-context=1 "This system is affected by the following GLSA" | egrep "^[0-9]*-[0-9]*"
Afterwards, check the announcements here:
  http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/glsa/index.xml
Posted by K at 11:58:15 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

PHP5 is out

Downloads here. Ebuilds are already in the Portage tree, even if masked. Just emerge sync and emerge the ebuild directly.
Posted by K at 15:42:29 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Sunday, May 30, 2004

Comment Spam

I may add myself to the list of those comment-spammed. It seems blog.com, besides grabbing the eye of news media, called in spam forces. I'm counting a couple hundred spam comments on my blog already...

Adding my 0.02€ to the discussion by André: Blog.com requires two kinds of tools for dealing with comment spam. Automated tools and manual ones. Manual tools are pretty straightforward: Comments, wich as of now are seen as a small total count entity, must be seen as a large volume entity. That means comments must be searchable, and manageable in sets (namely set deletion is essential). Automated tools are a whole different beast...
Posted by K at 19:21:23 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Friday, May 14, 2004

Yahoo offers 100MB free and 1GB paid email

I know I'm late to the news(work, work work), but it seems GMail jumpstarted the market brains:
in Week in review: Net portal wars | CNET News.com
 Yahoo will also begin offering "virtually unlimited storage" for its paid e-mail customers and will upgrade free users to 100MB from it current 4MB, in a challenge to Google's Gmail service. The upgrade is part of an overall enhancement for Yahoo Mail that will launch this summer.
Posted by K at 23:26:36 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday, February 09, 2004

PHP coming of age

This article, although old, is a very nice roundup of new features in PHP5:
  • Real object orientation, with full inheritance, working constructors/destructors, delegations, private fields, interfaces, abstract classes, namespaces...
  • Exceptions (yay!)
  • XML support is part of core PHP (XML support means: a parser, a DOM API and an XSLT transformer)
  • SQLite. SQLite is an embedded database, excellent for transient data that shouldn't be commited to the entreprise database. It'll be a core PHP feature. It isn't ACID compliant or anything like that, but it understands SQL and is fast for small operations (think mysql, but faster and smaller).
  • Dereferencing! This is a rant of mine... This code will work in PHP5 (stupidly, it doesn't in PHP4):
(new Foo())->makeSausages();

  • Autoloading. A method of avoiding the parse of every class of an application, instead of just the ones being used to service the current request (really excellent hindisight, as good OO will cause an explosion in the number of classes used by any given app).
  • Type hinting. This is a strange feature for a scripting language, but I guess its the cross-breed of untyped and typed languages providing the best of both worlds. Now, in PHP, developers can enforce parameter types (they may choose not to).
  • The Streams API. This is just the extension to all I/O operations of the streams concept, previously found in the f* functions. Now it's relatively easy to implement new streams, which can be immediatly used with the f* functions.
Last but not least, some stats on open bugs for PHP5.
Posted by K at 16:07:31 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |